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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsAnalysis shows recent Disney movies have actually DECREASED number of lines for female characters
We don't believe that little girls naturally play a certain way or speak a certain way, says Fought, a professor of linguistics at Pitzer College. Theyre not born liking a pink dress. At some point we teach them. So a big question is where girls get their ideas about being girls.
The Disney princess research is still in its preliminary stages, but a few weeks ago, Fought and Eisenhauer gave a preview during the nations largest conference of linguists. Their goal is to use data to shed light on how the male and female characters in these films talk differently. They started by counting how often the characters spoke. Thats when they hit upon a surprising irony.
In the classic three Disney princess films, women speak as much as, or more than the men. Snow White is about 50-50. Cinderella is 60-40. And in Sleeping Beauty, women deliver a whopping 71 percent of the dialogue. Though these were films created over 50 years ago, they give ample opportunity for women to have their voices heard.
By contrast, all of the princess movies from 1989-1999 Disneys Renaissance era are startlingly male-dominated. Men speak 68 percent of the time in The Little Mermaid; 71 percent of the time in Beauty and the Beast; 90 percent of the time in Aladdin; 76 percent of the time in Pocahontas; and 77 percent of the time in Mulan (Mulan herself was counted as a woman, even when she was impersonating a man).
There's one isolated princess trying to get someone to marry her, but there are no women doing any other things, Fought says. There are no women leading the townspeople to go against the Beast, no women bonding in the tavern together singing drinking songs, women giving each other directions, or women inventing things. Everybody whos doing anything else, other than finding a husband in the movie, pretty much, is a male.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/01/25/researchers-have-discovered-a-major-problem-with-the-little-mermaid-and-other-disney-movies/
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elias49
(4,259 posts)Are we going to judge the moral and ethical balance of the country based on Disney movies?
Lest I be charged with 'sexism', I'm just saying...
treestar
(82,383 posts)especially the girls.
Then there are the dolls, coloring books, games, etc.
I have little girls in my family taken over by "Frozen." I would have expected from what I know of it that it is about girls, so the above facts are pretty surprising. Little girls love it. The heroine is a girl. Yet it seems there are more men in the cast and men have more lines!
yardwork
(61,608 posts)You're free to erect a straw man and then dramatically tear it down.
elias49
(4,259 posts)Sexism..wtf, it's everywhere.
hifiguy
(33,688 posts)show your kids (and yourself) Hayao Miyazaki's brilliant animated films. He always uses strong female characters as leads, and they take care of themselves. Not only that, visually speaking, Miyazaki's movies are to Disney what a character-filled old European or Japanese street is to the Las Vegas strip. He's simply the best there ever has been.
And I don't care what age you are, you become a wonderstruck 10-year-old again watching any Miyazaki film.
1939
(1,683 posts)Aladdin had a had a male protagonist who had to fight against overwhelming odds. If you had written the princess out of the film completely, it would still have been a really good movie.
Much of the "male" characters and dialog in "The Little Mermaid" (my wife's favorite Disney flic) was by the crab, the flounder, and the bird, who, while ostensibly male, were just Ariel's entourage.
Mulan went to pretend to be a male soldier in an all male army. Unless her lines were to be a soliloquy, most of the voices would be male.
Get a life!!!