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10 Disney Princesses Reimagined As ANIME Characters

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A Pakistani illustrator turned Disney’s princesses into anime heroines, and the internet couldn’t look away.

Long before “reimagined as anime” became a genre unto itself on art platforms, illustrator Maryam Safdar was quietly redrawing Disney’s most recognizable heroines with the exaggerated eyes and delicate linework of Japanese manga. Working under the handle mari945, the Pakistani artist’s series went viral in early 2016 after being picked up by outlets like Bored Panda, and it’s the subject of TheThings Celebrity’s countdown, “10 Disney Princesses Reimagined As ANIME Characters.”

• Illustrator Maryam Safdar, known online as mari945, created the viral series that reimagines Disney heroines in anime style.
• The artwork spread widely across the internet in early 2016, with features on sites including Bored Panda.
• The video’s showcase includes Ariel, Elsa, Anna, Belle, Jasmine, Snow White, Rapunzel, Pocahontas, and Tinkerbell.

The Creative Minds Behind the Series

Safdar has said she grew up on a steady diet of both Disney films and anime, and the series grew out of a simple question: what would it look like if the two aesthetics collided? Rather than treating the crossover as a gimmick, she set out to keep the “magic and innocence” of the Disney originals intact while filtering them through Japanese animation’s visual grammar.

Safdar aimed to combine the magic and innocence of Disney characters with distinct Japanese animation aesthetics.

The Anime Makeover, Explained

Every princess in the series gets the same treatment: eyes enlarged well past Disney-standard proportions, facial structures softened and narrowed, hair rendered with the kind of glossy, multi-tonal shading that’s a manga hallmark, and lighting pushed into pastel territory. Crucially, Safdar didn’t strip away what made each character identifiable — Ariel keeps her red hair and green tail, Elsa keeps her ice-blue palette, Jasmine keeps her signature colors. The transformation is stylistic, not a redesign of who these characters are.

That balancing act is what separated Safdar’s work from the flood of fan-art reimaginings that followed similar trends online. Anyone can slap anime eyes on a familiar face; the harder trick is making the character still read instantly as Ariel or Belle. Fans and outlets covering the series pointed to that recognizability as the reason it traveled so far beyond typical fan-art circles.

The Lineup

The video’s ten-character showcase pulls from across the Disney canon rather than sticking to one era. Ariel represents “The Little Mermaid,” Belle carries “Beauty and the Beast,” and Jasmine brings “Aladdin” into the mix alongside Snow White, one of the studio’s oldest heroines. More modern additions round things out: Elsa and Anna from “Frozen,” Rapunzel from “Tangled,” Pocahontas, and Tinkerbell — a spread that shows Safdar wasn’t just reworking one generation of princesses but drawing a through-line from the 1930s to the 2010s.

Pairing Snow White with Elsa and Anna in the same series makes the anime treatment feel less like a one-off gag and more like a cohesive art project, which is likely part of why it kept getting reshared well after its initial 2016 splash. For a comparison point on how viral internet art trends tend to spread and stick around, it’s worth noting how fast similar side-by-side visual comparisons tend to circulate once people start sharing them.

Reasons for Persistent Public Interest

Fan-driven reimaginings of Western animated characters through other genres — anime, live-action, horror — have become a recurring cycle online, and Safdar’s series is frequently cited as one of the sharper examples because it didn’t sacrifice charm for novelty. The romance and elegance baked into anime character design gave characters like Rapunzel and Belle a slightly older, more wistful presentation without erasing the warmth that made them work as Disney characters in the first place. It’s the kind of crossover content that keeps getting rediscovered on countdown shows and roundup videos long after its original posting date, the same way older viral clips get recirculated years after they first made the rounds.

Safdar’s series never got an official Disney tie-in or a follow-up announcement — it’s stayed exactly what it started as, a fan artist’s passion project that happened to catch fire. Nine princesses deep into the countdown, from Ariel’s mermaid tail to Tinkerbell’s glow, the appeal hasn’t changed since Bored Panda first ran it in 2016: it’s still just really good fan art doing its job.