So this is really awesome! These are Disney princesses reimagined as disabled and drawn with service dogs. The artist, Arien Smith, drew these in 2017, but they have become viral only recently. Arien features all types of dogs in his portrayals as a way to educate about disabilities and service animals. He also does other dog related art. Arien can be found on Facebook under Royal Service Dogs or the major barkana. Hopefully more artists, or, you know, actual major film/tv/book creators begin to incorporate disabilities and service animals rather than pretending like they don’t exist (but that’s a different rant for a different day, 🙃).

Image descriptions: Disney princesses Cinderella, rapunzelle, tiana, sleeping beauty, belle, Snow White, and Pocahontas featured with various disabilities and service dogs of various breeds assisting them in daily lives. The last image in of a Facebook post that features the same pictures, but as line drawings, so they can be colored in.

These are absolutely fantastic!

[Further description: Cinderella’s service dog helps her take off her shoes; she has fibromyalgia. Rapunzel’s helps with tactile stimulation & grounding for her Complex PTSD & Dissociative Identity Disorder. Tiana’s dog helps with her autism, “tactile stimulation, interruption of physically harmful behavior, guiding during overstimulation episodes, and anxiety calming techniques. Sleeping Beauty’s dog elevates her head when she falls asleep during the day due to her narcolepsy; “Her service dog’s name is Spindle”. Belle’s dog lets her know if someone is coming up behind her, to help alleviate anxiety and startle responses. Snow White’s dog alerts her to the presence of apples in her food, which she’s allergic to. Pocahontas has diabetes, and her dog lets her know if her blood sugar is too high or too low; “At the request of some Native folks, I made some minor modifications to her outfit”. Her tattoo from the movie has been replaced with an armband of feathers, her necklace has been thickened, and her clothing now has a visible seam down the side. End Description.]

You can find them on Tumblr too @themajorbarkana!

Thank you for expanding on the image description!

A modern ballgown for a modern princess.

The movie dress for this scene is my least favorite by faaaaar. Who goes to a history-reenactment ball in a tube-dress? Everyone else is practically Rococo and she’s standing there in sheath-dress with a strange 2006/2007 bling-halter top. It’s just silly… and not as flattering as 2007 thought it was. In my opinion. I don’t like sheath-dresses in general… I’m all about the waist-illusion.

So here we have a modern ballgown inspired by a few different Red Carpet looks (it’s practically as close as we get to a modern-day ball & celebrity fashion-trends the way it would have been). We have some 2006/2007 bedazzling, a sweetheart neckline, and folds of skirt to give the illusion of a fuller skirt on a modern silhouette.

(It’s also giving me Anastasia vibes but I’m not mad about that…)

https://www.instagram.com/ellen.cranch/

I am the artist!! Don’t repost without permission & credit! Thank you!

Okay so I made a new dress! I was super bothered by the ‘riding away in the ballgown only to trash it on the cobblestones’ bit. There was enough time to change out of a ballgown.  So why wouldn’t she change into a more proper riding habit? Structured shoulders, fashionable sleeves, skirt with mobility. Combining the blue of the village with the gold of the castle. Evil genius.

And then…. her wedding dress. Anyone who’s ever clicked on a Buzzfeed article knows that before Queen Victoria white wedding dresses weren’t really a thing. So why not have the Historically Accurate* Reprise of the gold dress?

I had a lot of fun redesigning Belle!

Send some love on Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/p/CEj2QpcjGcc/

I am the artist!!! Do not repost without permission & credit!!! Thank you!

Translation: How do western european perverts imagine Slavic girls to be like: Me and the womenfolk of Moravia:

This is now officially a Slavic humor blog

[The first picture is of Rapunzel from Wreck It Ralph 2, looking a lot like she did in her own movie: long blonde hair, green eyes and stick thin. The second picture is of Fiona her mother and other princesses from Shrek 3. They look taller with wider arms and a lot more instances of darker hair and eyes.]

someone: the disney little mermaid is a bad adaptation of the original story because she’s meant to die at the end

me: the original story was meant to be an outlet for the male author having unrequited and repressed romantic feelings for another man and the only happy ending he saw for a same sex attracted man was to die and the only reward was being able to earn his soul through the joy of children his stories brought while the Disney adaptation touched upon the same themes with the work of Howard Ashman, another same sex attracted man but instead being able to give the mermaid a happy and loving relationship where she lives out her dreams is just as thematic and truer to the what the story sought to tell instead of having it become a tragedy. in this essay i

Okay so the rest of the essay be here:

I am going to preface this by saying the people involved in these stories did not intend for The Little Mermaid to be a 1:1 replica of their lives but it’s clear how significant their experiences shaped the telling of it.

Hans Christian Andersen’s sexuality isn’t easy to define especially since the society and culture he lived in wouldn’t have the language or the framework to discuss sexuality, and it would do a disservice to say he was gay when he didn’t have a known romantic life. But his love life has been defined by his numerous unrequited loves that ranged from women to men, but also his steadfast refusal to have sex.

Another aspect of Andersen is how heavily religious he was and how that showed through his work. Some of his other stories like “The Ugly Duckling”, “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, “Thumbelina”, and “Princess and the Pea”, all have themes around being alienated but that there isn’t a true villain in any of them and their happy endings be something close to divinity and good morality. Though not overtly religious in his stories it’s clear how much faith he had in God doing the right thing in the end.

The Little Mermaid however, is probably one of the most overt in how his religion and his sexuality intersected.

A brief overview of Andersen’s The Little Mermaid is that in his story, Mermaids are creatures born without souls, however they live significantly longer than humans.

But it’s precisely because of this, the titular Mermaid longs to become human in hopes she too will gain a soul. She chooses to trade her tongue to get a pair of legs to woo a human she rescued, and on these legs all she feels is pain and suffering, and she must do so in silence. If she cannot gain the love of her prince, she will die without a soul, and never get to heaven. All the while, the prince loves her only as a brother would in the time they spend together and eventually chooses to marry another girl.

The mermaid is then given a chance to return to her life as a mermaid if she kills the prince before she dies but in doing so she will never have a soul. She loves him too much to do so and chooses death over living as a creature with no soul.

But when she dies, she finds herself amongst the daughters of the air, and is told because of her love and her suffering she has the chance to gain a soul unlike any other mermaid. She can work for 200 years making sure children are happy and be granted a soul thereafter.

So, looking at this, you can draw clear parallels with this story and Andersen’s personal life.

Like the mermaid, Andersen saw himself as a creature without a soul. He too was in love with a man who only saw himself as a brother to Andersen. Andersen saw himself doomed to be silent, doomed to constantly feel like he was walking on knives and doomed to be alone.

But his idea of a joyous ending is that his suffering wasn’t all for naught, that his stories that he wrote for children and the joy they brought WOULD eventually grant his greatest desire to be granted a soul and accepted into heaven.

Of course there isn’t a villain, Andersen accepted that his culture that cruelly casted him out was correct in doing so, and that he had to work within the system to exist.

The Little Mermaid’s themes of suffering and love were tied to Andersen’s life and his sexuality intersecting with his religion.

The 1989 Disney version has consistently gone on record that despite have Musker and Clements being directors, Howard Ashman, a gay man with AIDS in the 80s, was the creative force in character writing, music and the creative direction the movie eventually went in.

In the movie, all of the religious aspects have been stripped away, and the motivations have been changed.

Ariel no longer wants to gain a soul, her desire to become human instead is tied with feeling alienated with her home life and wanting acceptance elsewhere. Her hobby of collecting human stuff HEAVILY echoes the experiences of many LGBT+ people who had interests outside of their gender roles, and being unable to to see eye to eye with bigoted parents. People often mistake her attempts at asserting her own identity as “being in love” when the narrative is about her wanting agency and respect for who she is.

Ursula being a villain in this version is tied to how LGBT+ people of the 1980s understanding at least part of their oppression was due to predatory and unscrupulous people, as well as being systematic. This contrasts with Andersen’s work because Andersen, despite suffering, always put faith in the systems surrounding him and only striving to work within them, while Ashman understood that to work with society you don’t do business with morally neutral people.

