Every Live Action Disney Princess Ranked, Snow White to Moana

One of the most famous actresses to ever take on a Disney Princess also knows plenty about the tightrope-walk of adapting a beloved character; Emma Watson rose to fame by playing Hermione Granger in eight Harry Potter feature films over the course of a decade. She rose to that challenge, perfectly embodying young Hermione as a child actor and then growing with that crucial character across the series. The idea of her playing Belle, the similarly bookish (if far more sheltered) princess-to-be from Beauty and the Beast, seemed like an inspired one. But this also made Watson the first major star to run into the Disney remake machinery, where the desire to create a sorta-new character competes with the assignment to say a bunch of lines that were memorably inflected by a voice actor first. Watson’s watchable, but weirdly unremarkable, performance establishes what will become a familiar theme for the live-action princess: It’s not really her fault the material so constrains her. But those constraints rarely feel more visible than they do in this billion-dollar hit.

Liu Yifei as Mulan in Mulan (2020)

On the other hand, what if you became a Disney Princess and no one much remembered? Again, that’s not Liu Yifei’s fault; her version of Mulan was released to streaming during the pandemic, when a lot of movie theaters were closed, and it doesn’t seem to have particularly stuck in the minds of audiences. Also: Not for nothing, but technically Mulan isn’t a princess; she’s just a female lead. Her whole story arc, in fact, involves her being a regular girl who disguises herself as a man in order to serve in the army in place of her ailing father. It’s actually the direct-to-video animated sequel Mulan II that leans into her potential princesshood by getting further into her romantic life, and as such, feels a little insulting to the character from the first film. Niki Caro’s live-action Mulan makes no such mistake, and Yifei gets to do some cool action stuff as a less clumsy version of the character, but the whole thing feels like a half-measure; not as cool as a proper martial arts epic, but less adorable than the cartoon.

Catherine Laga’aia as Moana in Moana (2026)

Let’s get to the good stuff upfront: Catherine Laga’aia has a nice, likable presence, and a lovely singing voice. Unfortunately, no one involved in making a live-action Moana ever gives her material stronger than a school-play version of the 2016 classic, with every mild dialogue tweak being prominent enough to notice and clunky enough to count as a downgrade. It’s a case study in how a movie can follow almost the exact same beats as its predecessor, yet feel shockingly rhythmless in the aggregate. Unfortunately, this applies to Laga’aia’s performance, too. She hits all the right notes from a purely technical perspective, but the movie is so lacking in physicality for its performers that she feels like she’s doing a school play through no fault of her own.

A few of the Disney remakes have taken a more revisionist approach to the material. Most of the time, this doesn’t involve princess characters; Tim Burton’s versions of Alice in Wonderland and Dumbo, for example, apply his sensibility to more bustling ensembles, while Cruella is a Burton-esque reworking of the 101 Dalmatians villainess. The first such Disney villain to get their own POV film, however, was Maleficent, the fearsome witch from Sleeping Beauty, and that meant casting someone to play the title character herself, even if this Aurora has a decidedly different path than her animated counterpart. Elle Fanning’s sad-girl ennui is such a potentially interesting choice for the Disney Princess image. (Imagine her in the Sofia Coppola version of The Little Mermaid that was apparently in the mix at some point!) The Maleficent movies don’t give her anything that rich or interesting. The main thing that’s interesting about her in either of them is that she doesn’t look or act exactly like the cartoon version, who is one of Disney’s least personality-driven lead characters. The lingering evidence of Fanning’s better performances in other movies is enough to vault her above several of the other princesses.

The Little Mermaid is just as inert as the worst of the Disney remakes, and because it has so many fantasy elements converted from hand-drawn animation into “live-action” designs that are then realized via, you guessed it, computer animation. It’s also hideously ugly in a way that not all of them are. The highlight, though, is Halle Bailey playing yearning incarnate as Ariel, the mermaid who longs to explore the surface world. She basically provides the only real hint of human emotion within an entirely synthetic version of a story that desperately needs it. Naturally, the narrative around the movie was that Bailey’s Blackness was took woke for general audiences (who showed up for the movie to the tune of nearly $300 million in North America). After all, we wouldn’t want to tinker with the racial makeup of the famous historical figure… the little mermaid. A fish-woman who lives under the sea. Anyway, the movie itself isn’t much, but Bailey is pretty much the only reason to consider watching it.

