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What Happens When You Hear Disney Princesses Sing in Their Real Languages

February 17th 2016

The YouTube page, Movie Munchies has released two viral compilation videos revealing how Disney princesses sound when singing in their native tongues, and people on social media are loving it. 

Many Disney films are originally released for U.S. audiences, meaning that even when princesses are inspired by or depicted as coming from other countries, they only sing in English. Movie Munchies' videos, though, are true to the cultures of the characters. "Little Mermaid" princess Ariel, for example, sings in Danish, as Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen wrote the story.

Mulan sings in Chinese, as she is from China.

The first clip also shows Elsa singing the legendary "Let It Go" in Norwegian, as Norway inspired the fictional country in "Frozen."

Some of the other princesses depicted include; Belle from "Beauty and the Beast," who sings in French, "Snow White," who sings in German, and Princess Jasmine from Aladdin, who sings in Arabic. 

"This is a fun way to try and pick up some new phrases in a different language," E! Online writer Julia Hays wrote of the videos. "The classic songs are just as beautiful, if not more-so, hearing them in a whole new way. Now we're wondering what these videos would look like for a movie like The Lion King."

Many commenters praised the videos:

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When one commenter said that Disney movies can be dubbed in other languages anyway, another pointed out that the films don't always include options for a broad range of languages:

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Other criticism of Disney princess movies.

Disney princess movies are often criticized for their unrealistic and even sexist depictions of relationships, and recent research reveals that Disney princess movies from 1989 to 1999 devote three times as many lines to male characters compared to female ones. Speaking to The Washington Post, one of the study's researchers, Carmen Fought, said that among Disney's female characters, it seemed only the princesses got to speak. Sidekicks and friends of the Disney princesses, for example, all tended to be male.

“There's one isolated princess trying to get someone to marry her, but there are no women doing any other things. There are no women leading the townspeople to go against the Beast, no women bonding in the tavern together singing drinking songs, women giving each other directions, or women inventing things. Everybody who’s doing anything else, other than finding a husband in the movie, pretty much, is a male.” - Carmen Fought 

You can watch the Movie Munchies videos below:

RELATED: The One Thing You Probably Didn’t Notice About Disney Princess Movies

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