—
A lot of the criticism I got for this post on Disney dimorphism was about how good animation inevitably exaggerates sex differences. (There are a lot of these comments on the Sociological Images version of the post and on the Slate re-write.) Here’s one example:
Cartoons aren’t meant to accurately portray people, EVER. They are meant to exaggerate features, so that they are more prominent and eye catching. So feminine features are made more feminine, and masculine features are made more masculine. … The less realistic the proportions, the more endearing and charming we find the character. The closer to realistic they are, the creepier/blander they can become.
Flipping through IMDB’s list of the top 500 animated movies reveals that Disney is certainly not alone in emphasizing the larger size of males. But there are a few successful counterexamples as well.
Here are some good ones where the male and female characters are similarly proportioned. Note these are not just random male and female characters but couples (more or less).
From Kiki’s Delivery Service by Hayao Miyazaki:
From Dreams of Jinsha:
Even some old Disney movies have romantic moments between physically-similar males and females. The original Snow White (from the 1937 movie) was paired with a Prince Charming whose wrists were barely bigger than hers (plus, look at her giant/normal waist!):
Disney non-human animal pairs were sometimes quite physically matched. Consider Bambi and Faline (Bambi, 1942):
Or Dutchess and O’Malley from Aristocats (1970) in which their exaggerated femininity and masculinity are not conveyed through extreme body-size difference:
In other realms of animation, Marge and Homer Simpson, the most durable couple in animation history, have very similar features: heads, eyes, noses, ears. His arms are fatter and neither of them really have wrists, but I’d put this in the category of normal sex difference:
Of course, Lucy and Charlie Brown were virtually identical if you think about it:
I’m open to other suggestions.
—
This post was previously published on familyinequality.com and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.
◊♦◊
Talk to you soon.
If you believe in the work we are doing here at The Good Men Project and want to join our calls on a regular basis, please join us as a Premium Member, today.
All Premium Members get to view The Good Men Project with NO ADS.
Need more info? A complete list of benefits is here.
—
Photo credit: Istockphoto.com
Compositing 3d when the camera is moving though is much, much harder. At the very least you need skills in 3d tracking, lighting for 3d, rendering, etc. If you want the lighting and shadows to be convincing. It’ll be hours of work that’s really beyond what you’d normally expect a single person to do.
Yeah when talking about actual animation Redline and Akira are the only real answers and there is a big degree of objectivity in it. Maybe the best animated Ghibli’s like Ponyo or Steamboy can have an argument. But the most well animated movies will always be way ahead of the most well animated TV shows. Such an awesome movie. So good that in some scenes i feel like they’re showing off how good they can do it. Those background characters and the details in the crowd, god damn.