"Seen and not heard" is an adage that applies more to Disney princesses than you think.
Interesting (and disappointing) new research shows that since 1989, Disney princesses speak less than men in their films, according to The Washington Post.
Data linguists Carmen Fought and Karen Eisenhauer analyzed all dialogue in Disney princess films and found that men have three times as many lines as female characters. This trend started with the Little Mermaid, where men speak 68% of the time. The statistics carry on well into the '90s from there, with men speaking 71% of the time in Beauty and the Beast, 76% of the time in Pocahontas and 77% of the time in Mulan.
[seealso slug="girl-sings-little-mermaid"]
Even with the newer films, the balance is still off. Women speak less than 50% of the time in 2009's Princess and the Frog and 2013's Frozen. Brave and Tangled break that streak, with women getting 52% and 74% of lines respectively, though they appear to be exceptions to the rule.
In addition, the characters are usually surrounded by men, Fought and Eisenhauer note.
“There's one isolated princess trying to get someone to marry her, but there are no women doing any other things,” Fought tells the Post. “There are no women leading the townspeople to go against the Beast, no women bonding in the tavern together singing drinking songs, women giving each other directions, or women inventing things. Everybody who’s doing anything else, other than finding a husband in the movie, pretty much, is a male.”
Their data shows that since Snow White in 1937, pretty much every Disney princess film has a mostly male cast. Aside from princes and villains, the sidekick/best friend character is typically also always male. For example Mushu (Mulan), Flounder (The Little Mermaid), Genie (Aladdin), Olaf (Frozen) and more.
There is a silver lining, however, when it comes to analyzing how princess characters were complimented over time. In the earlier Disney films, character praise was usually focused on looks. In the '90s, that shifted to only about 38%, with a quarter of comments focused on "abilities or deeds." Now, that trend is over, with the study showing that figure swinging down to 22%.
Progress ... right?