While Andersen sees the only option for people, or to him, creatures, like him to gain any morally good ending, they need to remain passive and work within the system to get what they want.

But the 1989’s response to that is, no, to get a happy ending, you NEED to question the system, you need to fight against it because it is a system that only uses you to get what it needs and it needs to be destroyed to get a happy ending. Like, you CAN NOT separate how this change in the story occurred with Howard Ashman being a gay man with AIDS during 1980s America.

In the end, Ariel reconciling with her bigoted father to be able to live her life as a human with another man thematically ties in to how Andersen saw his own happy ending.

The Little Mermaid is a story that can not be separated from two men who dealt with complex relationships with their own identities, and it’s disingenuous to say the 1989 film is a bad adaptation for not religiously following the plot points of the original.

The Little Mermaid is at its best when it explores how a person’s sexuality and identity is alienated from the culture around them, and how they navigate the system that oppresses them.

Andersen saw the system to be just and his idea of a happy ending clashes with Howard Ashman’s own experiences of a system that needed to be defied to have earned a happy ending.

All in all, the 1989 movie is a good adaptation, not for slavishly keeping every detail, but for reflecting where society is, and for keeping the themes of unrequited love, identity and coming of age relevant to their audience.

so, if I understood all that:

1) The core issues are identity, alienation from society, and unrequited passion;

2) To get The Prize, you must be willing to suffer and learn an entire new way of life,

3) You must further, even in this new life, be willing to reject instructions of What You Must Do when you know that’s wrong,

4) The Prize is *not* romantic happy-ever-after love, but lasting impact on your community and culture, and helping remove barriers that made your life difficult, so future generations will have a freedom and opportunity for joy that you did not.

Fairy tales are NOT all straight white heroes and women sans agency! I swear!

I re-blogged a picture of a little girl, dressed as Tiana, hugging the face actress who plays Tiana at one of the Disney Parks, and noted that everyone should have their princess.  And a few people have now contacted me basically going “no, only straight white people can have princesses if you stick with the classics.”

Um.

No.

I am a folklorist, and it’s time for some Fun With Folklore.

First off, very few Princesses/fairy tale heroines who are going to become Princesses because that’s what you do are actually defined by specific physical attributes.  You have Snow White, who yes, requires the “skin as white as snow” etc, but that’s to make her an alien beauty and justify the actions of her stepmother.  She belongs to the Aarne-Thompson tale type 709, which is commonly referred to as “Snow White,” but which contains a hell of a lot more, including “Bella Venezia”, “Myrsina”, “Nourie Hadig“ and ”Gold-Tree and Silver-Tree.”  All those links will take you to Wikipedia.  Click them.  Note that NOT ONE of those girls is defined by her appearance, beyond “incredibly beautiful.”  “Nourie Hadig” is Armenian in origin; you can bet that girl was not white as snow.  (Note that I do not actually care for the “Nourie Hadig” 709 variant, due to using a Roma girl as the main adversary, but that’s another story.)  Any story you want to tell is going to have variants where the heroines are never described!  You know why?

BECAUSE THE PEOPLE WHO WERE TELLING THESE STORIES UNDERSTOOD THAT IT WAS IMPORTANT FOR CHILDREN TO SEE THEMSELVES IN THE MIRROR OF THE TALE.

There are fairy tales about people with disabilities, ranging from the physical (missing limbs, missing eyes, missing tongues) to the emotional (girls who cannot smile, boys who cannot feel fear).  There are fairy tales that end in same-sex marriage.  There’s even an excellent fairy tale about gender identity, “The Princess Who Became A Prince,” in which our hero has always felt he was a boy, but tried to be a dutiful daughter, until a dragon stole a neighbor princess and he had to ride to rescue the girl in order to save the kingdom.  One misaimed curse later, and wham, our new-minted prince is finally outwardly as he had been all along on the inside.

THIS IS JUST AS OLD AND TRUE AND SCHOLASTIC AS CINDERELLA AND THE OTHERS.

