<P>In Good Girls and Wicked Witches, Amy M. Davis re-examines the notion that Disney heroines are rewarded for passivity. Davis proceeds from the assumption that, in their representations of femininity, Disney films both reflected and helped shape the attitudes of the wider society, both at the time of their first release and subsequently. Analyzing the construction of (mainly human) female characters in the animated films of the Walt Disney Studio between 1937 and 2001, she attempts to establish the extent to which these characterizations were shaped by wider popular stereotypes. Davis argues that it is within the most constructed of all moving images of the female form—the heroine of the animated film—that the most telling aspects of Woman as the subject of Hollywood iconography and cultural ideas of American womanhood are to be found.</P>
Оглавление
Amy M. Davis. Good Girls and Wicked Witches
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Film as a Cultural Mirror
2. A Brief History of Animation
3. The Early Life of Walt Disney and the Beginnings of the Disney Studio, 1901–1937
4. Disney Films 1937–1967: The “Classic” Years
5. Disney Films 1967–1988: The “Middle” Era
6. Disney Films 1989–2005: The “Eisner” Era
Conclusion
Appendix 1. Disney’s full–length animated feature films
Appendix 2. Disney films analysed in this study, with plot summaries335
Good Girls and Wicked Witches: Women in Disney’s Feature Animation, by Amy Davis, looks at how human female characters have been represented during the first 70 years of feature-length animation at Disney. Tallying up which films have had human females in leading roles and analysing how such issues as activity/passivity have been handled, this book re-examines the notion that all Disney heroines are rewarded for passivity, and contextualises these films within the larger Hollywood landscape in which they were produced.
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If there is one single aspect of Disney’s films which is consistently criticised more than anything else, it is the changes made in the stories which caused them to differ from the “original” versions. Norman Klein mentions Bruno Bettelheim’s criticism of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937): that Disney had differentiated each of the dwarfs into characters with their own names and personalities.25 It seems clear, however, that Disney, in altering and/or “modernising” these tales, was essentially performing the traditional function of the storyteller by altering the tale he was telling to fit his audience, as well as to make the story work cinematically (giving each of the seven dwarfs his own name and personality was cinematically more interesting than simply having seven unnamed, undifferentiated major characters on screen). Furthermore we now know that Bettelheim was wrong to accuse Disney of initiating the change whereby the dwarfs are individualised; in the 1916 silent, live-action version of the story, Snow White (directed by J. Searle Dawley), the dwarfs are each named and made distinct from one another (albeit not to the same extent as in the Disney version).
More important than the cinematic changes made by Disney to these stories, however, are the ways in which Disney films present larger ideas and themes such as love and morality. Indeed, particularly significant are how these themes are presented, the ways in which these presentations change over time, and how consciously or unconsciously they are included within the Disney studio’s filmic texts. To quote Propp:
