The Analysis of Women Representation Built in Disney Princess Narrative in Postmodern Era Through the Case of Moana

Disney is the most well-known and oldest corporation in the animation industry. It is now passing through a process of postmodernization like animation cinema in general and other forms of popular cinema. Postmodernity brings a new set of issues in Disney narrative. One of them is the problem of representation that is already seen far from being innocent in the mainstream cinema debates. “Harmless” princess tales are essential for Disney from the beginning of the company. In these tales, role models are modernized by the general trends of the era. From the first “princess tale”, Snow White (1937), to the last, Moana (2017), representation of women shifted from domestic, submissive and pretty to brave, determined and autonomous. In this study, we will look for the change in Moana. First of all, we will review how Disney uses the form of “princess narrative”. In the second step of theoretical evaluation, we will concentrate on “the postmodern turn” in the representation of women beginning from The Princess and the Frog (2010). In the analysis section, Greimas’ “operative sampling” and “semiotics” models are used. The results have shown that in Moana animation, “strong, independent, warrior” representation of the women works differently in the subcodes of the narrative