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The subject of women and how they were regarded over the course of the modern era is not by any means new. 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. But in the twentieth century, as a mainly print-based culture gave way to one which, at the start of the twenty-first century, is primarily image- and media-based, it was the way these physical/cultural/social expectations were tied together with and within the medium of film, and disseminated in the person of the “actress” (be she a live woman or a drawing), which became important. It is with the images of women in popular culture that all of the aspects of American society’s changing attitudes towards women were mapped.

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 reflected the attitudes of the wider society from which they emerged, and that their enduring popularity is evidence that the depictions they contain would continue to resonate as the films were re-released in later decades. It attempts to establish the extent to which these characterisations were shaped by wider popular stereotypes by putting the films into the context of Hollywood films from the era in which these Disney films were made. Moreover, because of the nature of the animated film – because it is a unique combination of printed popular culture (as in drawings done for newspapers, books, and magazines) and the twentieth century’s later emphasis on more life-like visual media (such as film, television, and various forms of photography), it is argued here 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 (in the case of the output of US animation studios) ideas of American womanhood are to be found. Furthermore, because within the subject of US 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 this study concentrates.

The problems of researching Disney

Ironically, as scholarly interest in the history and creations of the studio increased thanks to the emergence of film studies and animation studies as academic disciplines, one of the major roadblocks which eventually arose in undertaking a study of characterisations of femininity by the Disney studio has been the Disney organisation itself. The first logical place to go as a source of information on Disney films and on Walt Disney himself would be the archives at Walt Disney Productions in Burbank, California. Though earlier researchers were able to do this (amazingly, Richard Shale, author of the 1982 book Donald Duck Joins Up: The Walt Disney Studio During World War II, wrote almost apologetically in his book’s introduction for having to rely so heavily on the Disney archives and primary sources as a source for his research materials!¹), recent years have witnessed a change in the Disney company’s attitude toward anyone – including academics – wishing to undertake research in the studio’s archives. For a time, even using the name “Disney” or images from Disney was prohibitively problematic. As the editors of From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender, and Culture were told in correspondence with the Disney Company before the publication of their book (which they had originally entitled Doing Disney: Critical Dialogues in Film, Gender, and Culture): “... Disney does not allow third-party books to use the name ‘Disney’ in their titles – this implies endorsement or sponsorship by the Disney organization”.² The letter continued: “As you know, all of our valuable properties, characters, and marks are protected under copyright and trademark law and any unauthorized use of our protected material would constitute infringements of our rights under said law”.³ The hint of threat this statement contains is not there by accident. Over the course of its history, the Walt Disney Company has grown suspicious of outside interest and, as a consequence, has become unusually protective of itself. It could be hypothesised that this protectiveness has its roots in the 1928 theft of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit by Disney’s distributor, Charles Mintz, but this seems unlikely, given that this protectiveness reached its height during Michael Eisner’s leadership of the corporation. Whether academic research in the archives will be allowed in the future, now that Eisner has left, remains to be seen. It can only be hoped, however, that the value of permitting scholarly access to the archives will be realised, and that the treasure trove of information they contain will be offered up once more for professional intellectual analysis.

By the late 1990s, however, it had become impossible simply to make an appointment to see the Disney archives. Scholars first had to write a detailed letter to the Disney Archives’ Permissions Department stating the nature, purpose, and ultimate intentions (i.e. whether publication was intended) of the research that was being undertaken, and then had to wait and hope that access would be granted. Only after first being granted permission to enter the archives were scholars allowed to make an appointment to conduct research. Furthermore, they were still not allowed complete access to the archives. When I enquired as to the existence of audience polls on the reception of Disney’s films, I was told that, while these polls had, in fact, been conducted, “Unfortunately, after checking with our Legal departments, it seems that the audience poll information is still considered proprietary and confidential, so it is not available to people outside of The Walt Disney Company”.⁴

I myself was denied the use of the archives when, in 1997, I wrote for permission to see such materials as existed showing the evolution of the various character portrayals. The reply I received stated that “While we recognize the purpose you have in mind, unfortunately, I am placed in the unenviable position of having to advise you that we cannot grant you the permission you have requested”.⁵ Moreover, when I e-mailed Dave Smith, the chief archivist at Disney, on 7 June 1999, he informed me, as part of an answer to a enquiry about the content of the archives, that the Disney archives were no longer open to outside researchers, and were, to his knowledge, to remain closed indefinitely.⁶ Therefore, for most of my Disney sources, I have been forced to utilise such data that has made it out of the Disney archives and into a variety of other archives, libraries, and the public domain. While this was not an ideal situation for undertaking original research, it has nonetheless forced me to extract as much information as possible from the available sources.

