Disney's new heroine is a badass feminist rabbit

Once upon a time there was a dress; a dress so alluring that every little girl in the kingdom coveted it. No wonder: made in China and spun from the finest polyester and gauze, in hues of vivid pink and purple, this was a gown befitting the fairest Disney princesses in the land: Snow White and Cinderella, Belle, Rapunzel and Tiana.

But now there’s a new Disney heroine in town - and this one wouldn’t be seen dead in a silly old princess dress. Opening next week, the wildly wonderful Zootropolis tells the tale of Judy Hopps, a young bunny who dreams of becoming the first rabbit ever to serve on the police force of the animal city of Zootopia.

Unlike her predecessor, the pneumatic Jessica Rabbit (a bunny by marriage alone), Judy’s bottom is bigger than her bust and she wears not a princess dress but a smart cop uniform. She has no love interest – her only passion is for her job. Her male sidekick, the delightful fox Nick Wilde, ends up as her colleague, not her husband; Mulder to her Scully, except with equal pay.

Judy dreams of career fulfillment rather than an engagement ring. When she first casts eyes on the grotty apartment she has rented, her sigh of delight – “greasy walls, rickety bed, crazy neighbours; I love it!” - is Virginia Wolfe-esque in its satisfaction at finally having a room of her own.

Widely hailed as a clever commentary on diversity, Zootropolis is also the latest attempt by Disney to deflect criticism that its princess oeuvre is at best saccharine bilge and at worst insidiously sexist. Starting with the Little Mermaid’s Ariel in 1989, Disney’s “Renaissance Era” saw a decade of princesses less passive and drippy than their pre-feminist sisters Snow White and Cinderella.

By the 2000s, the franchise had evolved further, its New Wave era turning out heroines like Brave’s Merida, who were determined to swashbuckle as well as any prince.

Despite this, a recent study by the American linguists Carmen Fought and Karen Eisenhauer suggests that, before the arrival of Judy, Disney movies continued to present a pretty terrible example to little girls. According to their analysis, while female characters spoke roughly 50 per cent of the time in the first princess films, by the 1990s they had all but lost the power of speech.

Ariel the mermaid literally gave her voice away – and in her film, male characters spoke 68 per cent of the time. In Aladdin, whose love interest is the glamorous Princess Jasmine, it was 90 per cent, and even 2013’s Frozen, which stars not one but two princesses, gave male characters 59 per cent of the dialogue.
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The problem, Fought and Eisenhaur concluded, wasn’t so much that the princesses weren’t particularly chatty, but that their worlds were populated almost exclusively by men. With the exception of nubile royalty, women were largely absent, there were no female inn keepers, no garrulous best friends or amusing sidekicks. The default setting for all characters was male – giving little girls few images of women in the world other than as fictionalised Kate Middletons.

A similar story played out in Disney’s animal-based films: female creatures were mothers (often deceased), chaste love interests or baddies. Roo’s mummy Kanga was the only female in Winnie the Pooh; Bambi had a dead mother and a sort of girlfriend; Mowgli had a surrogate mother; and that was about it.

Zootropolis has a few more women than most Disney movies - around a third of the cast. But it is Judy who breaks the mould; a character who has no interest in being saved by Prince Charming, she’s too busy saving everyone else.

As Ginnifer Goodwin, the actress who voices Judy and has two sons, has said: “If I had little girls, I would kill for Judy Hopps to be their role model. And I would kill for Judy to be my boys’ role model, too.”

So with the arrival of Judy Hopps, should we encourage our little girls to swap their sequins for bunny ears? After all, there’s no biological reason why girls rather than boys should be drawn to princess dresses. One two-year-old boy I know insists on wearing a Cinderella dress, to the horror of his father, who has repeatedly tried and failed to get him into a super hero costume. The reason for his love of the dress is obvious – his hero and role model isn’t Batman but his five-year-old sister who has a full panoply of princess outfits.

Abi and Emma Moore, sisters who founded the Pinkstinks campaign, argue that by offering girls toys and clothes that are almost exclusively pink, we give them an alarmingly narrow definition of what it means to be female.

And it’s not as if the love of pink is somehow innate; little girls defected to blue en masse when Frozen’s Queen Elsa donned a gown of shimmering turquoise.

So perhaps it is time to get our daughters a Judy Hopps cop costume and tell them to put away their princess dress. If they protest, we can remind them of the advice given by Judy’s boss, Chief Bogo: “Life isn’t some cartoon musical where you sing a little song and your insipid dreams magically come true. So Let It Go.”

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