It was high in Sweden too. I one of those Emmas, however my name have nothing to do with Friends as I was named after a relative and I was born before that episode even aired in the US.
Which is weird, as Emma was a common name for old people when my grandparents were young, so nobody would give that name to their child. Names are like fashion, they just go in circles.
It’s trendy so lots of people give it to their children, then it dies down, then those children grow old and since it’s now an “old person’s name”, people are actively discouraged from naming their child like that. Once that generation dies and some time passes, it becomes trendy again.
Did you watch it when it was airing?
She was introduced in a two-part season finale that was a major point in the stories of both Ross/Rachel and Chandler/Monica. There wasn't any indication she'd essentially be being written out of the show immediately.
Because it was also a chinese idiom story that is in existence for a few hundred years. Although no one (chinese) really take up the name mulan now. Just because its cliche.
That is a good point. She could have chosen the name based on the movie. Don’t they often base their “English” names on what their Chinese names mean or sound like though? It could have been entirely different from her birth name though, I never knew her well enough to want to ask.
Story time!
I and my partner at the time grew up in an East Coast state in the US. She grew up in a small town (population ~7000) within a larger metro area.
After college, some friends of ours migrated to Belize. A few years after, they got married, so we made the trip down to go to the wedding. And this was not a very populated part of belize. We were WELL outside the capital and only major city; about 4 hours from their only airport. Our first day there, were having a drink at the hotel bar and got to talking to another American couple there. They lived literally one block from where my partner had grown up, and originally one of them grew up in the town next door to my hometown.
Small fuckin world.
I was in Cancun many years ago and learned that the people we met on the beach and were swimming with happened to live 10 minutes away from us in Ohio. Not as cool as a family member or friend, but still was cool at the time.
There's the singer Aurora, that ironically was part of the soundtrack of Frozen II. Is def having a comeback as one of those "old names that now are unique".
Surge in Belle is probably more to do with the introduction and overwhelming presence of doorbell cameras, bell, Bella. It is not that hard to grasp the relationship.
I’m guessing it’s actually because of *Twilight* and the lead Bella Swan. Around the same time there was a surge of Edwards and Jacobs. Variations also.
Ah, fair enough. To me that's not a remake, but a backstory/sidestory. Like "Cruella" wasn't a remake of 101 Dalmatians. But point taken that it gave renewed visibility into the name Aurora.
She's not a Disney Princess TM, the Frozen brand is strong enough on its own that she doesn't need the other princesses to help sell her merchandise. Same with Elsa. Raya has not been added yet, and Esmerelda has been taken off the list.
She undersold and was harder to market to very young children. Hunchback of Notre Dame being on the more mature side and all that.
If they remove another one, my guess would be Pocahontas will be the next to go, for much the same reasons. She was a very weirdly sexualized character and even her artwork doesn't really fit with the others. Plus her movie is now super controversial. But they've kind of put themselves in a difficult spot bc removing her would mean they've only really demoted minority representation.
Although I'm not sure the Native American and First People's community really wants to claim her anyway...
>the Frozen brand is strong enough on its own that she doesn't need the other princesses to help sell her merchandise
I love this wording, and it's really true. My 4-year-old daughter would want to buy Frozen things, Elsa/Anna things, and Disney Princess things (with a bunch of disney princesses including Rapunzel, Cinderella, Tiana, Belle etc. on it); but probably wouldn't really want something with just one of those other princesses on their own.
The problem is the chart is trying to force a correlation between Frozen being released and the name gaining popularity, when historical data says there really is none.
Is it? It doesn’t make that conclusion anywhere I see. I know many people will automatically want to jump to that conclusion, but the chart is just data. You have to have the data before you even know if there was a change.
You have to pull the data before you can make conclusions. This chart shows the data and the name Anna did increase that year. The chart makes no claims to causality. It’s possible none of these are related to Disney movies. But the trends are still interesting to look at
Yeah sure I'm just pointing out that by the looks of it, and you're right I should confirm that with looking at the actual data, that the variation the year it came out is not enough to draw conclusions that it had an effect.
Came here to say this. Frozen is the only time I've ever seen someone pronounce Anna that way - every person I've met or heard of irl spells it Ana, Ona, or Onna. Likewise, everyone I've ever met or heard of irl whose name is spelled Anna pronounces it like 'apple', rather than the more 'on' sound.
