From the 1980s onwards, Disney tried hard to make its heroines less weedy. Ariel in The Little Mermaid, Belle in Beauty and the Beast, Pocohontas, Mulan and Tiana in The Princess and the Frog are all stronger and more adventurous than their forebears. But rumour has it the studio blamed The Princess and the Frog's underperformance (it still made a ton of money, some £162 million) on the word "princess", so from this point on, it opted for bland one-word titles with no princessy connotations whatsoever: Brave, Tangled, Frozen.
Marvel and DC can go hang. If they can't give us superheroines, maybe Disney will provide them. Elsa's story is more beguiling and psychologically nuanced than anything the Marvel and DC universes have given us recently, so I'm sure the Mouse House can tackle other classic fairy tales in similar fashion.
Here's an idea: between 1889 and 1910, Andrew Lang published 12 volumes of fairy tales that are now in the public domain. They're all storyboards waiting to happen. And they're packed with potential superheroines.