Naomi Scott as Jasmine in Aladdin (2019)

Princess Jasmine occupied an awkward position in the Disney Princess pantheon upon her introduction in 1992. On one hand, she was depicted (and marketed) as a more feminist-minded princess than ever before, chafing against the requirement that she marry out of royal obligation. On the other, she’s a midriff-baring princess who ultimately is the movie’s love interest, following two genuine leading roles from Belle and Ariel. This left some room for improvement in Guy Ritchie’s live-action redo, where Jasmine is recast as a young woman who feels capable of taking over for her sultan father and stymied by the limits of her station, no matter how privileged. This includes a brand-new solo song written specifically for the film (her only song in the 1992 original is the due “A Whole New World”), which also happens to be a nicely shot sequence from Ritchie — driving home how much there is to gain from these remakes actually deviating from the source at hand. Scott, who went on to do bravura scream-queen work in Smile 2, has more than enough charisma to pull it off; in a movie where poor Will Smith has to compete with the memory of Robin Williams, she makes Jasmine her own.  

Rachel Zegler as Snow White in Snow White (2025)

Disney seemed happy enough to let Rachel Zegler take the heat for the failure of their high-profile Snow White remake last year, even though there were plenty of other reasons for it, namely that the original Snow White movie isn’t nearly as popular with today’s kids or parents as, say, The Lion King. A lack of accompanying line-by-line fidelity is exactly what makes Snow White one of the more watchable Disney remakes; it knows it has to do something a little different with the material, and starts with casting Zegler, then continues with giving her some agreeable new songs to perform, in musical sequences that are better-directed than many of their more modern equivalents. There are still some strange and even ghastly elements to this movie, like the decision to make the dwarf characters entirely computer-generated, but Zegler gives a charming movie-star performance befitting someone plucked from obscurity to star in West Side Story. Mirror Mirror is the superior Snow White reimagining, but the Disney-on-Disney version of Snow White is almost worth watching just for Zegler.

Amy Adams as Giselle in Enchanted (2007) and Disenchanted (2022)

Enchanted is an odd case, and arguably doesn’t even quality for this list, because its translation from animation to live action is part of its whole storyline, and, as such, near-instantaneous: Giselle is designed as a stereotypical Disney Princess who could have easily existed in a 1952 cartoon, and we only see a bit of her animated life before she’s sent to the “real” contemporary Manhattan, where she’s played by Amy Adams. This allows Adams to originate the character from the jump — she does Giselle’s animated voiceover, of course — and, as such, gives her a major leg up over her competitors in this field. Oh, and there’s also the fact that Adams is one of the best actresses of her generation, throwing herself into Giselle with musical-theater energy while treating the role with an Oscar-worthy seriousness. The optimism, sweetness, and darker human emotions she must come to terms with all spring organically from the same character.

So if she’s allowed into the competition, why isn’t Adams number one? First, the degree of difficulty, while high, isn’t quite at the level of redefining an animated character in live action. And second, the years-later sequel Disenchanted kind of sucks. Actually, I’m not that big a fan of Enchanted itself, either; it’s treading satirical ground that was frankly trampled over decades before the movie existed, and doesn’t really bring much in the way of new observations about princess characters and what they mean to us culturally. It also tragically co-stars Patrick Dempsey. Adams herself, though, is terrific; no one else on this list has managed to make a Disney Princess one of her signature roles.

Lily James as Cinderella in Cinderella (2015)

Oft-forgotten with the rash of CG-choked Disney remakes is the fact that early in this trend, Kenneth Branagh produced a relatively grounded yet still-magical-enough expansion of the 1950 Disney classic. It’s not a terribly exciting movie, but it provides a surprisingly strong showcase for Lily James, exploring the same stereotypical princessy qualities as Giselle — kindness, courage, etc. — but from an utterly sincerely perspective. It also — largely lacking animal-based comic relief — gives more space to the film’s love story, arranging for James’ Cinderella to meet her Prince (Richard Madden) well before the ball. The relative restraint of the film may not interest kids, and surely most adults will have better things to do (like watch The Ugly Stepsister, maybe), but it also gives the movie a vantage that feels distinct from its animated counterpart, and allows James the room to make her Cinderella feel like a distinct person, not just a generic stand-in for friendliness to animals and occasional suffering.