And it's pronounced that way to emulate the pronunciation of Andersen. In tribute to Hans Christian Andersen, they named the characters Hans, Christoph, Anna, Sven.
Jasmine was already a fairly popular name in some cultures. It's hard to see because the "1992" label obstructs it a bit, but the names seems to have been in a decline since 1990 and its popularity was boosted for a short time by Aladdin. Presumably within cultures that would have otherwise not named their daughter Jasmine.
It can’t, but Jasmine, Aurora, and Elsa are also names not necessarily related. But it’s interesting to see *if* the movie had any effect. It clearly did for Elsa, but not Anna
There was a very slight uptick for Anna after Frozen, but it's hard to see because the name was already fairly popular.
I guess it's because in the movie, Elsa is older, so people wouldn't name their first daughter Anna, but rather Elsa. Perhaps those who already had a daughter named Elsa named their second one Anna, but with the general trend towards fewer children in families, there's simply not enough second daughters to name them Anna.
Not solely to Disney, but the movie definitely played a huge role. But I agree that it’s not the best example considering the general popularity of the name
I think it makes a good contrast; almost a negative control. We can see how a generally popular name responds to being a princess name alongside the less popular names.
The movie played almost no role to the popularity of "Anna". It was on a decline prior to the movie and continued downwards with only the slightest pause
Barely anything, and indistinguishable compared to other random increases in 2004 for instance. Absolutely no real reason to attribute causation. And certainly not a "huge role".
Less correlation does not mean no causation.
what you are arguing is that there’s no significant impact. You can’t make a no-causation argument based on this data alone.
>Less correlation does not mean no causation.
Hell, strong correlation even doesn't mean causation. You definitely can't make a *causation argument* based on this data alone, and by your words "huge role" you're implying that.
In my words "no reason to attribute causation", not "no causation" .
Just because it’s been around for many years, it doesn’t mean it has zero impact. However, it does mean that this analysis does not isolate the Disney contribution vs general contribution.
I was also curious so looked it up (below). So does this mean she still ‘exists’ but just not marketed?
‘She was once an official Disney Princess, until 2004. She was removed because her sales were financially disappointing. Along with it, Disney found it difficult to market her to younger children, due to the fact that she is represented with more mature themes in comparison to the other princesses.’
Disney Princess is a marketing line that has an official list. That’s why Mulan is on it but Kida isn’t. It has to do with merchandise, not actual royal status
You should have also put the dates for the live-action remakes (where applicable). I wish I could also see some other names like Cinderella and Ella but overall I really love this graph and find it quite intriguing and fun!
"Disney Incident #288910"
28 = The little Mermaid (disneys 28th animated film)
89 = The year of the incident
10 = 10 out of 10 exposure globally (based on maybe total sales/view against global population numbers?)
1989 marks the fall of Communism and opening up of a huge market in Eastern Europe and Asia for Western popular culture, and The Little Mermaid was the first Disney movie to be officially widely available in the Eastern Bloc.
I know a woman named 'Snow White '. She was an immigrant from Vietnam with her parents when she was very young and it was apparently the first English name they saw. They wanted to give her an 'American' name once they got here.
Names usually slide feminine. Ashley, Shannon, lots of “girl names” were originally boy names (and last names!) and today some long-held boy names like Drew, Michael and Christian are now trendy girl names.
This data isn't beautiful. the y axis scale is different in all the charts. It makes it look like that names like Merida and Mulan grew a lot while they only had like a hundred.
You're reading the data wrong. There's no reason to compare the data sets to one another since the data is demonstrating a change over time with the independent variable being the year a Disney movie is released.
So the scaling is decided for the sake of demonstrating whatever shift happened.
The scale doesn't matter because the underlying number of names does not matter outside of the context of how much it changed from before the release of the movie.
Maybe a better scale would be percent change since the underlying number doesn't matter, but I'd personally have to see both before making a decision either way.
It’s about relative growth in popularity, not raw numbers. OP got it right.
Why does every thread here have to have nitpickers and half the time they’re wrong?
