This is based upon nothing but my own suppositions about the Disney Studios' generally reductive treatment of gender roles, but one does not need to subscribe to the company's paradigm to observe that historically, they made more as it were 'girl' films than as it were 'boy' films - at the very least, the 'girl' films have a significantly more prominent place in the company's history and box office records (of course, most of the studio's projects were quite gender-neutral, with the acknowledgment that any film made almost solely by men will naturally take on a masculine perspective and I think this only really serves to indicate how ultimately irritating it is to try and view everything in gender-theoretical terms). That the Matter of Britain would make a fine subject for a Disney animation must have been obvious long before the studio actually completed The Sword in the Stone in 1963, and I imagine that it was particularly appealing because, like Peter Pan, it presented a 'masculine' narrative, rather than the more common and distinctly more feminine treatment given to classic Western fairy tales in the 'princess cycle' of films.

I refer to the Arthur mythology of Britain, rooted in a legendary tradition lost to time but almost certainly dating to earlier than 1000 CE though the best-known shape of the myth begins with Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae from 1138, and significant portions of the legendarium were still being added by (mostly French) sources throughout the early medieval period. Following the success of One Hundred and One Dalmatians, Walt Disney Production's most contemporary and 'hippest' film yet (though 'hip' and 'Disney' are correctly thought of as mortal enemies to one another), the studio immediately ran as far as possible to the other direction, making a film rooted in an antiquity that hadn't even been approached by the medieval fairy tale adaptations - in fact, there would be only two Disney features, three and a half decades later, adapted from more ancient source material.

The sword in the stone 1938