#34 Ariel became Disney’s first princess in 30 years in 1989
After 1959’s Sleeping Beauty, it took 30 years for Disney to produce another animated princess feature, and that’s The Little Mermaid featuring Ariel as the titular character. Since a lot had changed during the intervening decades, Ariel is far different from the three Disney Princesses that came before here. Unlike her predecessors, “Ariel is fully realized female character who thinks and acts independently, even rebelliously,” popular film critic Roger Ebert wrote of the mermaid character.
