Animating female characters is “really, really difficult” because
you have to “keep them pretty” while they go through “a range
of emotions”?
Oh, come on.
That’s
what the head of animation for Disney’s Frozen said
in an
interview this
week. Not great PR, particularly since Frozen features
two female lead characters who bear a suspicious resemblance to one
of Disney’s other recent princess characters, Rapunzel. The full
quote reads:
“Historically speaking, animating female characters are really, really difficult, ’cause they have to go through these range of emotions, but they’re very, very—you have to keep them pretty and they’re very sensitive to—you can get them off a model very quickly. So, having a film with two hero female characters was really tough.
No wonder people are linking this statement with a GIF comparing Anna and Elsa of Frozen, and the main character in Tangled.
Also,
Disney fans have already noticed a lot of differences between Frozen
and its fairytale inspiration, Hans Christian Andersen's Snow
Queen.
The question is: Is the apparent “difficulty” of animating female
characters to blame?
“Is
this why almost all
the female characters from
the Snow Queen were cut
out of the story?”
wonders Tumblr user a-spooky-scary-skeleton.
“They were too hard to animate because of their emotions?”
On
its own, a minor gaffe from a Disney animator should not be a big
deal. But in the context of an ongoing debate about Disney’s
representation of female characters and people of color, it doesn’t
look great. The Disney Princess franchise is so closely linked with
old-fashioned femininity that Brave’s
Merida was given agirlie
makeover before
she could “join” the rest of the princesses.
Meanwhile, Frozen has
already come under fire for being Disney’s third major animated
movie in a row to feature an all-white cast, following Tangled in
2010 and Brave in
2012. Disgruntled fans have been drawing
their own multi-ethnic interpretations of Frozen characters
ever since the first character designs were revealed earlier this
year.
If
Disney had a good reputation for including a diverse range of
characters in their animated movies, this interview quote wouldn’t
have made much of an impact. As it is, soundbites like this just
confirm people’s suspicions, with the original quote gaining tens
of thousands of
notes on Tumblr, and inspiring criticism from people like author and
illustrator Faith Erin Hicks:
The
similar appearance of the lead characters in Frozen and
and Tangled only
highlights the lack of racial diversity in Disney animation. Although
movies like Pocahontas and Mulan were
successful, some
fans say
that the current run of all-white animated movies makes it seem like
Disney fulfilled a quota for various ethnicities, and then went back
to making movies about blonde, Western European fairytale princesses.
Including Anna and Elsa of Frozen,
nine of the thirteen Disney princesses are white. As Tumblr
userraptorific explains:
In the eyes of Disney, there’s a Princess for Black little girls to look up to, a Princess for Native little girls to look up to, a Princess for Arab little girls to look up to, a Princess for Asian little girls to look up to, and nine princesses for all little girls to look up to. It’s no coincidence that in almost all promotional art featuring the “Princess Lineup,” Jasmine, Tiana, Mulan, and Pocahontas are all standing in the back, usually obscured by other white Princesses’ dresses, while the blonde lady brigade stands in the front.
So continues a seemingly endless cycle of arguments among Disney fans on Tumblr and other social media sites. Is it authentic for Western European fairytales to focus entirely on white characters? And if so, does historical authenticity even matter when you’re marketing the movie to a diverse, 21st-century audience of kids who live in a multiracial environment? Particularly if the movie includes decidedly un-historical details like talking animals or magic.
According
to Racebending,
an online community that promotes racial diversity in popular
media, Frozen is
just one of many movies that erases people of color—not only from
mainstream entertainment, but from history itself. The most popular
argument against including nonwhite characters usually goes something
like this post by Tumblr user annatheprincess:
do
people realize if they included [POC] in frozen, they would most
likely have to be slaves... it’s the same issue with brave, it’s
not historically accurate sorry
But
as Tumblr blogs like Racebending and medievalpoc point
out, there’s no factual basis for excluding people of color from
historical narratives. In the case of Frozen’s
Scandinavian setting, the Sami people were already indigenous to
Sweden, Norway, Russia and Finland. To make matters worse,
Racebendingrecently
revealed that Frozen will
feature aspects of Sami music along with Sami-inspired costumes, but
with no acknowledgement of the original culture.
Frozen won’t
be out for another month, and to be brutally honest, the criticism of
a few thousand adult Disney fans is unlikely to make much of a dent
in the movie’s with its target audience of young kids. However, the
viral spread of a reasonably banal interview with a Disney animator
should tell us something. Media representation is a touchy subject,
and right now, Disney isn’t handling it at all well.
(Source: dailydot.com)
No hay comentarios.:
Publicar un comentario