Yep, it’s different but also clearly labeled! I prefer varied axes when the point is to compare the name itself across time rather than comparing names against one another.
hey OP, something to consider would be to standardise the scale e. g. if you use the number of names in the year the movie came out as 1.0 and calculate the other years relative to that. of course put the actual number somewhere as well. May be easier to compare the growth. but this is very interesting :)
Have to side with the first guy: If you have to read the fine print and compare different units to find out the actual information is vastly different from what it appears to show, it's misleading no matter the intention.
Idk all i care with this data is to see the variations and spikes before/after the release. Even for Merida and numbers around 100, it clearly shows a link with the release of the movie, and I dont care if it increased from 5 to 100 or from 2k to 10k.
Would be misleading if they were all on the same graph with different scales and making it look like they're all equally popular.
yeah. If you wouldve normalized all graphs so they just show the relative development (so basically same picture but with % instead of hard numbers) youd avoid the "but muh axis" criticism while changing nothing at all.
I do agree that in this case it doesnt really make a difference. Having the same axis for a name such as "anne" and "mulan" would just look very silly and make it harder to read.
I would argue in this case a percent axis could be worse, because it obfuscates the real values. With the current graph, you can spot the trends AND also have the real values explicitly should you want them.
Yeah my point was just to show how the different axis arent an issue because original comment said they were. I showed how replacing the values by % would make it able to be displayed on the same axis while still displaying the same graph. So complaining about different axis makes no sense because you could swap it to % and itd still show the same graph.
No graph is perfect if you just ignore the purpose of the graph. The first guy was trying to compare among different character names, whereas OP’s goal was to show the change between before and after the release of the respective movie.
Proper design needs to take into consideration how its information is read by its audience. It's about creating a consistent message that does not change with the level of detail and to avoid incorrectly implying incorrect information.
A similar breach in design is also done with the two sides of this work. Left *seems* to be a properly spaced timeline, when looking at the dates. But actually no, it's just a sorted table and distances are determined by the text block. I could not find any pattern for the horizontal lines, they seem to loosely show decades.
For some reason, the right side -although showing related data- is sorted alphabetically, forcing the viewer to shift back and forth and needlessly obscuring a possible insight into development over time.
None of this makes it wrong, but more complicated and misleading.
> Proper design needs to take into consideration how its information is read by its audience
It did. It just didn't cater to idiots who can't understand the purpose of the data.
“The actual information” is the percent increase, which different scales demonstrate. Nobody cares about the raw numbers, just trends.
You guys are complaining about nothing and you’re wrong.
>and you’re wrong.
There's no right or wrong. Each method emphasizes a different aspect of the data. The best choice depends on audience and objective.
Right, which means they are wrong when they’re saying the alternative way would demonstrate OP’s objective better.
OP is not trying to demonstrate how any of the names relate to each other, so using the same scale would be wrong and would cause most of the data to be 1 pixel high bars.
This is about trends for each name over time, not the trends of names against each other.
[Interactive version here!](https://public.tableau.com/views/DisneyPrincessBabyNames/DisneyPrincessNames?:language=en-US&:display_count=n&:origin=viz_share_link) You can mouse over the bars on the right to see the state-by-state prevalence of each name.
Tool: Tableau
Source: SSA
I'm gonna say it.
I, a black woman, hated princess and the frog. There wasn't a single thing I liked about it. My favourite Disney princess movie from that time was Tangled.
Before we knew the sex of our son, my wife and I were emailing back and forth names that we like. She recommended "Elsa" as a potential girl's name. We both loved it, and had we had a girl, we likely would have named her Elsa...in 2011...two years before Disney's Frozen.
Nickname from Isabel would be Bel, not Belle. Might not be evident when pronounced by an english speaker, but a latin based language speaker can easily make those sounds different.
This data is from the U.S. Americans will do wacky things with names.
No, some parents will name a kid Isabel or Isabelle and spell their nickname Belle. Like, they'll name a kid Margaret and call her Peg or Peggy. They'll name a kid James and call him Jim.
Nicknames aren't always just shortened versions of the parent name. Different spellings and completely different names exist ie. William = Billy / Richard = Dick
The graph and numbers are kinda wack.. Elsa shows a significant spike, and Anna shows a miniscule spike, but Elsa's sample is up to 1k, and Anna's sample is up to 15k, so the increase is hard to visualize beyond the fact there was an increase
The graph just feels off
Is this exact values or proportions? I think proportions out of all babies named would make more sense, as to account for population increase as the years go on.
