The Females in Frozen May as Well be Aliens

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2013

While it’s undeniable that Disney is the tits at animating the shit out of some talking lions, the company has faced criticism for its seeming inability to properly animate believable looking women. This was particularly noticeable in Frozen where the female characters were so odd looking they could be classified as a different species. 

To illustrate what we mean, take a look at this random screenshot of the character Anna shooting the breeze with some douchebag …

shooting-the-shit

Now initially it doesn’t look all that odd, mostly because your eyes have been trained not to see anything pictured as weird, so lets break it down a little more and focus just on Anna’s face.

anna

Again nothing looks all that odd at first, until that is you compare it directly with a male face from the same movie then you start to notice that something is a little, off.

anna

It’s the eyes. If you look, you’ll notice that Anna’s eyes are noticeably larger than those of the male character while her nose and mouth are much smaller. This isn’t a new phenomenon and is a tried and true animation technique for making faces look “cute” by giving them features normally associated with baby animals like giant eyes and a button nose.

eyes

The problem is, Disney only does this with female characters while similarly exaggerating the stereotypical traits of males (wide shoulders, muscular arms ect). This has led to more recent Disney films featuring male and female characters so physiologically different they could technically be classed as different species. For example, in Brave one character’s hands are larger than his wife’s shoulders, begging the question, like, how do they fuck?

how

This in of itself isn’t a major issue, we expect fiction to take certain creative liberties with the human form when it’s done well, exaggerating certain features can tell us a lot about a character. For example we know just by looking at him that Mr Incredible could bench a fucking truck and that he’s probably killed mountain lions with his shoulders.

lantern-jawed

It can become a problem though when every female looks like a weird, oddly alluring caricature in a film that’s explicitly draws males as pretty regular looking dudes. Again, going back to that picture from Frozen …

You know, this one.
You know, this one.

The male character is for all intents and purposes, drawn fairly realistically with believable, if not idealised physical dimensions and looks, Anna on the other hand, isn’t. There’s a lot we could unpack, but we may as well drop the bomb straight away and lead with the fact her eyes are bigger than her fucking wrist!

eyes-wrist That’s, that’s just not how humans work and it’s now so ingrained in pop-culture that 90% of people watching the movie won’t even notice it, let alone think it’s a big deal even though the characters are so different they could be considered different species. While there’s a lot to be said about what this fact says about gender representation in movies, we think it’s way more hilarious that if you think about it, virtually every Disney movie ever made has been about men trying to get their fuck on with a bunch of doe-eyed space aliens.