Her story: friendship, fear, and the feminine quest

Once upon a time there was a girl. She was, of course, a princess—thin, traditionally pretty, and probably white. Cue song. Prince enters, stage left, saves her, kisses her, and they ride off into their hetero-normative sunset and live happily ever after. Repeat story, ad nauseam.

I began my graduate education with a very narrow definition of graphic design, as my first semester progressed and my focus shifted, my definition was forced to expand. My love of storytelling and illustration melded to design and unexpectedly turned my focus towards animation. As I looked closer at the stories told within this genre I began to see a troubling pattern. The kinds of stories told, the kinds of people who were telling these stories, and the kinds of characters that eventually showed up on screen were limiting.

Once I started paying attention, I discovered deficits. I found a lack of diversity thinly masked with tokenism. I found unachievable standards of beauty spoon‑fed to our girls and equally troubling ideals of power and strength served up to our boys. I found women playing a single role over and over again and I found gender represented in clearly marked antiquated boxes.

To address the problems I was seeing, I used the foil of the fairy tale to try and tell a different female story. I rewrote an existing tale, one that mirrored the predictable plot of a prince rescuing a damsel in distress. The changes I made to the story were my way of commenting on and righting the imbalances I found in popular animated fairy tales. I wanted to tell a story about the power of true friendship, the reality of fear, and the expansion of female aspirations.