Animating Women

Watching Song of the Sea on Tuesday really seemed to spark an interesting conversation. We were mainly talking about the Bechdel test and films having strong female characters, but that got me thinking of something else. The animation of female characters in films is typically unvaried. This isn't with every animation studio, but many animate women with a narrow nose, big eyes, and small chin. Whereas animated men actually look different from one another. Pixar and Disney Studios in general does this A LOT, rarely varying women's appearances. This is an interesting thing to consider when animating characters, because it seems like something that wouldn't be huge problem--considering that real women have different face shapes. But, men do as well and there's much more variety in the animation of mens' faces.
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Comments

  1. Rose PinnisiDecember 18, 2018 at 4:53 PM

    Yeah... this has always bothered me. It's much less interesting from a character design perspective. It's not even like there's not more than one pretty face, even though I don't think people should always be pretty.

    ReplyDelete
  2. UnknownDecember 18, 2018 at 6:45 PM

    Such an interesting point! I never really thought about the variation discrepancy you described but it seems so obvious once you say it out loud.

    ReplyDelete
  3. UnknownDecember 19, 2018 at 11:54 AM

    Wow, I have never thought about this. It's like they purposefully do this to make the women look more feminine and "cuter" almost. The guys look rather hideous and a bit odd. I've never even seen this until you brought it to our attention!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Em ZarabetDecember 19, 2018 at 2:29 PM

    This is crazy!! This is definitely something I never noticed, until you pointed it out, but now I can't unsee it. I don't understand why animators and studios would so much effort into diversifying the male characters, but then get so lazy with designing the women? Like yeah, the dumb beauty standards or whatever, but like it even comes down the children they draw and the Inside Out not even human fairy character thingies? Yikes.

    ReplyDelete

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