The “big fairy tales” of today are the ones that someone seized on as marketable.  We have the power, as drivers of media, to say that we want more diversity.  We want Princesses of every race, creed, and religion, and we have the folklore and fairy tales to make them real.  We want our transgender Princess (although wow would the marketing be problematic).  Saying “the classics” are 100% about straight white people reduces the past to a place where only straight whiteness existed, and where no other children ever needed stories.  And that’s not what the past was.

Once upon a time has never stopped being right now.

Modern Disney Girls! Who’s gonna be next?

You choose!

EDIT: Updated the post to put all new Gilrs in one place!

NEW ONES! Nakoma, Cinderella, Bella

Bonus Modern Disney Girl - my version of Leia!

UPDATE!

Alice in Wonderland guided by Shanti (Jungle Book )

One of my favorite animation stories is when Disney hired a group of female animators to work on Snow White and like this was a huge deal, it was Snow White, it was going to be the very first full-length American animated movie, it would go on to win a special Oscar designed just for it (they didn’t know that at the time of production, obviously, but this is how groundbreaking the movie was). And obviously this was back in the 1930s so everything was hand-drawn and hand-inked but…because they had the actual physical cels right there in front of them, they could put whatever they wanted to on the paper, I don’t know about you all, but I feel like I definitely take that for granted. You think ‘pencil, ink, paints’ and that’s it. And apparently Walt Disney had that mindset too because he was confused by the texture of the makeup on Snow White’s face and so he asked his female animators and they were just like, “Sir, we used our actual makeup” like these animators actually did Snow White’s makeup which is mind-blowing enough but then you realize that there were over 250,000 cels in Snow White and okay, sure, only a fraction of those cels actually featured a closeup of Snow but it’s still insane to think that we’re looking at somebody’s real blush here (once you see it, you can’t un-see it):

Animation, man.

This is myth.

First, there were no women animators. Women only worked in the inking and painting department. 

The women of this department actually did develop a new technique for Snow White’s makeup (as well as the Queen’s, and the rosy cheeks of the Dwarfs), but real makeup was not involved. Makeup was too chalky and it will not adhere properly to the cells.

What they did was, they would color in Snow White’s skin tone on the back of the cell, as it was usual, and apply a transparent red dye on the front of the cell. The dye would dissolve and combine with the paint of the skin to give that soft glow effect. The women who did this (and not many could do it) really had to apply it in the exact same spot on each cell so there would be no flicker, essentially doing animation with color. Apparently the one who did it best and got all of the close-ups was a woman named Helen Ogger.

These women really do deserve to be admired, credited and remembered, but for their real skills and amazing innovation, not a fun myth. 

You can read more about this in Mindy Johnson’s “Ink & Paint: The Women of Walt Disney’s Animation” and J. B. Kaufman’s “The Fairest One of All: The Making of Walt Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”.

THANK YOU. I love animation but I hate reblogging the version with misinformation :/

Noir Princesses by Astor Alexander

ok we gotta come up with writing prompts for these:

1. After her magnate father’s untimely demise, Ella, recently jilted by her very own prince charming, turns to an old family friend for help stealing back her inheritance from a wrathful stepmother. But the pair can only work so much magic and time is running out: in this increasingly deadly game of cat-and-mouse, there’s no telling who will still be standing when the clock strikes midnight. Bonus points if the writer uses a ‘sin-derella’ pun. bonus points if there are diamonds involved so we can make puns about glass.

2. When her police chief father is forced off the case, a young P.I. investigates a series of presumed kidnappings of beautiful socialites. All roads lead back to the mysterious mob boss known only as La Bestia, but under his violent reputation there may just be more than meets the eye. Throw in the once-resplendent now-defunct Castle Rose Casino, an egomaniacal ex-fiancé won’t take no for an answer, a local lycanthropy legend that may actually hold some truth, and the threat of being forcibly detained–this detective is in for the biggest hunt of her life. But beastly or not, she always gets her man: they don’t call her Jezebelle for nothing…

