Challenging Hierarchies Through Animality: Interspecies and Gender Relations in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast and The Princess and the Frog

Through the combined lenses of ecofeminism, masculinity studies, and critical animal studies, this article examines the cultural functions of animal metamorphosis in two Walt Disney animated feature films, Beauty and the Beast and The Princess and the Frog. It argues that animality operates as a narrative and symbolic space in which dominant gender norms and human–animal hierarchies are temporarily destabilized and reconfigured. Drawing on film analysis, this study shows how the animal figure enables the emergence of alternative masculinities—sensitive, relational, and ecologically attuned—while simultaneously exposing the structural limits of this apparent subversion. Although these films challenge toxic masculinity and propose more egalitarian interspecific relationships, their narrative resolutions ultimately reinstate anthropocentric and heteronormative frameworks by reasserting human centrality and normative romantic closure. By situating Disney’s representations within broader Western dualistic logics of domination (culture/nature, masculine/feminine, human/animal), I demonstrate that animality functions less as an autonomous mode of existence than as a transitional narrative device facilitating human self-transformation. In doing so, this article contributes to current discussions on how culturally mediated representations of animals shape human social imaginaries, ethical frameworks, and understandings of interspecies relationships.