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The Disney Bump: What a Movie Actually Does to a Baby Name

Disney princesses really do move the baby name charts — but the effect is sharper, shorter, and pickier than you'd think. Here's what the SSA data shows, movie by movie.

Every time Disney releases a new princess, the internet declares that a wave of babies is about to be named after her. Sometimes that’s true. Usually it’s true for about eighteen months. And occasionally the name everyone expects to explode barely moves at all.

We lined up seven Disney heroines against the official Social Security Administration data, matched each one to her movie’s release, and watched what happened to her name in the years right after. The pattern is remarkably consistent — and more interesting than “Disney makes names popular.”

The textbook case: Ariel

If you want to see the Disney effect in its purest form, look at Ariel. The Little Mermaid came out in November 1989. That year, Ariel ranked #209. One year later it jumped to #94, and in 1991 it peaked at #66 — 5,411 baby girls, more than four times its pre-movie number. Then, just as fast, it faded: #87 by 1992, #121 by 1993. Today it sits at #355. A clean spike, a short reign, a long slow drift back down. That shape shows up again and again.

The one everyone expected — and what really happened

When Frozen hit theaters in November 2013, everyone braced for a tidal wave of Elsas. Elsa did rise: from #528 in 2013 to #286 in 2014, roughly doubling to 1,140 babies. But that was the whole story — it slipped back to #486 the very next year and kept falling. The “Frozen wave” was real, but it was one year tall.

The more telling detail is her sister. Anna was already a top-40 name before Frozen — #35 in 2013 — and after the biggest animated movie of the decade, she landed at #34 in 2014. Essentially flat. Which points to the rule underneath all of this: a Disney movie mostly moves names that weren’t already popular. Anna had nowhere new to go.

The bump is real, but modest — over and over

• Tiana — The Princess and the Frog (December 2009) took her from #597 in 2009 to #331 in 2010, close to doubling.
• Moana — Barely existed before the 2016 film (18 babies in 2015), then climbed to a peak of 141 babies in 2017 (#1,552) before receding. A big multiplier on a tiny base — and never mainstream.
• Mirabel — Encanto (November 2021) lifted her from 34 babies in 2021 to 153 in 2022 (#1,451), then the usual fade.
• Merida — Brave (2012) produced one of the smallest bumps here: 19 babies in 2012 to 110 in 2013. A cult favorite, not a chart-mover.

And the one that shrugged it off

Jasmine is the exception that proves the rule. Aladdin arrived in November 1992 — but Jasmine was already the #28 name in 1990, riding a wave that had nothing to do with Disney. She peaked at #23 in 1993 with over 12,000 babies, and it’s genuinely hard to separate the movie from the momentum she already had. When a name is already a star, the movie is a footnote.

(Worth a caution here: not every “princess name” on the rise is a Disney story. Aurora has climbed steadily to #15 today, but Sleeping Beauty is from 1959 — that ascent is a modern-revival trend, not a movie bump. Correlation and a castle are not the same thing.)

So should that change your pick?

Only if you want it to. If you love a name and it happens to belong to a princess, the “everyone will think of the movie” worry tends to be overblown — most of these bumps are small and brief, and a beloved name is a wonderful choice regardless of what’s in theaters. Plenty of parents pick a Disney name on purpose, and that’s every bit as valid.

The useful thing the data gives you is just clarity: if you’re choosing an Elsa or a Moana partly because it feels rare, know that a film can move it — usually for a year or two — before it settles back down. Chart the name and you’ll see exactly where it is in that cycle.

Source: U.S. Social Security Administration data, 1880–2025.