When new images emerged of the Polynesian girl at the center of Moana over the summer, many took instant notice of the heroine’s solid-looking, realistic body. “That was a deliberate attempt, partly inspired by wanting her to be different,” co-director John Musker told BuzzFeed in July. “We wanted her to be an action hero.”

Although Musker saw Moana’s muscular body as a mark of her difference, some Disney fans might have heard something familiar in his declaration. “I wanted a real girl,” Brave’s writer-director Brenda Chapman told the New York Times in 2012 of the arrow-slinging Merida. “Not one that very few could live up to with tiny, skinny arms, waist, and legs. I wanted an athletic girl.” Brave, she said, upended fairy-tale tropes.

Fourteen years earlier, Ming-Na Wen, the voice of Mulan, told USA Today that her character was “the antithesis of Cinderella. She doesn’t wear a gown. She wears armor.”

Asserting that a Disney heroine has broken ranks with her predecessors is a tradition that dates back to 1989 with Ariel, the defiant princess in The Little Mermaid. In 1990, Ron Clements — Musker’s co-director on both Moana and The Little Mermaid, along with other Disney movies — told the Scripps Howard News Service that Ariel’s red hair shocked some people. “But we felt it was important,” he explained. “It made her different.” Saying this princess is not like the ones who came before her has become almost as essential to the Disney princess formula as an animal sidekick or a parent who just doesn’t understand.