Scan barcode
A review by octavia_cade
Good Girls and Wicked Witches: Changing Representations of Women in Disney's Feature Animation, 1937-2001 by Amy M. Davis
challenging
informative
slow-paced
3.0
This study apparently developed from Davis' PhD thesis, and it shows. I did find it interesting, especially once it got onto the actual topic of women in Disney's animated films, but it took a while to get there. Barring appendices, the text is around 220 pages, and the first 90 odd pages were contextual material on the history of animation in general, or the inner workings of the Disney studio - ongoing problems with distributors and so forth. All of which is, I'm sure, very useful, but it's not always entirely relevant. Once it's all done away with, there are only three chapters that cover what the title says the book covers. In fairness, Davis' argument appears solid: women in the early animations, such as Snow White, were either largely passive (if good) or actively evil, but that as women's role in society changed, so did the representation of them in Disney films. I mean, it's not a rocket science argument, but it's solid - although, if the role of women in film is linked to history in this way, a much more in-depth study, pertaining to science fiction rather than animation, can be see in Dean Conrad's Space Sirens, Scientists, and Princesses: The Portrayal of Women in Science Fiction Cinema.
One big gap here, I think - and a surprising gap, given Davis' focus on contextualising the given narratives within the cultural and business practices of the day - is that there's no attention given to Disney's adaptation of source material. I'm not even talking about fairy tales here, continually altering as they are, but films like The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Pocahontas are so far removed from the source material (a famous novel and, more problematically, actual history) that I would have thought these deliberate changes in the way the women at the centre of these stories were represented merited discussion. Apparently not.
In summary, then, it's a fairly decent study, but a bit unfocused, and ruthlessly limited.
One big gap here, I think - and a surprising gap, given Davis' focus on contextualising the given narratives within the cultural and business practices of the day - is that there's no attention given to Disney's adaptation of source material. I'm not even talking about fairy tales here, continually altering as they are, but films like The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Pocahontas are so far removed from the source material (a famous novel and, more problematically, actual history) that I would have thought these deliberate changes in the way the women at the centre of these stories were represented merited discussion. Apparently not.
In summary, then, it's a fairly decent study, but a bit unfocused, and ruthlessly limited.