In Response to "Notes on Isolation"

(This was originally supposed to be a comment, but it ended up getting a little long. I thought it'd be more readable in this form.)

Personally, I think it would be way more interesting if the Princesses passed the Bechdel test. I love character interactions, and I can imagine that there are quite a few girls out there who've basically said to hell with Disney's canon and made up their own stories using as many princesses as they had dolls.

"Notes on Isolation" reminded me of something most people versed in Disney lore probably don't know much about, a video game by the name of Kingdom Hearts. In it, a young boy travels across a universe of Disney worlds in order to stop the "Heartless," creatures of darkness encroaching on each world. Over the course of the game, the seven "Princesses of Heart" (Cinderella, Aurora, Snow White, Alice, Jasmine, Belle, and a new girl added by the game, the hero's own love interest, Kairi) are kidnapped from their realms and transported to one of the final levels, Hollow Bastion, where the boy eventually rescues them.

And somehow, despite the fact that all of the Princesses are obviously sharing the same space, standing right next to each other in an identifiable world, Disney manages to keep up the Disney ideal set forth by Mooney.

You can see, in this video (skip to 0:44, watch until 1:42), that the Princesses never look at each other.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sc-ZgqL5q4U

Though they say "we," referring to the Princesses as a group, they never address one another, only Sora, the young hero. In the entirety of the game, I can't think of an instance where the Princesses chat amongst themselves. In many of Kingdom Hearts' levels, in fact, there is only one female to be found at all! If there are two, the second is usually a Disney villain. This may be due to the constraints of basing the levels around Disney films, but it's still a bit jarring.

In the one case that I can think of which may adhere to the Bechdel test, the female characters don't belong to Disney at all. They're taken from the Final Fantasy series. The two that spring to mind are Aerith Gainsborough and Yuffie Kisaragi, who, alongside Squall Leonhart, provide background support for Sora. They probably fail the test, anywho, because I'm almost certain that all of their conversations are about Sora and his quest.

It's also interesting to note that in every new land, Sora gets to team up with a Disney movie star. In the "Alice in Wonderland" level, rather than allow Sora to team up with Alice, the movie's heroine, he gets no one. Over the course of his journey, he meets Tarzan, combs the streets of Agrabah with Aladdin, traipses through Halloween Town with Jack Skellington, flies through London with Peter Pan, rescues Belle from a cursed castle with Beast, and defeats Ursula with Ariel.

Yep. Ariel. The only female character to earn a place in the party. And in the second game, Mulan is the standout female party member while Ariel has been relegated to a minigame.

I'll be the first to say that I love these games. They're a ton of fun, and as a "fangirl" of both Final Fantasy and Disney movies, I can't help but enjoy the relentless cameos. But I'd never thought about them with a feminist eye before. It's startling and disappointing, especially since this mingling of movies could have given us so much more than Disney's same old, same old.