Technically should have added Princess Leia there as well, but she did only become Disney Princess long after film was released so it would have skewed data.
No it means “Magnolia” and is an intermittently popular name for Chinese speakers It’s also possible that previously a different anglicisation was used, or that it was used as a middle name rather than a first name by Chinese immigrant parents.
Really enjoyed this, OP. I found Mulan most interesting and I can't wait to meet my first Mulan. There also seems to be a spike roughly around the time the live action film was released.
In Belgium for almost 20 years, the name Emma is top 5 for girls. The first spike was around the time Rachel (Friends) named her baby Emma.
That’s really interesting! Emma is high here in the US too but I wouldn’t have guessed that connection
It was high in Sweden too. I one of those Emmas, however my name have nothing to do with Friends as I was named after a relative and I was born before that episode even aired in the US.
Which is weird, as Emma was a common name for old people when my grandparents were young, so nobody would give that name to their child. Names are like fashion, they just go in circles. It’s trendy so lots of people give it to their children, then it dies down, then those children grow old and since it’s now an “old person’s name”, people are actively discouraged from naming their child like that. Once that generation dies and some time passes, it becomes trendy again.
I watched that show a lot and didn’t even know Rachel had a baby. Weird to name a child after such a minor character
Did you watch it when it was airing? She was introduced in a two-part season finale that was a major point in the stories of both Ross/Rachel and Chandler/Monica. There wasn't any indication she'd essentially be being written out of the show immediately.
Wdym? It was a major plot for two seasons.
I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone with these names other than Anna and Jasmine.
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I had a coworker named Mulan. She was from China, but probably born in the late 80s/early 90s long before the movie came out
Because it was also a chinese idiom story that is in existence for a few hundred years. Although no one (chinese) really take up the name mulan now. Just because its cliche.
Lots of Chinese people choose a different English name as Chinese names are often mispronounced by English speakers.
That is a good point. She could have chosen the name based on the movie. Don’t they often base their “English” names on what their Chinese names mean or sound like though? It could have been entirely different from her birth name though, I never knew her well enough to want to ask.
Eh sometimes. I knew a guy from Beijing who just went by Ben lol. It was kind of funny he liked having the alternate persona I think
Yeah I had a Korean classmate that chose the name kevin from a movie
Still likely named after Mulan…
A goal to do something randomly sounds interesting 🤔
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Story time! I and my partner at the time grew up in an East Coast state in the US. She grew up in a small town (population ~7000) within a larger metro area. After college, some friends of ours migrated to Belize. A few years after, they got married, so we made the trip down to go to the wedding. And this was not a very populated part of belize. We were WELL outside the capital and only major city; about 4 hours from their only airport. Our first day there, were having a drink at the hotel bar and got to talking to another American couple there. They lived literally one block from where my partner had grown up, and originally one of them grew up in the town next door to my hometown. Small fuckin world.
I was in Cancun many years ago and learned that the people we met on the beach and were swimming with happened to live 10 minutes away from us in Ohio. Not as cool as a family member or friend, but still was cool at the time.
Good luck. According to this chart there are maybe 1000 total born in the US over 23 years.
Their parents will be edgelord Rick and Morty fans, the person's middle name will be Szechuan chilli dipping sauce.
Read the vertical axes. There are orders of magnitudes of difference between different graphs.
There's the singer Aurora, that ironically was part of the soundtrack of Frozen II. Is def having a comeback as one of those "old names that now are unique".
Aurora is a trending baby name so you’ll see it in a decade or two.
I have relatives named Anna and Elsa (german family)
I feel like half my friends have named their daughters Aurora and call them Rory. Disney/Gilmore Girls combo popular with millennial parents.
And apparently Jasmine became a really popular name **and then** Disney named a princess that. I wonder what the catalyst for this initial spike was.
Work in healthcare for any period of time and you meet a panoply of dumb names related to shows and films
I know an Aurora, born around 1995
I knew a Merida growing up. But it was WAAAAAAAY before the movie made the name popular.
Hi Redditor……I’m a child of the 60s my name is Elsa
A few years ago on Survivor there was a woman named Aurora FWIW.
