Good girls and wicked witches : women in Disney's feature animation

"Good Girls and Wicked Witches: Women in Disney's Feature Animation" by Amy Davis looks at how human female characters have been represented during the first 60 years of feature-length animation at Disney.

Tallying up which films have had human females in leading roles and analysing how such issues as activity/passivity have been handled, this book re-examines the notion that Disney heroines are rewarded for passivity, and contextualises these films within the larger Hollywood landscape in which they were produced.

The subject of women and how they were regarded over the course of the twentieth century is not by any means a new subject.

Writers, feminists, anti-feminists, politicians, political commentators, psychologists, journalists, celebrities, housewives, students, historians, and many others have written on this subject in varying degrees of depth and seriousness. But in the last century, as a mainly print-based culture gave way to one which is image- and media-based, it was the way these physical/cultural/social expectations were tied together with and within the medium of film, and disseminated in the person of the 'actress' (be she a live woman or a drawing), which became important.

It is with the images of women in popular culture - in magazines, on television, on billboards, in calendars, in newsreels, and in films (the medium with which this book is concerned), to name just a few examples, that all of the aspects of American society's changing attitudes towards women were mapped.

This book analyses the construction of (mainly human) female characters in the animated films of the Walt Disney Studio between 1937 and 1999.

It is based on the assumption that, in their representations of femininity, Disney films both reflected and helped shape the attitudes of the wider society, both at the time of their first release and subsequently.

It attempts to establish the extent to which these characterisations were shaped by wider popular stereotypes. Moreover, because of the nature of the animated film - because it is a unique combination of printed popular culture (as in drawings done for newspapers, books, and magazines) and the twentieth century's later emphasis on more life-like visual media (such as film, television, and various other forms of photography), it is argued here that it is within the most constructed of all moving images of the female form - the heroine of the animated film - that the most telling aspects of Woman as the subject of Hollywood iconography and ideas of American womanhood are to be found.

Furthermore, because within American animation it is the work of the Disney Studio which has reigned - and continues to reign - supreme within its field, and because most of the major animated films created in Hollywood have been produced by Walt Disney's studio, it is upon these films that the book concentrates.