Unearthing Dissenting Narratives of Love and Agency in Modern Disney Cinema

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-587-4_7How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Disney Princess Movie; Greimas Actantial Model; Truth-procedure of Love; Women’s Empowerment

Abstract

Disney Live-action movies, Beauty and the Beast (2017) and Cinderella (2015), are acknowledged for shaping contemporary conceptions of womanhood. In the story of Beauty and the Beast (2017), love is depicted as a dialectical process that unfolds over time through interaction and character transformation, in which Belle and the Beast develop a love dynamic that transcends physical appearance and social status. In contrast, Cinderella and the prince represent love through visual impressions and attraction to the power. Thus, these two films present different love archetypes, implicating the function of love in the narrative structure. Through the lens of Greimas’s Actantial Model, this study examines how film narration produces meaning within the actantial scheme. Furthermore, the exploration of the love dynamic is grounded in Badiou’s concept of the Truth-procedure of love, which involves the work of the Scene of Two and Fidelity. Wollstonecraft’s feminist theory is used to analyze the underlying agenda of the love story by investigating the female protagonists’ agency in the film, with a primary focus on the educational backgrounds that lead them to find true love. This research employs a descriptive qualitative approach, drawing on scenes from the Disney films Beauty and the Beast (2017) and Cinderella (2015) to examine the dynamics of love and the agency of female protagonists. Through the lenses of Greimas, Badiou, and Wollstonecraft, the results indicate that Belle embodies a positive female archetype who asserts her agency through curiosity. Simultaneously, Cinderella portrays a vulnerable woman who begs a prince for protection against another woman.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Zahra Fadia Siti Haliza
AU  - Ghanesya Hari Murti
AU  - Denny Antyo Hartanto
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/06/12
TI  - Unearthing Dissenting Narratives of Love and Agency in Modern Disney Cinema
BT  - Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on English Studies in Indonesia (ICONESIA 2025)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 58
EP  - 73
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-587-4_7
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-587-4_7
ID  - Haliza2026
ER  -