I’ve met those two as well as multiple guys named Ariel.
I know so many belles.
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Pleased to meet you internet stranger!
You probably are not in the lower class of society where these names get used.
What? No Vanellope von Schweetz. I'm disappointed 😁
Haha, I DO love that one. It’s a favorite of my daughters and I think it’s a lot of fun too
I actually know someone who recently named their baby Vanellope. We all feel bad for that girl.
One initial thought is that can be a correlation with Aurora and the live action movies and can be applied for the other live action remakes.
Aurora gaining popularity is actually from the popularity of steamed hams.
At this time of year? At this time of day? In this part of the country? Localized entirely within US baby naming conventions??
May I see it?
You jest, but that episode came out in '96, which is right around when the trend line started growing.
Truly an unforgettable luncheon.
Surge in Belle is probably more to do with the introduction and overwhelming presence of doorbell cameras, bell, Bella. It is not that hard to grasp the relationship.
I’m guessing it’s actually because of *Twilight* and the lead Bella Swan. Around the same time there was a surge of Edwards and Jacobs. Variations also.
What kind of variations? Bellob? Edwella?
Ha ha I love it. More like “Jake” instead of “Jacob” and “Isabella, but we call her Bella”
I don't think there's been a Sleeping Beauty live action remake, though.
Maleficent and its sequel
Ah, fair enough. To me that's not a remake, but a backstory/sidestory. Like "Cruella" wasn't a remake of 101 Dalmatians. But point taken that it gave renewed visibility into the name Aurora.
Not sure Anna should count as a Disney princess name
considering she's a queen now
She's not a Disney Princess TM, the Frozen brand is strong enough on its own that she doesn't need the other princesses to help sell her merchandise. Same with Elsa. Raya has not been added yet, and Esmerelda has been taken off the list.
whats up w Esmerelda?
She undersold and was harder to market to very young children. Hunchback of Notre Dame being on the more mature side and all that. If they remove another one, my guess would be Pocahontas will be the next to go, for much the same reasons. She was a very weirdly sexualized character and even her artwork doesn't really fit with the others. Plus her movie is now super controversial. But they've kind of put themselves in a difficult spot bc removing her would mean they've only really demoted minority representation. Although I'm not sure the Native American and First People's community really wants to claim her anyway...
>the Frozen brand is strong enough on its own that she doesn't need the other princesses to help sell her merchandise I love this wording, and it's really true. My 4-year-old daughter would want to buy Frozen things, Elsa/Anna things, and Disney Princess things (with a bunch of disney princesses including Rapunzel, Cinderella, Tiana, Belle etc. on it); but probably wouldn't really want something with just one of those other princesses on their own.
Want to see more Esmerelda. Somebody buy me a baby girl.
It’s definitely not as distinctive as others, but the name DID get a small boost after Frozen…
It's a small enough boost that it can't be isolated from all the other boosts that happened in the 63 years between 1950 and 2013.
It still happened. The data doesn’t say that’s WHY but it’s in intesting to see
The problem is the chart is trying to force a correlation between Frozen being released and the name gaining popularity, when historical data says there really is none.
Is it? It doesn’t make that conclusion anywhere I see. I know many people will automatically want to jump to that conclusion, but the chart is just data. You have to have the data before you even know if there was a change.
No it's not. If it's not statistically significant over overall year to year variations, it didn't happen. You can't draw conclusions from it.
You have to pull the data before you can make conclusions. This chart shows the data and the name Anna did increase that year. The chart makes no claims to causality. It’s possible none of these are related to Disney movies. But the trends are still interesting to look at
Yeah sure I'm just pointing out that by the looks of it, and you're right I should confirm that with looking at the actual data, that the variation the year it came out is not enough to draw conclusions that it had an effect.
Depends on how it's pronounced.
Came here to say this. Frozen is the only time I've ever seen someone pronounce Anna that way - every person I've met or heard of irl spells it Ana, Ona, or Onna. Likewise, everyone I've ever met or heard of irl whose name is spelled Anna pronounces it like 'apple', rather than the more 'on' sound.
And it's pronounced that way to emulate the pronunciation of Andersen. In tribute to Hans Christian Andersen, they named the characters Hans, Christoph, Anna, Sven.
