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You've probably noticed that many Disney princess stories have a similar pattern. Namely, they're all female characters plucked from sorta dark fairy tales and shoved into an animated, romantic musical. Jason Porath is having none of that.
A former animator at DreamWorks, Porath is now the creator of Rejected Princesses, a site dedicated to "women too awesome, awful, or offbeat for the movies." Porath came up with the idea during a lunchtime conversation with some friends. They were talking about the "narrow mold" most animated flicks follow.
"I started listing off some names of people who would never make good fodder for kids' movies, for whatever reason — too awesome, too awful, too offbeat — and my friends encouraged me to actually illustrate them," says Porath. "So, I did. And, as I did so, more suggestions kept coming, until it snowballed into what it is now a list of over 200 amazing people, ready to be illustrated."
He reminds his readers that these characters were technically never rejected, as they were never truly pitched for their own films in the first place. But, he writes on his site, "I think we can assume that nobody’s going to want to do kids’ movies about a lot of these people. They’re either way too awesome, way too awful, or way too weird."
What's especially enjoyable about Porath's work is the way he retells the stories of these women. For example, he writes that "Penta grew up as royalty, sister to the king. When the king’s wife died, he spent some time looking for a new wife, but could not find anyone equally beautiful — except for Penta. So he decided, 'You know what, screw it, I’m the king, and I’m gonna marry my own sister.'"
Click through to see some of Porath's rejected princesses. It's like an island of misfit toys, but given a beautiful Internet home.
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