Although Disney has never shied away from a certain amount of darkness in its animated feature films — this is, after all, the studio that notoriously introduced millions of traumatized children to the concept of seeing your parents murdered in front of you— the corporation has always had a particularly complicated relationship with its princesses. Decades before the first thinkpiece bewailing the sexist heteronormativity of Cinderella or the passive femininity of Sleeping Beauty, Disney was already in the habit of sanitizing the source material in its princess oeuvre, skipping over the gore, the grit, and the occasional not-so-happy ending.
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