Much has been said over the years about the Disney princesses – some are bad role models, some good, they set impossible expectations for young girls, they’re predominantly white, and so on. But what about their male counterparts? Just like the princesses have evolved as characters, so have the roles of the Disney princes; yet, we rarely hear about their cultural impact (or lack thereof).
So who are the Disney princes? The latest iteration of the character is Prince Eric in the live-action remake of The Little Mermaid. Although he has more screen time than in the original, he’s arguably even more redundant this time around. The film follows the same story beats, but it overhauls Ariel from a naive and reckless figure into a mature protagonist who doesn’t fall for the first human pretty boy she lays her eyes on. The Little Mermaid wants to keep Eric, but it doesn’t want to need him.
In historical terms, the princes are, functionally, significant others. Unlike the princesses, they are not part of a billions-worth, standalone multimedia franchise that’s been going strong for decades. A common criticism of the early princesses – Snow White, Cinderella, and Aurora from Sleeping Beauty – focuses on their passivity. They’re the titular characters, yet they lack agency, and others must solve all of their problems for them. But this passivity doesn’t translate to prominence from the royal blokes either. The real heroes of those films are the dwarves, the mice and the fairies. Meanwhile, the princes from Snow White and Cinderella are just nameless minor characters with very little screen time, and they purely exist to give the princess protagonist her happy-ever-after ending.
The next two princes, Philip and Eric (from Sleeping Beauty and The Little Mermaid respectively), fare a tad better. Unlike their predecessors, they do have names, they have a bit more screen time, and, most notably, they slay the antagonists of their films. But the first major evolution manifests in the 1990s. No longer do the princesses wait for others to solve their problems, and no longer is love their main ambition. In Beauty and the Beast, Belle yearns for adventure, Aladdin’s Jasmine wishes to make her own choices, and Mulan wants to protect her father. As for the princes Beast is the first of his kind to undergo a character arc as he changes both figuratively and literally throughout the film. Ironically enough, like the first two princes, the film never gives Beast a real name.
The biggest outlier of the canon has to be Aladdin. This is the only princess film to date where its titular star is its prince character. So it’s interesting that the princess of his desires, the headstrong Jasmine, has eclipsed Aladdin in popularity, thanks to the marketing success of Disney princess branding. That said, Aladdin is arguably the first of the princely bunch to demonstrate heroic qualities that might appeal to the boy demographic; these qualities carry over to subsequent love interests like Mulan’s soldierly Li Shang and the swashbuckling Flynn Rider in Tangled. Tangled – and to a lesser extent, The Princess and the Frog – shook things up by breaking an invisible barrier that had existed between the previous couples, and allowed Rapunzel and Flynn to go on the same adventure, grow as characters together, and spend more screen time together.
Frozen signified a paradigm shift in Disney storytelling, and its self-subversive elements rely on the viewers’ preconceived notions and familiarity with prior princess films. The movie incorporates not one prince archetype, but two: Prince Hans, who’s noble-born and aesthetically similar to the earliest princes, but who is ultimately revealed to be the villain, and Kristoff, who’s closer to the more modern prince variant like Flynn Rider. Kristoff and Princess Anna do end up together, but their relationship is inconsequential because the true thematic core is Anna and Elsa’s sisterhood. In Frozen 2, Kristoff more or less vanishes from the second half of the film, and when he does have screen time, he’s stuck in a marriage proposal side-plot while Anna and Elsa are busy saving the land. So in a rather twisted way, we’ve circled all the way back to the beginning: the prince is a minor character existing for marriage, but only now the princess’s main goal outweighs her love life.
The prince reaches his final evolution in Moana, to the point of utter non-existence. For the first time in Disney animation history, a princess film contained not even a semblance of romance, and Moana was allowed to go on an exciting adventure without having to fall for a boy. Lo and behold, the absence of a prince didn’t detract from the film’s success, and to this day, it’s consistently one of the most streamed movies on Disney+. The continued lack of male love interests in recent female-led films – Raya and the Last Dragon and Encanto – shows that Disney has absorbed the idea that the end-destination of a female protagonist doesn’t have to involve a guy or heterosexual marriage. So perhaps the real impact of the Disney prince is our collective understanding that he was just never all that necessary in the first place.
