A blog for social analysis of animated media. Because you might not know it, but nothing is ever "just a cartoon." Operated by turbomun. WARNING: Everything here contains spoilers.
To keep your mind of the princesses, what's your opinion on Yesss, if you don't mind me asking?
I don’t mind you asking at all, but unfortunately we’ve seen very little of her, and my understanding is that her design is going to be in constant flux. I’m not going to pass judgement on her until the movie comes out.
So now that the new WIR2 trailer is out and there's more views of the Princesses, what to do you think about their new designs?
It’s been a couple days and I’m already sick to death of talking about the WIR2 princesses. Let’s just get this over with. Below the cut are my comprehensive thoughts and I’m not going to talk about it any more after this, if I can help it.
The 3D princess designs in Wreck-It Ralph 2 have already kicked off a fandom war between hardcore Disney/Disney Princess stans, who will love anything that has their favorite characters in it, and people like me who are more critical Disney fans and thus have a reputation as “princess haters.” Now, as I hope I’ve shown in the past, I actually like most of the Disney Princesses as individual characters, and it’s only the concept and brand that I have an issue with, but that doesn’t matter; I’m still going to be accused of being a princess hater and thus always needing something to complain about.
So for the first time ever, let me offer you as close to an unbiased opinion as I can get: that of my mom, who likes Disney a lot, but is fairly representative of the general public in this matter. My mom has treated all of my critical comments as “overthinking it” and has absolutely no desire in analyzing the media she consumes. When I showed her the new Disney Princess designs, her literal, unabridged reaction was: “Eww, don’t like that.”
All of the pre-Rapunzel Disney Princesses have been given a large dose of Keaneface. While small variations keep them from being a complete army of Anna/Elsa/Rapunzel clones (Snow White has different lips, Aurora has a slightly narrower chin, etc.), they’re all ridiculously infantilized and look like a bunch of pre-teens. The main issue is the size of the eyes; some enterprising soul has already compared Merida’s original design to her WIR2 one, and everybody else also has eyes that, like the Grinch’s heart, grew three sizes that day. Except that they had pretty large eyes to begin with so now most of them look like aliens.
To be fair, I think that most of the princesses of color made the transition to 3D more gracefully and look more like themselves, with the exception of Pocahontas, as I mentioned on my personal blog. Again, the issue there is eye size, as well as head-to-body-ratio. Pocahontas had smaller eyes and a smaller head than the vast majority of the princesses, and now that those traits have been taken away from her, her design has really suffered for it.
Already, the cries of “it’s a STYLISTIC CHOICE!!!!!!!” have been ringing out. (In fact, I saw someone comment that the look is supposed to be based on the Pocket Princesses comic, which...isn’t that a fan comic? Why would an official Disney product be based on that?) That excuse doesn’t ring completely true for me because Disney has been making a BIG FUCKING DEAL about having their princesses represented in a CGI film. I mean, remember last year’s D23, when we got our first look at Wreck-It Ralph 2? Remember how the princesses completely hijacked the presentation and the mere fact of their existence in the movie was portrayed as being way more important than the movie itself? If anything, I think that what we’re seeing is an attempt to “update” the older* designs. It just so happens that “update” for Disney currently means making their female characters look like children except with boobs, which is creepy for all sorts of reasons that I’ve already covered.
To be fair again, the small preview of the scene that we got in the trailer was pretty funny. I liked stuff like Cinderella turning her glass slipper into a shank, and Vanellope being like, “Are you guys okay?! Should I call the police?!” And it looks like the animation on the princesses might drag the designs through, which has been the case for every Keaneface’d Disney movie so far except Frozen. But the designs are still going to bother me.
*I’m using “older” to mean “pre-Rapunzel”, since she was the princess who really made Keaneface more ubiquitous than ever. Yes, I know that Brave (2012) came out after Tangled (2010) but since Merida didn’t have Keanface, she had to get dosed with it too.
what do you think about the new WIR clip with regard to sameface? i notice they gave the older princesses the big doe eyes that the newer ones have, and pocahontas looks kind of strange.
I’m going to hold off on passing judgement right now because there was only one image released, which had many of the princesses at odd angles or in the background. When I see the full scene, feel free to ask again.
Hi! I'm a long time follower and love your reviews on animation and essays, I hope I'm not bothering you with this question. If character design aims at making a character's personality visually immediately readable, how are we to escape topics such as round=soft, sharp features=bad, pretty=good? Thank you in advance!
