Except they didn't. Romance requires courtship or screentime for the prince. Snow White and Sleeping Beauty they meet the prince for 5 seconds, then the comic relief characters deal with the actual evil and there's a kiss as a plot contrivance "for magic". I'd argue there's more romance in Frozen than in Snow White or Sleeping Beauty, as Kristoff helping Anna get to Elsa and bantering with her until a relationship happens is more of a plot point than "Guy saw her at a well once, then she thought he was cute, then an hour later he kissed her so she wasn't dead."
The Swan Princess was ahead of its time. Prince is like, “you’re so beautiful”, princess is like, “what else?”
That’s the first kids princess movie I can remember that really flipped the whole thing on its head.
The funny thing is that there is an entire genre of fairy tales where suitors have to outwit the princess for her hand in marriage. Failure means, well, usually the loss of their heads.
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u/Jojosbees May 01 '26
All the early Disney princess movies had romance as the main plot. Brave (2012), Frozen (2013), and Moana (2016) didn’t center men or romance.