Just when you thought the Disney Princess culture had reached
the 21st century — today's movies aren't about being rescued by princess,
hoorah! — a subtler form of animated sexism has come to light.
Bugged by
something she noticed in the posters for Inside Out, Tumblr blogger Alex
decided to take a close look at all the female and male characters of the
Disney/Pixar movies to date. She found out that all the girls and women have
almost exactly the same round face and ridiculously tiny nose. There's a lot of
diversity among the men and boys, however.
Her assessment is priceless: "Apparently every Disney
woman is a clone/direct descendant of some primordial creature with huge round
cheeks and a disturbingly small nose, because there is no other explanation
(yes there is (it’s lazy sexism)) for the incredible lack of diversity among
these female faces."
So, yeah, Anna, Elsa, Rapunzel, and Merida are doing it for themselves,
but they've still got to be uniformly pretty like little babies. A.V. Club makes
another point about these movies: Animators make the peripheral characters the
most diverse (and funny-looking), but most Pixar films, even the female-driven
ones, have mostly male supporting characters.
This isn't cool. Sure, animated characters aren't supposed
to look exactly like real human beings. Still, there are girls out there — young and old — who
would probably love to see some female characters with big noses, narrow faces,
square jaws, wide noses, pointy chins, broad cheekbones, high cheekbones, small
eyes, and every other form of beauty there is.