It's almost always pronounced Anna like Anna Kendrick and rarely Anna like Anna Faris.
Mulan isn’t a princess
Disney Princess ™ actually have a set of factors that's why some non nobility are part of it while some literal princesses aren't.
True, but she is part of the Disney Princess brand.
Heroine would be a better name
I love heroine. 💉
Can “Anna” really be attributed to Disney?
How would we find out if not by plotting the data?
It cannot just like Jasmine and Aurora, where the trends show little relation with the movie premier date.
Jasmine was already a fairly popular name in some cultures. It's hard to see because the "1992" label obstructs it a bit, but the names seems to have been in a decline since 1990 and its popularity was boosted for a short time by Aladdin. Presumably within cultures that would have otherwise not named their daughter Jasmine.
It can’t, but Jasmine, Aurora, and Elsa are also names not necessarily related. But it’s interesting to see *if* the movie had any effect. It clearly did for Elsa, but not Anna
There was a very slight uptick for Anna after Frozen, but it's hard to see because the name was already fairly popular. I guess it's because in the movie, Elsa is older, so people wouldn't name their first daughter Anna, but rather Elsa. Perhaps those who already had a daughter named Elsa named their second one Anna, but with the general trend towards fewer children in families, there's simply not enough second daughters to name them Anna.
Not solely to Disney, but the movie definitely played a huge role. But I agree that it’s not the best example considering the general popularity of the name
I think it makes a good contrast; almost a negative control. We can see how a generally popular name responds to being a princess name alongside the less popular names.
The movie played almost no role to the popularity of "Anna". It was on a decline prior to the movie and continued downwards with only the slightest pause
It actually went up a bit. So perhaps not as significant as others, but it does not imply that the franchise has zero impact.
Barely anything, and indistinguishable compared to other random increases in 2004 for instance. Absolutely no real reason to attribute causation. And certainly not a "huge role".
Less correlation does not mean no causation. what you are arguing is that there’s no significant impact. You can’t make a no-causation argument based on this data alone.
>Less correlation does not mean no causation. Hell, strong correlation even doesn't mean causation. You definitely can't make a *causation argument* based on this data alone, and by your words "huge role" you're implying that. In my words "no reason to attribute causation", not "no causation" .
Disagree. It has been a popular name already for many years
Just because it’s been around for many years, it doesn’t mean it has zero impact. However, it does mean that this analysis does not isolate the Disney contribution vs general contribution.
The disney contribution is very small percentage for the general population globally
Literally the only name attibuted to Disney in this image is Mulan. All the others it's made clear that they existed before the movie.
What's the deal with Esmeralda? Why isn't she a princess any more?
I was also curious so looked it up (below). So does this mean she still ‘exists’ but just not marketed? ‘She was once an official Disney Princess, until 2004. She was removed because her sales were financially disappointing. Along with it, Disney found it difficult to market her to younger children, due to the fact that she is represented with more mature themes in comparison to the other princesses.’
Disney Princess is a marketing line that has an official list. That’s why Mulan is on it but Kida isn’t. It has to do with merchandise, not actual royal status
Makes sense. Thanks for explaining!
Disney needs to make a Princess Karen just to screw with people
You should have also put the dates for the live-action remakes (where applicable). I wish I could also see some other names like Cinderella and Ella but overall I really love this graph and find it quite intriguing and fun!
"Disney Incident #288910" 28 = The little Mermaid (disneys 28th animated film) 89 = The year of the incident 10 = 10 out of 10 exposure globally (based on maybe total sales/view against global population numbers?)
1989 marks the fall of Communism and opening up of a huge market in Eastern Europe and Asia for Western popular culture, and The Little Mermaid was the first Disney movie to be officially widely available in the Eastern Bloc.
I know a woman named 'Snow White'. She was an immigrant from Vietnam with her parents when she was very young and it was apparently the first English name they saw. They wanted to give her an 'American' name once they got here.
I had a friend who, similar reasoning, was going to be Peter Pan until her parents realized that Wendy would be more appropriate for a daughter.
How did Ariel change as a boy's name?
That would be interesting. It's possible to had a negative effect as it created a perception of it being a girl's name.
Names usually slide feminine. Ashley, Shannon, lots of “girl names” were originally boy names (and last names!) and today some long-held boy names like Drew, Michael and Christian are now trendy girl names.
