The Princess Blog

I was fortunate enough to see an early screening of Frozen 2  this weekend thanks to  ASIFA Hollywood . Due to circumstances beyond my control, I missed the first few minutes of the movie, so my review will cover what I did see. For a Disney sequel  to a movie that I consider overrated , I tried to keep my expectations realistic. Frozen 2  was just as visually stunning as it looked in the trailers , but the story was all over the place and suffered from many of the same pacing issues that I had with the original. While the beginning and ending dragged on much longer than they needed to, the middle was the most engaging portion of the film with many tasteful throwbacks to the original as it expanded upon Anna and Elsa's past and future. Ultimately, however, the story had a lot of buildup with very little payoff. The first thing I'd like to address is the songs. There were so many songs. As someone who loves musicals , I never thought it would be possible t...

Betrayal has been a common theme among princess shows as of late , and I think that may be something worth exploring a little further. I incorporated an act of betrayal into my own story, The Stolen Jewel , even before it appeared in three of my favorite princess shows. The betrayal of a princess by someone she cares about is a big trend among Disney properties within the past five years or so. It began with the popularity of Frozen  which had a novel twist for a Disney movie in which Anna's true love turned out to be using her for power and tried to kill both her and her sister. Once  Frozen  became the cultural phenomenon that it did, Disney decided to duplicate the formula with varying results . In my opinion, the most effective of these was Cassandra's betrayal of Rapunzel. The Tangled series gave us over two years to feel as close to Rapunzel's  lady-in-waiting  as she did, which made it sting that much more when she stabbed her in the back during the p...

The Frozen 2  hype comes to a crescendo today with with the second full-length trailer  that gives us more information about this upcoming sequel than ever. Other sources  reveal names for several new characters from the movie, including Honeymaren, a young woman who was in the first teaser, and her brother Ryder, who is similar to Kristoff in both appearance and personality. This trailer also reveals footage of Anna and Elsa's parents, who were reported to be part of a flashback sequence at  this year's D23 Expo . Couple that with some adorable Anna dialogue and more epic footage of the Nokk , and we have the best trailer Disney has released for this movie so far! It starts out with a traditional narration that foreshadows the Enchanted Forest that Anna and Elsa would travel to later on. The narrator is then revealed as their father, King Agnarr, who tells them a bedtime story in a flashback from when they are children. We also briefly see their mother, Quee...

It took me quite a while to get over the fact that Disney's California Adventure shut down their stellar Aladdin: A Musical Spectacular  show that contained my absolute favorite Princess Jasmine solo  to replace it with more Frozen  hype . Frozen  is not one of my favorites , but I tried to keep an open mind when I entered the newly renovated Hyperion Theater for Frozen Live. Gone was the beautiful Arabian architecture surrounding the stage in favor of a basic screen setup designed for CGI background projections to transform it into any Arendelle locale. I personally prefer the concrete sets of Aladdin that looked like you could reach right into them and enter the world of Agrabah. Hiding Arendelle behind a CGI mask only served as a reminder that the digital age is taking even more artistry away from us than just traditional animation . Despite my caveats, I enjoyed the performance I saw yesterday due largely to the performers themselves. The actresses who ...

With all the controversy over Halle Bailey getting cast as Ariel , I wondered why nobody made such a big deal out of all other times Disney race-bent a fairy tale princess. This is not intended to be  another post about why we should support Halle  but instead an analysis of all the other times this happened in a Disney production. This is such a hot button issue right now that people are talking about it when they don't even have all the facts. ABC's The View aired an episode in which Whoopi Goldberg claimed that Halle was voicing the character for an animated production, and other people are making videos where they claim that Ariel isn't a princess  or that she had green skin in the original fairy tale . Let's take a moment to get our facts straight while we explore how this is something that Disney has been doing for over 20 years. Cinderella - 1997 This is the one that people remember the most fondly, and for good reason. Whitney Houston 's passion pro...

Thirteen years after the release of Kingdom Hearts II, Kingdom Hearts III  is finally available for us to peruse. With over a decade of buildup and hype, this game is a massive undertaking both to play and to review. There's just so much of it. There are a lot of cutscenes, a lot of new abilities, a lot of Disney characters, a lot of hidden Mickeys, and a whole lot of backstory to catch up on  if you haven't played all nine of the previous games in the series. It's just a lot in general. Fortunately, Kingdom Hearts III definitely lives up to all the hype. It is beautiful, emotional, and fun to play, but because of its enormous scope, it never lets the player take a breath. Between the endless array of minigames and the endless array of bonus abilities popping up on your screen during battles, it's very difficult to find time to sit back and enjoy the  rich and tranquil environments  of the Disney movies that you are playing in. For the purposes of this review, I will...

The internet has been buzzing about Kingdom Hearts III finally getting a release date after fifteen long years of anticipation. Unless it gets delayed again, we will be able to catch up with Sora, Donald, and Goofy as they travel through the realms of various Disney movies on January 29th, 2019. There have been a couple of trailers  dropped over the last few days revealing footage from Frozen , Tangled , Toy Story , Monsters Inc. ,  Hercules , and Pirates of the Caribbean . For me, the biggest announcement came from the latter half of  last night's trailer  in which Larxene of Organization XIII  remarked that Elsa might be one of the new seven pure hearts that they needed for their latest quest. Anyone who has played the first game knows that this is a reference to the Princesses of Heart , a select group of Disney Princesses who had their chance to become video game royalty  when they got captured by Maleficent in an attempt to use their pure heart...

The fall of the Disney Prince  left a gaping hole in many princesses' hearts that could only be filled by a different type of love. Instead of focusing on  ladies-in-waiting  and stories about friendship like in the  Barbie movies , Disney decided to start giving their princesses siblings. Until recently, most of them were only children, and very few of them had two parents. I've written a little about Ariel's sisters in the past, but they come off as a separate entity from Ariel with the exception of a few episodes of the series. Modern princess  sisters spend just as much time together as they do apart and compliment each other's differences, teaching children how to get along with people who don't share the same perspectives as them. The first Disney characters to achieve this were not Anna and Elsa, but Sofia and Amber from Sofia the First . Once Upon a Princess , Sofia's 2012 premiere movie, was all about her rocky relationship with her new stepsiste...

In 1845, Hans Christian Andersen wrote a story called "The Snow Queen" about a girl named Gerda who bravely journeyed through many dangerous lands to rescue her friend Kay, who was possessed by a cursed mirror and seduced by the beauty of a wicked queen . In 2013, Disney released a movie that had absolutely nothing to do with any of that. I go back and forth between hating Frozen  and thinking it was just okay. The more hype it gets, the angrier I become. When people ask me why, I get tired of going into the same explanation again and again because it's long and complicated. That's why I'm writing this post. Most of what I knew about Frozen  before seeing it in theaters came from the D23 Expo  in summer 2013. I went to several panels where I saw the early footage and listened to the filmmakers discuss their progress. At the time, I was very excited about it. Olaf's song was hilarious, and Elsa's disapproval of Anna's engagement to Hans se...