Category Archives: Hipster Disney Princesses

The Best of Disney Princesses Reimagined

Despite their respective ages,  Disney’s princesses still manage to penetrate American pop-culture. From mash-ups to realistic portraits,  artists from all over the world started puting their own unique stamp on Disney’s damsels.  Each year a few of these reimaginings go viral, but which ones are the very best? To answer that question, I scoured the internet and came up with this post of my six favorite.

6. If Disney Princesses Had Instagram

This one is almost as good as a time capsule. Does anything say 2015 quite like Disney characters with Instagram accounts? In her series, Italian artist Simona Bonafini turns Disney’s classic characters into present-day teens and twenty-somethings. I especially love the Hercules gym selfie.

5. Disney Princesses as Hipsters

So remember how I asked if anything was as 2015 as Disney characters with Instagram accounts? It might be Disney Princesses as Hipsters. From a goth Belle to a tatted-up Aurora, artist and professional illustrator Emmanuel Viola liberates Disney’s damsels from their too-perfect personas in this series to prove “there’s always a dark side in all of us.”

4. The Wonderful World of Westeros

Yup. Game of Thrones meets Disney World in this series by DeviantART user DjeDjehuti.  It’s as genius as it is absurd.

Some of the castings are perfect: Elsa as Daenerys and Mulan as Brienne. Others, like Aurora as Cersei and Ariel as Melisandre, merely look the part. Still, this is one of my absolute favorite reimaginings and I’m crossing my fingers that the artist will do a series with Disney’s princes, too.

3. Disney Princesses As Pin-Ups

If you thought Viola was crossing a line with his hipster princesses, get ready to leap over it with Andrew Tarusov. In his pin-up series, Disney princesses get down-right sexy. This one requires a sense of humor (a Frozen threesome??) Tarusov’s series was so popular that he created a second, reimagining the villainesses as sexy vixens, too.

2. Real-Life Disney Princesses

Probably the most stunning of the reimaginings are Helsinki artist Jirka Vaatainen’s  portraits. The elegant series was so hugely popular that Vaatainen did a follow-up, transforming Disney’s princes into realistic hunks. Seriously. You’ll dump your book boyfriends for these guys.

1. Historically-Accurate Disney Princesses

The people at Buzzfeed did a phenomenal job with this video. Since I’m  a history blogger and historical fiction novelist, it should come to no surprise to any of you that this is my absolute favorite.