I don't think Disney or the filmmakers consciously choose for the DPs to not have close female friends, but it is curious that this is often the case.

Marketing reasons. I figure marketers assume kids would prefer buying plushies of cute animal friends over a less glamorous doll of the (plain) female sidekick compared to the heroine.

That and sometimes male filmmakers don't really understand female characters, which is often why in some movies there's more male characters to females...

^Yeah, that too. It emphasizes their outcast and oddball status more.

Tbh never though about that.

Not for any deliberate reason. It's just that most of these are written by men and men usually aren't very good at portraying positive female relationships. It isn't done out of malice, they just don't think about it because they've never had to. (Of course women can do this too. Look at Frozen- Anna spends more time bonding with Hans, Kristoff and Olaf than Elsa and of course none with her mom like every single DP but Merida and Moana).

i doubt it's intentional, but it's men doing most of the character writing, and i think it just doesn't occur to a lot of them that women have significant no-men-involved relationships.

also, and this borders on intentional, but i could see the creative team worrying that giving the heroine actual friends might distract the audience, and make her romance with the guy less special or important, when the end-all of a heroine's arc is to find love, duh.

It happened in Pocahontas, and in TPATF.

I do think screenwriters don't write in female friendships with the same regularity with which they write male friendships/bros. This happens in non-animated movies with a TON of regularity, also. I see more male friendships, than female friendships.

I guess, I enjoyed Xena Warrior Princess because the male screenwriters there did their job superbly, and I tend to love Xena and Gabrielle for that reason.

Again, this could change if more women were at the helm, but usually the field of media is very male-dominated, and people usually get where they are due to connections ("my dad worked with this guy so that's why i'm here"). But then not always, some women just have some misogynistic tendencies as well. Jennifer Lee's and the Moaner's idea of female bonding is laughable and nowhere near as empowering as Disney wants us to believe.

^the few scenes we get of the sisters bonding is realistic and pretty sweet. Sisters- especially ones with different personalities and tastes- don't need constant bickering and dragging each other's interests just because that's the common way to depict them. I'm sick of that. It's nice to have two sisters who have hurt each other's feelings and disagree on several things and still manage to show they can get along and care deeply. Just because you prefer Lilo and Stitch doesn't mean every pair of siblings needs to be exactly like Lilo and Nani (who are totally different in their setting, situation, age gap, etc).

And it's improved quite a lot by Frozen 2, even if Elsa fell back into her old habits of shutting Anna out.

Yeah it definitely depends on the movie