some female characters who only get to appear/be relevant in the story bc they're a male sidekick's love interest:
miss bunny -> thumper (bambi movie);
babette -> lumiere (beauty & the beast);
syrinx -> phil (hercules the series);
eden -> genie (aladdin: the animated series);
thundra -> iago (aladdin: the animated series);
ms. birdwell -> kronk (kronk's new groove);
i DID stumble upon some examples of female sidekicks while verifying my claim, at varying levels of qualification for the type that's being discussed:
terk (tarzan) apparently this is mentioned in film? i don't remember anything about that movie tho. idk maybe she was really funny and slapsticky
djali, esmeralda's goat (hunchback of notre dame); she has funny moments but that's not a speaking role (tho she was VERY cute and had cute plushies and other merch, if that's the bigger metric)
tinkerbell (peter pan) also not a speaking role (and i keep mentioning this bc whether or not characters speak in an unsilent film is just as meaningful and significant to OP's point as their existence. that 2/5 of the few examples i DID find never talked is Not Great)
and the WINNERS of the contest i was apparently holding:
flora, fauna, & merryweather (sleeping beauty)
aha! okay, finally. i've found a film with not one but THREE (3) female sidekicks who: have speaking roles; are cute; are funny; do shenanigans.
however, i wouldn't count them as "three women" so much as "one film" bc, while they have three different personalities & sets of preferences, they function as one character — always found in generally the same place, share the same ultimate goal, have the same character arc. which is fine, i wouldn't call grouping sidekicks like this "unique"* in a way that suggests yet another expression of misogynist bias. in fact, grouping is necessary in a lot of writing if you want the story to stay tight, but i wouldn't give the writers "wrote funny women sidekick" credit for more than one character either.
*off the top of my head — despite all their cutesy personalities, another example is the seven dwarves (snow white), who also hardly count as more than one character. and no surprise — in the original story, as the grimms recorded it, they're not distinct from one another at all. they are one group, one character
went to check — and in the sleeping beauty tale there's also just the one fairy out of seven who remains invested in the princess's life who would be the direct equivalent to the three fairies in disney
seems disney just likes to populate the screen by breaking up individuals into additional characters, and groups into individuals with names. my best guess is that this is to make things more visually interesting (esp w/ the color-coding they add to the resulting individuals).
it occurs to me that this practice, a seemingly simple innovation in adapting a story to the then-unexplored medium of moving pictures, could even have been a key element in the longevity and influence of disney's adaptations. finding a way to take up more space with color, personality, and motion could have kept audiences in thrall, while the output of other studios fell out of public consciousness. …yeah, none of this has anything to do with the original post at this point, i just wanted to argue that while it was exciting to suddenly stumble upon THREE female sidekicks in one film, a little extra thinking made their number feel less "impressive" and more "inadvertent"
and now, completely tangential bc she happened to pop up in my head while trying to think of examples:
bagheera is… okay, wow, so i didn't know he was male in the OG Kipling version; i... lol, i definitely thought that was a disney invention. TIL. i grew up on the soviet mowgli animations. …so bagheera is female there if anyone would prefer that to the english versions lol
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