3. The Arabian Tiger’s Eye may not be the world’s largest ruby, but it’s certainly the most famous–and cursed. With a habit of disappearing and reappearing, the gem is briefly scheduled to be exhibited in public for the first time in decades. Naturally this brings all sorts of thieves out of the woodwork, including: a beautiful-but-dangerous royal descendant intent on reclaiming her country’s rightful heritage, a conman with a heart-of-gold being set up to take the fall, an indebted illusionist who is running out of magic to perform, and a treacherous museum director who is ruthless enough to kill them all. Not to mention what could happen when the ruby’s curse comes into play…

4. Commercial diving isn’t a glamorous job, and Ariel’s tired of the family business. When saving a handsome (but hopeless) swimmer leads to an invitation to a private resort, she jumps at the chance to travel. And if the wealthy stranger assumes she’s one of the jet set, who is she to correct him? In need of quick funding, Ariel makes a dangerous deal. Ursula Enterprises is fishy at best, and the job is anything but easy: locating the long lost Sea Witch. The shipwreck has spent centuries on the ocean floor, sunk in almost undivable waters. Now Ursula wants it–and its mysterious cargo. But sunken treasure is the least of Ariel’s worries–not when she’s already feeling like a fish out of water masquerading as a carefree tourist, and dealing with a love affair that won’t quite take off. Throw in a crabby family friend who wants her to return safely home, his sweet but floundering partner, and a contract she should have read more carefully before signing–it’s anything but smooth sailing for this rebellious diver, who just may be out of her depths. 

YES

5. Tiana likes to make her own way, working honest to prove that it can be done in a city riddled with crime and underhand dealings. But when an offer comes her way she finds it hard to say no. An offer to play dress up for a few days and keep a visiting royal out of the way for a lucrative business deal. But when kidnappers and possible assassins try to silence the Prince permanently, Tiana must save both their lives. Using her street smarts and strong will she gathers allies along the way. A man with a gift for music whose reputation is completely unfounded, a day dreamer who knows everyone and anyone, and a wise woman who might be as crazy as she is all knowing. Dragging around a pretty boy was not what Tiana imagined. She planed to ditch him until he takes a bullet for her and she starts to see beyond the facade. Can she keep him alive long enough for their relationship to go anywhere? Bonus points if Naveen gets the nickname Hopper at some point.

6. When Fa Zhou is murdered by a man with a grudge from his time in the Chinese military, it falls on his daughter Mulan to avenge his name and restore the family’s honor. As a first generation Asian-American, Mulan must balance her family’s past and traditions with embracing the new opportunities her homeland offers her. When she goes undercover to hunt down the man who killed her father, she finds herself working with a young police officer trying to live up to his fathers shadow. But when Li Shang’s father is killed by the same man who killed hers, Mulan finds herself struggling to keep her identity a secret and to not fall for the officer. When a confrontation with the murderer goes south, Mulan finds her secrets exposed and no way back in. How can she avenge her father and rekindle the spark between her and Shang? Bonus Points if Mushu is a reformed gangster whose eccentric personality resulted in him being indebted to the Fa family.

7. When Miss White’s father died under mysterious circumstances, she barely has time to grieve before her mother shoves her aside in an attempt to “Keep the family’s reputation pure.” But when Miss White is the survivor of an arranged accident she flees for her life. When she finds herself cornered later that night by a bunch of thugs and she is rescued by a group of vigilantes. After suffering a blow to the head in the fight, she comes too in their hideout she starts to earn her keep. At first by doing chores but then by taking lessons on how to fight and now hopes to join the band of oddly named vigilantes out on the streets. When her first mission on the streets goes south and the rumor she’s still alive reach her mother’s ears, all bets are off on whether Miss White can keep her hands from turning red. When a fresh out of the academy baby-face cop gets caught up in the action, Miss White now finds herself teaching him the rules of the streets, together can they stop this duplicitous queen of a hidden social class empire?

Disney Princesses reimagined before and after by real-life daughters and mothers

Found over: https://www.demilked.com/disney-princesses-queens-mothers-tony-ross/

Credits to https://www.tonyross.co