Who was Disney’s first 3D princess?

Animations starring princesses began to be released by Disney studios in 2D format, since 1924 through the short film that belongs to the ‘Silly Symphonies’ series, ‘The Goddess of Spring’, Persephone (the first human character to star in a Mickey Mouse Clubhouse title), was presented through sketches that took shape under the direction of Wilfred Jackson.

In 1937, with the arrival of the label’s first feature film, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”, which also brought the first official Disney princess, the technique remained the same, after all, the story of the beautiful girl whose life is hunted by her evil stepmother was also animated frame by frame through flat hand-drawn drawings.

The method was a landmark among plots starring princesses, as it was also used in classic titles such as “Cinderella” (1950), “Sleeping Beauty” (1959), “The Little Mermaid” (1989), “Beauty and the Beast” (1991), “Aladdin” (1992), “Pocahontas” (1995), “Mulan (1998)” and others that feature characters that belong to the select group of Disney crown holders.

This raises the question: who was the first princess released in 3D format by Disney? The answer was given in 2010 with the premiere of ‘Tangled’, a plot led by Nathan Greno and Byron Howard which introduced Rapunzel, the newcomer to the animation method that takes shape on the small and big screens through computer graphics, that is, using computer software that has three dimensions and depth of field, creating an illusion of movement that resembles reality.

In the plot, the young girl, who has magical golden hair that is 21 meters long, lives imprisoned at the top of a tower under the orders of Mother Gothel, who uses the magic of her locks to remain forever young. Without contact with her family or the outside world, Rapunzel dreams of the day she will be free, and sees an opportunity to fulfill her wish when the most wanted bandit in the kingdom, Flynn Rider, ends up hiding in her tower.

An interesting fact is that, as reported by the Rolling Stone portal, the film was made using computer-generated images, because for Disney to be able to animate Rapunzel’s more than 100 thousand strands of hair, it was necessary to create a new CGI technology, since, until then, no character had been produced with that much hair.

Since then, the princesses of “Brave” (2012), “Frozen” (2013), “Moana” (2016) and “Raya and the Last Dragon” (2021) have all been created using 3D techniques, which makes Tiana, from “The Princess and the Frog”, a film released in 2009, the studio’s last 2D princess.