Disney Princess

We are the Disney Princesses. We arrived one by one across decades — Cinderella in 1950, Aurora in 1959, Ariel in 1989, Belle in 1991, Jasmine in 1992, Mulan in 1998, Tiana in 2009, Rapunzel in 2010, Moana in 2016 — each of us carrying a different story about what it means to want something more than the world in front of you. We have been misread as passive, as waiting to be rescued. We were always something more complicated than that: stubborn, curious, inconveniently brave. Pop Mart's Disney Princess series renders us small and precise — the gowns reduced to their essential colors, the expressions quieted — which turns out to be a way of looking at us that rewards attention.