I thought it was a breath of fresh air, hahahaha. I did in fact like Princesses and such as a kid, but I did find it satisfying that Disney didn't try to make every Disney heroine an actual Princess. Mainly because of the monotony of sticking to the mold. Certainly since I was a younger teen in the late nineties, I certainly appreciated it.[/quote]DisneyFan09 wrote: I always thought it was odd that they didn't try and label all the 90s girls as princesses in the movies.
I'm glad about that too. I wish Disney would be more like that considering how many princesses we've gotten in a row currently. Tiana, Rapunzel, Vanellope, Merida, Elsa, Anna, etc. It's worse because characters like Rapunzel and Anna were never princesses in their respective source materials (well for Rapunzel at least until she married a prince). This also points more evidence towards how the Renaissance films were not as homogeneous as people claim them to be.
Yeah, in the second film Pocahontas refers to herself as a princess when she is in King James' court for the second time near the end of the film. I think she is probably referred to as a princess a few times before that too by the English. That's certainly how it worked in real life. In promotion though for the original film, the word princess was thrown around a few times, especially to remark on how Pocahontas was following in the footsteps of past princesses like Ariel, Belle, and Jasmine.DisneyFan09 wrote:Really?They didn't bother calling Pocahontas a princess until her sequel, although I know in promotion for the first film, she was always referred to as Disney's newest or most independent princess yet, as well as an Indian princess.
Yeah, I don't think the princess angle would have worked in the film considering how far it departed from the source material. The nicknames of Meg and Herc certainly added to that.DisneyFan09 wrote:The thing with Meg is that they made her too much of an anti-Princess; A snarky, cynical babe from screwball comedies. And she was a part of the modern, Americanized version with shortening her name to Meg.Even Esmeralda in past Hunchback film adaptations was sometimes brought to a noble event by Phoebus and introduced as a Princess of the Gyptians. Not to mention, she was often made the adopted daughter of Clopin, King of the Gypsies, so it's strange that they didn't try and push that role for Esmeralda in the movie. Maybe they would have, if the film had been based on her rather than Quasimodo. And as you pointed out, Megara was an actual princess in mythology and even concept art shows her with what looks like a tiara/headdress in one image. I think they were afraid that with Hercules' many similarities to Aladdin already, making Megara a reluctant princess whose hand is offered to Hercules for saving Thebes from the many monsters plaguing it, would make her too much like Jasmine.
I find some of the songs in Swan Princess really good, but a few others are just mediocre. The character designs are never horrible either, but they range from excellent to just decent. I really like Odette's design as well as the animals. Derek's hairdo was never something I liked and I found Rothbart's look to be overall forgettable. King William was also generic unlike Queen Uberta and Rogers. The animation was just fine for a non-Disney feature, but I found it to not be up to par with the films Disney had been releasing at the time. The opening especially gets to me where baby Odette is literally thrust into King William's arms as if she was born by immaculate conception and didn't require a mother. On top of that, she looks anything like a baby. Thumbelina, which came out around the same time, I thought had much better animation and more of that old classic storybook style. I also didn't like the plotholes in Swan Princess, but then again, Disney films tend to usually have more.DisneyFan09 wrote:I actually happen to like The Swan Princess even more as an adult and I actually consider it to be as good as Disney's best. And yes, I even prefer it to Anastasia, but I've ranted about this many times priorly. Swan Princess appeals to me just more and though it's far from perfect, I find the movie more compelling as a whole than Anastasia.I know Swan Lake was a potential project for Musker and Clements after The Little Mermaid and Aladdin, but they choose Hercules instead because they wanted to make a comic book style film which was the closest to their dream project of Treasure Planet. I don't know the exact timeline of when Richard Rich left Disney, but it's possible that this spurred him on to make the film himself. I don't think The Swan Princess film (nor its sequels) have the same quality as Disney's films (and Anastasia) but I was a big fan of the series when I was younger so I would have liked for Odette to be a Disney Princess back then. Now, I'd much rather Disney make a Swan Lake film with the original ballet music like they did with Sleeping Beauty and like how Barbie made their Swan Lake film.