Abstract
“The real world and the animated world collide.” This tagline, used to market the 2007 Disney film Enchanted, assumes an audience that knows what is meant by “real world” and “animated world.” In particular, the animated world implied by the tagline is one defined by a history of Disney fairy-tale tropes, which invites potential viewers to enjoy its “collision” with reality. The slogan for this mixed animated and live-action Princess narrative suggests a subversive approach to the Disney canon, one that promises to grapple with the disjuncture between the medievalisms of its fairy-tale realms and the trappings of modern life. The result, however, is a film that refuses any historical anchor for Disney’s fairy-tale ethos, fashioning instead what Carol Robinson and Pamela Clements call “neomedievalism,” in order to insist upon the pervasive relevance of that ethos in the contemporary world.1
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Notes
Carol Robinson and Pamela Clements,“Living with Neornedievalisms,” Defining Medievalism(s) II, ed. Karl Fugelso (Cambridge: Brewer, 2009): 55–75. As Robinson and Clements note, this use of “neomedieval-ism” is markedly different from that explored
by Bruce Holsinger in Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm, 2007). I intend no reference to Holsinger’s use of the term.
Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2008).
For analysis of the differences in Princess culture during these eras, see Rebecca-Anne Do Rozario, “The Princess and the Magic Kingdom: Beyond Nostalgia, the Function of the Disney Princess,” Women’s Studies in Communication 27.1 (2004): 34–59.
Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 185–86. Dinshaw also explores the homophobic and homoerotic connotations of the medi-eval in this scene. Although beyond the scope of this essay, it is worth noting that Enchanted alsoflirts with such implications in its character-izations of Edward and Nathaniel. They each serve as the butt of homoerotic jokes, including several that play with the idea of a man desiring or seeking a “prince.”
Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers (New York: Routledge, 1992), 23.
See also Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).
Jason Sperb, “Reassuring Convergence: Online Fandom, Race, and Disney’s Notorious Song of the South,” Cinema Journal 49.4 (2010): 25–45, at 26.
Chuck Tryon, Reinventing Cinema (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2009), 151.
Susan Aronstein and Robert Torry, “Magic Happens: Re-Enchanting Disney Adults,” Weber: The Contemporary West 26.2 (2010): 41–54, at 49.
Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Tison Pugh, “Introduction: Queer History, Cinematic Medievalism, and the Impossibilty of Sexuality,” Queer Movie Medievalisms, ed. Kathleen Coyne Kelly and Tison Pugh (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), 1–17, at 3–4.
Jack Zipes, Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2006), 193 and 203.
Helen Cooper, The English Romance in Time (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 222.
Cory Grewell, “Neomedievalism: An Eleventh Little Middle Ages?” Defining Neomedievalism(s), ed. Karl Fugelso (Cambridge: Brewer, 2010), 34–43, at 40.
Jacqueline Rose, The Case of Peter Pan, or, The Impossibility of Children’s Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993). 9.
Francesca Coppa, “An Editing Room of One’s Own: Vidding as Women’s Work,” Camera Obscura 26.2 (2011): 123–30, at 124.
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© 2012 Tison Pugh and Susan Aronstein
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Cecire, M.S. (2012). Reality Remixed: Neomedieval Princess Culture in Disney’s Enchanted. In: Pugh, T., Aronstein, S. (eds) The Disney Middle Ages. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137066923_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137066923_14
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