First of all, I wouldn’t say that the entire point of a character design is making a character’s personality immediately visually apparent. Character design is meant to support the story and the character’s role in the story, but yes, that often involves visual elements of personality.
What is with the trope of strong girl characters (like teens and kids) growing up to be docile domestic housewives with no character substance/depth/personality whatsoever completely going against like everything they stood for and identified with when they were younger as if thats just what happens to women when they’re adults
Someone who has revolved their life around a set of hard morals and defining traits and characteristics from basically childhood to young adult hood isn’t just going to completely flip around because they got married or turned 30. this only ever happens to the girl characters. marriage might as well be the the equivalent of killing off a girl character because the second they’re married their personality disappears and they’re shoved off as a background character when they used to be a pivotal character in the series
It’s big in shounen anime/manga. The Dragonball series is by far the most egregious offender (Bulma, Videl, Chi-Chi, Android 18, etc) , but the domestication thing shows up in other things like Boruto too.
Hey there, budding cartoonist here. I notice a lot of the ducks have sameface syndrome well like with Scrooge and Donald but the creators managed to get rid of it by changing the eye shapes and making them different sizes what do you think of this? And how do I avoid sameface syndrome on my characters? (not ducks)
I don’t necessarily consider the Disney ducks to have Sameface Syndrome, because of how I define that term: “When various female characters all have their faces designed according to the exact same formula, in a way that detracts from the story and is clearly done only to make them ‘beautiful.’ Does not apply to stylistic choices, and does not mean that the characters literally all have the exact same face.” The ducks are a stylistic choice, and while you could make an argument that it detracts from the character design if you really wanted to, there’s nothing misogynistic about it.
As for how to avoid Sameface Syndrome, I made an entire post about that here!
I love your new review on Frozen! I enjoyed your writing and learned a lot!, thank you! I know that you are a person behind a tumblr account and must have a life, but I would like to encourage nevertheless to produce this kind of texts. Also, congratulations for your soon-to-be graduation!
I actually graduated a month ago, but thank you anyway -- and I’m really glad that you enjoyed my article!
At long last, here’s the article I wrote for school this past semester! It’s mainly about Anna and was written for a different audience besides Tumblr, so it covers some things I’ve already talked about, but there’s new info too!
“Hey, what happened to those articles you were going to write for class?”
What happened is that the reality of the class intervened.
Basically, my teacher is more interested in us writing a single article for the class and then heavily revising it, so that’s what I’ve been doing. He says that he likes my writing, but that I tend to be too long-winded and too focused on details for the style that he’s looking for (mass market articles are a lot different from blog articles). So because of how much editing I’ve had to do, I only wrote the Frozen article.
And even then, he didn’t want me to write about the whole movie once he saw how much I had to say about it; he basically told me to go write a book if I wanted to be as long as I’d originally intended. So the article is only about Anna. To be fair, her lack of agency is one of the movie’s biggest problems.
Hence that post I made yesterday, and I will still post the finished article, I promise!
After discussing all of your suggestions with my professor, I will be writing four articles for this academic series, all focused on feminist criticism of animated films but covering a variety of subtopic. These will go from a sliding scale of negative to positive:
Article number one will be about Frozen, a generally overrated film. While I’ve obviously talked about Frozen way too much in the past, my professor isn’t exactly familiar with my seething hatred of it...and it will admittedly be interesting to go back and make a general critical article of it now that the hype has died down a bit.
Article number two will be about framing and how subversive messages undermine themselves, featuring Shrek and Megamind.
Article number three will talk about how once-positive messages can become degraded as culture changed, and will compare Mulan to Moana.
And article number four will be about Monsters vs. Aliens, a generally underrated film.
hey, it's just a little thing but i thought you'd probably want to know (otherwise i'd be too nervous to send a message tbh haha), but in your review of jessica rabbit, referring to her genitals as "lady parts" could be seen as cissexist. i'm enjoying reading through your reviews, and looking forward to future ones!
Ack, you’re right, that was not a good euphemism to use. Thanks for letting me know!
Answering your last post: what about Studio Ghibli films? It's Eastern but they're always labelled as feministists and, as much as I love them, I find a bit problematic that many of the girl protagonists share a dull, quiet, shy, traditional feminine character. I know it's old but Nausicaä's costume seems too sexualizing.
I’ll definitely consider looking into some Ghibli films; it might be nice to do at least one.
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