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About this book

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.

The subject of women and how they were regarded over the course of the twentieth century is not by any means a new subject. Writers, feminists, anti-feminists, politicians, political commentators, psychologists, journalists, celebrities, housewives, students, historians, and many others have written on this subject in varying degrees of depth and seriousness.

This book analyses the construction of (mainly human) female characters in the animated films of the Walt Disney Studio between 1937 and 2004. It is based on 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. It attempts to establish the extent to which these characterisations were shaped by wider popular stereotypes. Moreover, because within American animation it is the work of the Disney Studio which has reigned – and continues to reign – supreme within its field, and because most of the major animated films created in Hollywood have been produced by Walt Disney’s studio, it is upon these films that the book concentrates.

Biography

Amy M. Davis is a lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Hull. The author of several papers on Disney feature animation and the Disney Studio, Good Girls & Wicked Witches is her first large study of the Disney studio’s output, and grew out of her doctoral work in the history department at UCL.