I have a confession to make: I am a product of the Disney generation. I am a woman in my mid-twenties, and my childhood was unabashedly filled with images of flowy princess hair, epic anthropomorphic animal sidekicks, and Alan Menken soundtracks. As hard as I tried to shirk my Disney princess obsession when I hit middle school and high school, I finally had to face the cold hard fact that I had been dramatically influenced by those seemingly innocuous childhood animations. What’s more, I realized that those Disney movies affected me at the very core of my feminine heart: my desire to love and be loved. My perception of love itself was colored, in large part, by Disney princess love stories.
And I fear I am not alone.
Looking around at the societal understanding of love today, I see the imprint of the hope for “happily ever after” and “true love’s kiss” everywhere. It seems that many young people search for a living and breathing version of something that was fantasized once upon a dream. At the same time, there is a general lack of interest in commitment because someone better could be waiting just around the river bend. There are many toxic themes present in Disney movies that give a false understanding and definition of love that is a far cry from the truth of self-sacrificial agape.
Still, I am a glass-half-full kind of gal, and while I could write an equally long, if not longer, article on the deleterious aspects of Disney movies, I want to focus on the bright side here and seek out the roses tangled among the thorns. As I sit looking back over the list of my childhood-favorite-musically-talented-princesses as a grown-up, catechized adult, I see some noteworthy things that I would like to share:
1. Beauty and the Beast. My absolute favorite princess, with whom I found much solidarity as a nerdy, book-loving, brunette little girl, is Belle! Obviously, I need to lead with her. The main male character in Belle’s saga is literally turned into a beast due to the hardness of his heart to love and compassion. It is not until Belle enters his life, when she sacrifices herself for her father, that the Beast has a glimpse of what true agape looks like. Throughout the story, the Beast is slowly drawn into Belle’s feminine mystery. It is ultimately through her hope in him and her affirmation that he is capable of love that the Beast is able to recognize this excellence in himself and fight for her. Belle’s gentle love for him literally transforms him from a Beast into a man. This theme of the transformative power of the male-female relationship is quite evident in the writings of St. John Paul II and especially in his Theology of the Body where he teaches that the dignity and balance of human life depend on “‘who’ she shall be for him and he for her” (43:7). However, long before I fell in love with our late Papa and his teachings, this spark of the authentic feminine genius was lit in my heart as a young girl who watched Beauty and the Beast on repeat too many times to count.
2. The Lion King. On a similar note, there is a line in a Lion King song that gives me heart palpitations every time I hear it. Simba says “so many things to tell her, but how to make her see the truth about my past—impossible! She’d turn away from me” and Nala follows with “he’s holding back, he’s hiding, but what? I can’t decide. Why won’t he be the king I know he is, the king I see inside.” Even though it is debatable that Nala is a true Disney princess, I think that this scene demonstrates a powerful reality of love. The guilt and shame that surround Simba are paralyzing him, and it is the gentle and penetrating gaze of another that sets him on a path to recognizing forgiveness and redemption and, in fact, the dignity of his true identity. The Church teaches us that lovers have the ability to help their beloveds aspire to holiness. As Venerable Archbishop Fulton Sheen puts it: “When a man loves a woman, he has to become worthy of her. The higher her virtue, the more noble her character, the more devoted she is to truth, justice, goodness, the more a man has to aspire to be worthy of her. The history of civilization could actually be written in terms of the level of its women” (Life is Worth Living). This is not something exclusive to the feminine, as it is also beautiful when a man looks upon his beloved and sees the good in her that she cannot see in herself. How I long to be in a marriage where both he and I can see the virtue at the heart of the other and push each other to that desired height of holiness.
3. Frozen. Perhaps most potently, though, a new Disney princess taught me a valuable lesson about love. Princess Anna from Frozen sings about a common female phenomenon: daydreaming about when she will meet her future husband. She is so enthralled in this idea that she falls head over heels for the first guy she meets. He woos her, and she quickly accepts a marriage proposal.
From the outside, Anna’s behavior is seen for the absurdity that it is; however, her desperation and subsequent willingness to jump at the first thing that resembles love in her life is a temptation that many young women understand, including myself.
From this movie, I learned that time is a valuable tool in dating, and it is critical to spend time getting to know your significant other before entering into marriage, lest it come to pass that he is a sociopathic liar in disguise. “I adjure you, Daughters of Jerusalem, do not awaken or stir up love before it is ready!”(Song of Songs 8:4); true love is most certainly worth the wait.
For all of its flaws, Disney certainly taught me a few valuable lessons about love. As I sat as a young girl longing for true love and a knight in shining armor, these stories were paving the way for the fullness of truth to penetrate my heart and set it ablaze.
