I love this story!
A photographer has commemorated her daughter’s fifth birthday by dressing her up as five different influential women from history – Amelia Earhart, Coco Chanel, Susan B Anthony, Helen Keller and Jane Goodall – and capturing the images for a photo series.
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I think Belle is pretty awesome. She is an avid reader and an independent thinker who learns to love people for what’s on the inside! What’s wrong with that message?
I don’t think Faye thinks there is anything terribly wrong with Belle. But we can all agree there are actual real people, men and women, to admire rather than defaulting to Disney’s imagination of what “princesses” should look like.
I might add the storylines are contrived and trite, as contrasted with real people. Ie. Disney adventures could be better if they would more closely mirror real life.
I completely agree with you when it comes to “new” Disney; however, I have to stand by a lot of the “classic” Disney – Aladdin, Beauty & the Beast, Toy Story, Mary Poppins – as it fuels the imagination! There are certainly real people who can and should be admired, but I don’t think fantastical stories with symbolic value can be replaced by fact (though they can/should be complemented by it). I think there are a lot of great themes in the some of the older Disney movies, esp. Mary Poppins and Pocahontas. And real people often don’t condense the meat of their life experiences into music. As a child, because the music was memorable, I was also able to internalize the lessons in “Feed the Birds” and “Colours of the Wind” that I may have missed if given an informative lecture on the life of a real heroine. However, I was raised on Disney and thus am a member of an Old Guard that may be dying!