HON 2206 - Disney Princess Medievalisms

Credits: 4
Sleeping Beauty in the tower of a castle. Princess Merida practicing archery. Maid Marion dancing in the woods. This class will explore how Disney’s animated princess films shape our modern imagination of romantic love in a fantastical, fairy-tale past – a past often portrayed as pseudo-medieval. We will compare Disney films with medieval literature that features similar plots and imagines a romanticized Arthurian past. In the process, students will study a historical continuum of human creativity and analyze how different arts inform and inspire one another (such as medieval art mirroring elements of medieval literature, and both becoming inspiration for animated films). Students will also engage in creative production through writing exercises that reimagine scenes, translate medieval prose and poetry texts into 21st-century dialogue, and place characters within new fictional frameworks, all culminating in a final creative project to compose a screenplay or storyboard for their own new Disney movie based on a medieval text.
McDaniel Plan: Creative Expression