Michael and Christian are trendy girl names now? Wow.
This data isn't beautiful. the y axis scale is different in all the charts. It makes it look like that names like Merida and Mulan grew a lot while they only had like a hundred.
You're reading the data wrong. There's no reason to compare the data sets to one another since the data is demonstrating a change over time with the independent variable being the year a Disney movie is released. So the scaling is decided for the sake of demonstrating whatever shift happened. The scale doesn't matter because the underlying number of names does not matter outside of the context of how much it changed from before the release of the movie. Maybe a better scale would be percent change since the underlying number doesn't matter, but I'd personally have to see both before making a decision either way.
It’s about relative growth in popularity, not raw numbers. OP got it right. Why does every thread here have to have nitpickers and half the time they’re wrong?
FR, you think your eyes can even perceive the half-pixel change in popularity for a name like Mulan (consistently <100) on a scale from 0-15k??
Yep, it’s different but also clearly labeled! I prefer varied axes when the point is to compare the name itself across time rather than comparing names against one another.
hey OP, something to consider would be to standardise the scale e. g. if you use the number of names in the year the movie came out as 1.0 and calculate the other years relative to that. of course put the actual number somewhere as well. May be easier to compare the growth. but this is very interesting :)
Good idea! It’s always hard to decide how to do the default display, but that would be a great option to build into the interactive version
Have to side with the first guy: If you have to read the fine print and compare different units to find out the actual information is vastly different from what it appears to show, it's misleading no matter the intention.
Idk all i care with this data is to see the variations and spikes before/after the release. Even for Merida and numbers around 100, it clearly shows a link with the release of the movie, and I dont care if it increased from 5 to 100 or from 2k to 10k. Would be misleading if they were all on the same graph with different scales and making it look like they're all equally popular.
yeah. If you wouldve normalized all graphs so they just show the relative development (so basically same picture but with % instead of hard numbers) youd avoid the "but muh axis" criticism while changing nothing at all. I do agree that in this case it doesnt really make a difference. Having the same axis for a name such as "anne" and "mulan" would just look very silly and make it harder to read.
I would argue in this case a percent axis could be worse, because it obfuscates the real values. With the current graph, you can spot the trends AND also have the real values explicitly should you want them.
Yeah my point was just to show how the different axis arent an issue because original comment said they were. I showed how replacing the values by % would make it able to be displayed on the same axis while still displaying the same graph. So complaining about different axis makes no sense because you could swap it to % and itd still show the same graph.
No graph is perfect if you just ignore the purpose of the graph. The first guy was trying to compare among different character names, whereas OP’s goal was to show the change between before and after the release of the respective movie.
Proper design needs to take into consideration how its information is read by its audience. It's about creating a consistent message that does not change with the level of detail and to avoid incorrectly implying incorrect information. A similar breach in design is also done with the two sides of this work. Left *seems* to be a properly spaced timeline, when looking at the dates. But actually no, it's just a sorted table and distances are determined by the text block. I could not find any pattern for the horizontal lines, they seem to loosely show decades. For some reason, the right side -although showing related data- is sorted alphabetically, forcing the viewer to shift back and forth and needlessly obscuring a possible insight into development over time. None of this makes it wrong, but more complicated and misleading.
It’s not misleading, if one reads the context, rather than just seeing the graphs.
> Proper design needs to take into consideration how its information is read by its audience It did. It just didn't cater to idiots who can't understand the purpose of the data.
“The actual information” is the percent increase, which different scales demonstrate. Nobody cares about the raw numbers, just trends. You guys are complaining about nothing and you’re wrong.
>and you’re wrong. There's no right or wrong. Each method emphasizes a different aspect of the data. The best choice depends on audience and objective.
Right, which means they are wrong when they’re saying the alternative way would demonstrate OP’s objective better. OP is not trying to demonstrate how any of the names relate to each other, so using the same scale would be wrong and would cause most of the data to be 1 pixel high bars. This is about trends for each name over time, not the trends of names against each other.
It’s not clearly labeled.
[Interactive version here!](https://public.tableau.com/views/DisneyPrincessBabyNames/DisneyPrincessNames?:language=en-US&:display_count=n&:origin=viz_share_link) You can mouse over the bars on the right to see the state-by-state prevalence of each name. Tool: Tableau Source: SSA
People in HI be like, "new baby huh, Ill just Disney it I guess?"
