Friday, March 20, 2015

Do All Disney Female Characters Have the Same Face?


These are the jawlines and noses of the most recent 16 male (green) and 16 females (red( Disney leading characters. Notice anything different? Well, not in the women's outlines. In fact, the women's outlines just look like one face turned at different angles. However, no two male faces have the same nose OR jawline. That's a little suspicious to me, considering the women are of different ethnicities, different movies, different lifestyles, etc. and so should look different. What really gets me is what the head animator, Lino DiSalvo, said was the reason for this:

"Historically speaking, animating female characters are really, really difficult, ’cause they have to go through these range of emotions, but they’re very, very — you have to keep them pretty and they’re very sensitive to — you can get them off a model very quickly. So, having a film with two hero female characters was really tough, and having them both in the scene and look very different if they’re echoing the same expression; that Elsa looking angry looks different from Anna being angry."

So male characters don't express emotions enough to make it difficult to animate them? More importantly, the female characters aren't worthy of having their own face to express their emotions with? That's absolutely ridiculous. There is no possible way that animating female faces through emotions could be so difficult that they don't deserve to have individualized faces. If the animators are willing to spend however long it took to animate Elsa's hair, they sure as anything could differentiate her features from that of Merida or Rapunzel. It's fine if she looks like her sister, that logically makes sense, but there isn't just one female face and its important that that is represented. I think one of the more legitimate reasons that they don't animate females like they do males is because the men often are more comical characters. Their features can be more exaggerated or clown-like however, women cannot be anything but the same "beautiful" that Disney established fifty years ago. Sure, features like large eyes, rosy cheeks, and small mouths are genetically recognized by humans as cute (they're features we innately expect to see in babies and so we respond positively to them, it's a whole thing about making people not commit infanticide -- same thing with puppies being cute) but women who have all sorts of face-shapes and facial features deserve to have their faces animated.

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