Alright, this is going to contain critical and possibly controversial opinions about Frozen and Tangled, as well as other things, so if you can't stand to hear these movies badmouthed I'd suggest that you skip this article. Now that you've been suitably warned, on with the article!
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MARKETING

The first that you see of new Disney characters is almost always through promotional rendered images, so that's where we are going to start in this dissection of Disney's character design.

To begin, let's look at some of the earlier promotional art of Elsa and Anna:

Looking at these two, it's difficult to spot much in the way of differences. Sure, they're wearing different clothing, hair, and makeup, but those are only artificial details. For a cast of characters to be varied and diverse, body type and facial features should be taken into account along with these artificial details. Which is why it is troubling that Anna and Elsa have virtually the exact same facial features and body types. "But wait," you say, "Elsa and Anna are sisters. Surely sisters are supposed to look alike!" And sure, they should. It would be just as odd if they had no similar features. But they aren't twins, so it's just pure laziness to take one 'marketable' face, tweak it a little bit, and pretend you have two radically different character designs. And not only do both Frozen sisters have almost the exact same face, this isn't where this puppy-eyed, snub nosed trend began. For that, we'll have to go back to 2010...


TANGLED

The first ever CGI princess has always looked to me like she was designed in a laboratory for the purpose of making millions on dolls. Her infantile, eyes, snub nose and mouth always in a quirky smile... any advertiser's wet dream, that's for sure. However, one interesting thing I noticed about the Frozen sisters is, not only did they have an imitation of Rapunzel's face nestled between their CGI curls, it also appeared that with the marketing of Anna and Elsa they just took the two angles they were going with Rapunzel. Because if you think back to the advertising for Tangled, with Rapunzel's promotional images there were two angles they played: the cute, quirky Rapunzel, jumping around and brushing her hair, and the fiesty, 'tough' Rapunzel, using her hair as a whip and brandishing a frying pan.

After all, look at these two comparisons and try telling me that there are influences not only in actual character design, but also marketing angles:






FINAL WORDS

So, it seems as though lately the Disney Princess lineup has two options: quirky and awkward, or 'strong empowered woman'. And I can't say I'm fond of this, and really hope this trend doesn't continue with Moana and onward.

After all, Disney is a huge company, and the Disney Princess line up is quite prevalent all over the world. Why can't we have original, unique character designs, instead of everything being copied to match society's ideal of beauty for the sake of marketability?

And although BH6 did a lot better with this, and Merida certainly doesn't adhere to standards of beauty, BH6 has nothing to do with the DPs and Merida is Pixar. Which means that we just have to hope that the next Disney Princess affiliated Disney feature doesn't continue this trend.
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Well, there goes my first article! It could be a lot better, and perhaps it was a poor choice to choose a controversial topic for my first article, but oh well. I hope you all enjoyed!