This is a collection of four short stories, each following the events leading up to the wedding of a different Disney princess: Cinderella, Belle, Tiana, and Rapunzel. Each of them featured a problem or conflict that had to be solved before the wedding, and usually turned out to everyone's satisfaction.
Cinderella
Cinderella's story opens with Prince Charming proposing to her, which was confusing since in the movie, the whole point of the ball was to find Charming a wife, so once Cinderella comes back to the castle to stay with him, it's pretty obviously implied he's going to marry her. If Charming wants to do a proper proposal to make the whole thing feel more romantic, he'd better do it right when Cinderella arrives, or else his father's going to be planning the royal wedding anyway! Having Charming propose to Cinderella days or even weeks later felt not only untrue to the movie, but also way too modern, not at all in line with the fairytale this story is meant to be.
The main conflict is that the King wants Cinderella to wear the same wedding dress the late Queen did when he married her, only the dress is too poofy and heavy for Cinderella and she doesn't feel like herself wearing it. That was a little confusing as well because Cinderella already designed herself a very poofy and frilly dress for the ball before the Fairy Godmother changed it, and she was rocking that look! She also carries herself like a real queen at all times in the movie (there's a reason I always call her “Queen Cindy”!) so it was difficult to imagine Cinderella not being able to pull off the same wedding look as an actual Queen. In the end, Cinderella, after a dream about her mother which was very sweet, finds a compromise that satisfies both herself and the King, and ends up honouring both her own mother and Prince Charming's in her wedding ensemble. There is not even a hint that the King might get furious as he was wont to do in the movie, and then he loves her idea and everything works out. It almost felt like the only conflict in this story never really existed.
Belle
In Belle's story, she wants to get the prince who is no longer a Beast a very special gift for their wedding. Beast and all his servants actually get to be humans in this story – only the second or third time I've ever seen that, yay! Belle decides it would be just the thing to invite all the people from her quiet village – you know, the same ones who always dismissed and gossiped about her for being odd and then formed a mob to invade Beast's home – to join their wedding celebrations. I mean, that could have been really interesting if the whole point was that the village didn't trust Beast and so Belle had to change their minds before the wedding. Maybe the villagers could have even been planning to invade the wedding and rescue Belle because they think she's been kidnapped by a hideous monster, and she had to convince them they're wrong! There could have been a really deep, touching story in which the villagers learn not to judge by appearances, and then an ending where Beast realizes the outside world doesn't hate him anymore, which could have been touching to the point of tears. None of that is addressed, though, and Beast is just glad all the villagers have come, seeming not to even remember they were the ones pillaging his house and following a guy who wanted to murder him that one time.
Tiana
In Tiana's story, Naveen's parents and little brother arrive in New Orleans for the wedding – that's the second wedding that happens once Naveen and Tiana were both human again, of course, not the first wedding officiated by Mama Odie while Tiana and Naveen were both still frogs. Naveen's mother has hired some royal wedding planners to help Tiana with her wedding, only they're making all the decisions and Tiana doesn't feel like the wedding is hers anymore. So she has to come up with a solution to create a wedding that feels authentic to her. There's a brief possibility for tension when Tiana thinks her mother-in-law will be unhappy that she's gone behind her back, but then the Queen of Maldonia isn't upset at all and understands perfectly, and everyone is happy, except for the confused wedding planners. Basically, Tiana's story felt a lot like Cinderella's with different details, but honestly I thought the plot suited Tiana better. I can definitely see Tiana not being happy unless she got to plan and decide on every detail of the wedding herself, and being a down-to-earth girl who wouldn't want a fancy event planned by royal wedding planners. I think Tiana's was my favourite story out of the four, since it was the one where we really got to see more of the princess's character and how she interacts with her loved ones to solve the problem of the day.
