Far from a fairytale.
Disney movies fondly feature in our childhood memories but new research published by The Washington Post has blackened that.
To conduct the study, Karen Eisenhauer from North Carolina State University and Carmen Fought from Pitzer College, looked at the way dialogue was presented in some of our favourite Disney classics.
They found that Disney films, produced in the 1980s and 1990s, allowed male characters to do the majority of the talking.
For example, men talk 71 per cent of the time in Beauty of the Beast, 77 per cent in Mulan and a whopping 90% in Aladdin.
More recently then, men got to chat for more than half of Frozen and The Princess Got The Frog.
However, Tangled was a little bit up with women talking 52 per cent of the time and Merrida ruled the roost in Brave, with 74 per cent of the lines apportioned to women.
Speaking about the research, Carmen said: “There’s one isolated princess trying to get someone to marry her, but there are no women doing any other things.
“There are no women leading the townspeople to go against the Beast, no women bonding in the tavern together singing drinking songs, women giving each other directions, or women inventing things.
“Everybody who’s doing anything else, other than finding a husband in the movie, pretty much, is a male”.
Let’s hope the next Disney movie gives female characters the chance to shine…
