Howl, voiced by Christian Bale, a powerful young wizard, also struggles with his narcissism and becomes the focal point of expectations of beauty. It is also a gendered experience that becomes reversed. In Hayao Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle, love becomes this point of tension with age and appearances.
What happens when male characters are just as dependent on their looks as female characters are made out to be? Or when they hurt others to uphold this impossible beauty standard? It opens the door to discussions about who creates these arbitrary standards enforced on female characters and who is imposing them. What happens when vanity is aligned with masculinity? Male characters in these fairy tales are often indifferent to their beauty. In contrast, male agency seldom depended on their own need for physical validation from their female counterparts or the world they inhabited.īeauty and vanity are usually assigned to the female character. At the very least, beauty is addressed in the context of female agency to gain that agency. The common thread here is the obligation to change one’s appearance for love to be attained.
In Shrek, it’s about aligning Shrek and Fiona as equals through their shared aesthetic as ogres instead of living with the way they are, Fiona as a human and Shrek as an ogre. In Snow White, it’s the stepmother’s obsession with being the “fairest of them all'' that prompts her to kill her stepdaughter because there can only be one. In Cinderella, appearance is so important that she needs to completely change her look and wear a beautiful ball gown and glass slippers just to get through the castle doors. RELATED: On Hayao Miyazaki's 'Spirited Away' and the Anxieties of Growing Up However, much of these expectations of grace and ethereal beauty rely so much on their female protagonists. Youth equates to beauty, which then gets used as currency for attaining love. The image of a handsome young prince and equally stunning princess riding off into the sunset becomes the customary visual representation of love. Growing up with Disney films of fairy tales, it’s easy for young viewers to get caught up in the romantic fallacy of beauty and love.