Rapunzel
I'm not sure whether or not Rapunzel's story was based on a short called Tangled: Ever After. I haven't seen the short, but I believe it's about Rapunzel and Eugene's wedding, and this story felt like it was based on something else that was supposed to be longer and more fleshed-out. I kept feeling like the events were flying by and I was missing something. The story centres on Pascal and Maximus being ring-bearers at Rapunzel and Eugene's wedding, but then mishaps ensue. There was a lot of slapstick action and description of visual humour, which would have been perfect in a cartoon but here it just felt rushed and glossed over. In the end, the wedding is left a complete mess, but somehow isn't ruined – it seems to me that if you had to pick that mess up, no one would be in the mood for celebrating anymore! I think I would not have blamed Rapunzel if she'd wanted to be a little more upset, maybe even go off and cry, but instead our bride just insists it was the “best wedding ever”. I could go really deep and suggest that Rapunzel doesn't believe she's worthy of a celebration that actually goes right because she was raised by an abusive caregiver.... Or maybe she just likes anything exciting and different after being stuck in a tower for eighteen years. (Maybe I'm missing something and in the short it really did feel like everything might be ruined but then the wedding turned out all right after all. Like I said, the book's story did feel kind of incomplete.)
I think what didn't work for me most in this book was the lack of any real emotional stakes. For a collection of stories about an event celebrating True Love, the stories didn't seem to hinge on anything deep and meaningful. The worst we ever see is the possibility that someone might get mad, which never actually happens so there was never really a concern at all. While the Five Minute Princess Stories collection I read had low stakes too, those felt just right for their respective scenarios, and whatever the stakes were, they were usually real. Here it felt like even the stakes they did set up were brushed away so quickly they were basically imaginary. I just felt like something was missing. I wanted the stories to be more meaningful.
The other thing that didn't work for me was – I guess I can describe it best as a lack of diversity. And yes, I know Tiana was in it, but I'm not talking about skin colour. I mean cultural diversity.
The weddings all feel the same: white dresses, walks down the aisle, parties afterwards with cake. The Disney Princess franchise gives us heroines from multiple time periods and from all over the world. Even among the Western/European Princesses who got chosen, what makes us think they didn't have different wedding traditions in Germany than they did in pre-Revolutionary France than they did in Black communities in 1920s New Orleans? One thing I would really like to see, in stories that take place anywhere in Europe before the Victorian Era, is a wedding dress that isn't white. What did the gown that represented this great life-changing day look like before that tradition got started at Queen Victoria's wedding? Cinderella gets a pass because her wedding dress was white in the movie and we have to keep that, also besides her setting always felt a little Victorian to me despite its being a European monarchy. Tiana, of course, is fine because her story takes place after Queen Victoria's wedding. But there's no reason Belle or Rapunzel has to stick to white – and since white was a mourning colour in Europe before Queen Victoria made it the wedding colour, they probably wouldn't have! You may think I'm making a big deal out of nothing, but I do feel strongly about this. I have no problem with white being the bridal colour nowadays, but it seems an awful case of mind-blindness to not even acknowledge the time periods and cultures – some of which I'm sure still exist today! – where that wasn't the case.
And speaking of which, why not go beyond the Western weddings whose traditions the younger readers would immediately recognize? Why not showcase beautiful wedding traditions from all around the world? They could do a story about Mulan and Shang's wedding, and show us what an ancient Chinese wedding ceremony would have looked like, complete with a bride in a red gown. They could do Aladdin and Jasmine (assuming this story would be true to everything their movie set up and actually have it happen right away), and go full-on Arabian Nights wedding, complete with Aladdin taking a trip to the bathhouses before heading to the palace tossing gold into the crowd, the Sultan drawing them up a marriage contract, and Jasmine modelling Aladdin seven different-coloured wedding gowns. (I believe there is a short story somewhere about Jasmine and Aladdin's wedding, in addition to that sequel, but from what I've seen it also features a white wedding dress and I wouldn't trust it to depict an ancient Middle Eastern wedding accurately.) If you expanded outside of the “official” Disney Princess lineup, you could show Esmeralda and Phoebus combining Gypsy and Catholic wedding traditions (and that could be the conflict, if their families are each expecting a different type of wedding) or show us Meg and Hercules in a traditional Ancient Greek ceremony. So many options....
I don't know, maybe I'm being too hard on this collection, or just expected it to be something it wasn't. I think perhaps the stories didn't want to create too much of a conflict around the Princesses' weddings or raise the stakes too high, and I can appreciate that, if they just wanted to let the Disney Princesses get married without having to deal with some big problem first. And props to them for not going for the default problem of having her fight with her prince and almost not marry him!! But if they didn't want large stakes, maybe the best thing to do would have been to not have stakes at all, and make the story all about the wedding traditions each princess would follow given her own particular time period, culture, and story. Weddings from around the world – the Disney Princess edition! And then I would get to see Jasmine model Aladdin those seven wedding gowns.
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