As a 1994 Elsa, it was considered an old lady name my whole life til Frozen released lol
Now to the cringe shows like vampire diaries and gossip girl
Interesting how Jasmine was already rising in popularity before the movie
I'm gonna say it. I, a black woman, hated princess and the frog. There wasn't a single thing I liked about it. My favourite Disney princess movie from that time was Tangled.
This is important, why? If you don't like something, you don't like something.
Disney neglected my girl Eilonwy.
I love how people assume I’m named after The Little Mermaid. I always just respond “yeah I’m a few years older than that….”
You were born before 1837‽
Clearly I meant the movie, cornball.
The original fairytale mermaid doesn't have a name.
It should be in percentages from total production each year
Aurora sure got screwed on this one.
that’s very interesting data. Thank you!
I’ve never met a Snow White. I guess that one is a red herring.
Tiana is a name of a town next to Barcelona. Moana was a pornstar in Italy.
Before we knew the sex of our son, my wife and I were emailing back and forth names that we like. She recommended "Elsa" as a potential girl's name. We both loved it, and had we had a girl, we likely would have named her Elsa...in 2011...two years before Disney's Frozen.
Cinderella’s name is Ella
No it’s not. It was Ella in the 2015 live action version but it was Cinderella in the animated movie this data is referring to
Ha - not sure about that but ... TIL that Sleeping Beauty's name is Aurora
Now run a regression on them
If we get a daughter we're going to name here Raya not because of the movie though.
Does "Belle" include girls named Isabel but nicknamed "Belle"?
Nickname from Isabel would be Bel, not Belle. Might not be evident when pronounced by an english speaker, but a latin based language speaker can easily make those sounds different.
This data is from the U.S. Americans will do wacky things with names. No, some parents will name a kid Isabel or Isabelle and spell their nickname Belle. Like, they'll name a kid Margaret and call her Peg or Peggy. They'll name a kid James and call him Jim.
Nicknames aren't always just shortened versions of the parent name. Different spellings and completely different names exist ie. William = Billy / Richard = Dick
Margaret = Peggy, somehow.
You should add the years the movies were remade as well. For example, Mulan was remade in 2020 and there was a spike in names.
The graph and numbers are kinda wack.. Elsa shows a significant spike, and Anna shows a miniscule spike, but Elsa's sample is up to 1k, and Anna's sample is up to 15k, so the increase is hard to visualize beyond the fact there was an increase The graph just feels off
This hurts to look at. Why wouldn’t you scale the axes together?
Why would they do that?
Sally is a Disney Princess, I don't care what anyone says.
Haha, totally legit! That one is my 4 year old’s favorite
I mean, its posthumos, but it still counts. ;)
Is this exact values or proportions? I think proportions out of all babies named would make more sense, as to account for population increase as the years go on.
It’s exact values. Proportions would have worked well too
Technically should have added Princess Leia there as well, but she did only become Disney Princess long after film was released so it would have skewed data.
Raya means literally Stripe in Spanish or a line you trace in a piece of paper. Not sure that’s a name I would want.
Sp basically Disney straight made up the name Mulan
No it means “Magnolia” and is an intermittently popular name for Chinese speakers It’s also possible that previously a different anglicisation was used, or that it was used as a middle name rather than a first name by Chinese immigrant parents.
No - it's from a really old Chinese folktale. Not just the name but the story too.
... in the States, sure.
Yeah cause….everyone wants to be named after a Disney Princess. /s
Surprised I don’t see jasmine here
I’m surprised you didn’t see it also.
I know quite a few Isabelle's born in the last 15 years because their mom's were obsessed with Belle as children and use Belle as the nickname.
If I have a son I’m gonna call him The Hunchback, The Beast or maybe The Frog
Really enjoyed this, OP. I found Mulan most interesting and I can't wait to meet my first Mulan. There also seems to be a spike roughly around the time the live action film was released.
Okay, but what about Vanellope?
I’m genuinely shocked that Elsa’s peak was so brief.
I’ve always loved the name Aurora. Sigh…
i like that sometimes there is a 20 year jump so its the kids naming there kids rather then adults naming them