Despite this handicap, however, my sources themselves have been extensive, varied in nature, and sometimes rather untraditional. First of all, I relied upon the Disney films themselves as the basis for detailed textual analysis. My copies of the Disney films on which I focused in my study were all purchased VHS or DVD copies of the films, obtained in both the United States and the United Kingdom. All were officially produced and licensed Disney videos/DVDs released by Walt Disney Pictures. The other films referred to in this study were obtained both from purchased tapes and DVDs and from US and UK television broadcasts which I personally recorded. Another important source was the collection of books published by the Disney-owned press, Hyperion. Because of Disney’s careful control over the copyrights of its trademarked images and artwork, books published by Hyperion are amongst the few available sources for them outside of the Disney Studio’s archives. An incredibly rich source of previously unpublished materials such as studio memos and personal correspondence was found on the CDrom-based “biography” of Walt Disney, Walt Disney: An Intimate History of the Man and his Magic, published by the Walt Disney Family Educational Foundation, Inc.⁷ Also, the writings of other scholars on the subjects of Walt Disney, the Disney studio and its films, the theme parks, and animation history generally were useful, both for their information and as examples of the range of attitudes and approaches to the subject of Disney. As for the primary sources I used in this study (apart from the films), the collection of “Personality Ephemera” on Walt Disney in the possession of the British Film Institute proved to be very useful. Also, copies on the internet of such of important documents as Walt Disney’s testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities and the United States Supreme Court decisions on various cases connected with the Hollywood film industry were very useful for me in researching this book. Amongst my other primary sources, I relied upon period magazines, books, articles, and film reviews. Secondary sources were the increasing numbers of books and articles about Disney. Of all of these sources, arguably my most important has proved to be the films themselves, which I relied upon to carry out my original textual analysis of the films which my study has covered.

This book, in its emphasis on textual analysis within a historical context, falls within a tradition in film history and film studies of opening up new areas of scholarly enquiry through in-depth analysis both of individual films and of the genre to which they belong. Jeanine Basinger’s 1993 study of the women’s film genre, A Woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930–1960,⁸ is an example of this line of scholarly enquiry, although it is not the first study of women’s films during the period 1930 to 1960. It combines detailed textual analysis with an analysis of various aspects of the genre as a whole in a way which sees film texts as being more akin to historical documents, which require an examination of the elements they contain and the factors surrounding their production and reception as forms of popular entertainment. As Martin Barker writes in From Antz to Titanic: Reinventing Film Analysis,

“We can’t deduce ‘harm’ (or ‘good’ for that matter) from analysis of films. We can’t place films along some supposed dimension of political or ideological acceptability, from conservative/reactionary to radical/subversive. Most importantly, we cannot read off possible influences upon an unnamed, ‘vulnerable’ audience. And part of the reason for that is that films don’t contain ‘messages’ plus message-launching devices in the way that much analysis has supposed.”⁹

The spirit of Basinger’s study is, in a number of ways, the model for the approach taken here. Like A Woman’s View, this book strives to examine both the films as individual texts and the patterns formed by these texts when looked at as examples of a genre.

Depictions of women in American culture

On the face of it, cultural images of American women have changed considerably in the last two centuries. For many years, the reigning paradigm in women’s history was that of the ‘separate spheres’ of work and home. Barbara Welter, based on an examination of early nineteenth-century didactic literature – the cultural conditioning of its day – argued that, at least in middle-class families, the roles of each marriage partner were clearly defined along gendered lines.¹⁰ The male supported the family financially by working in the marketplace. The female took care of the home, raised the children, saw to the day-to-day needs of her family, and was subordinate to her husband in terms of overall authority within the family.

By the late twentieth century, the ways in which gender was constructed in the media were, ostensibly, very different. The division of labour in family relationships (where a traditional family could be found) was no longer so clear-cut. Both partners might work and share child-rearing responsibilities equally. The female might work outside the home and the male see to the household, or vice versa. In theory, the choices available to women (or, at least, the outward appearance of the availability of these choices) had vastly increased. Yet, accompanying the apparent growth in women’s freedom and their legal and social equality with men, there was also strong evidence of more conservative, less liberated views of women disseminated throughout popular culture.

Tabloid newspapers and magazines have consistently depicted women as objects for the male gaze (as have men’s magazines, often to an exaggerated extent). Some women themselves, moreover, seem to have colluded in the production and dissemination of fundamentally conservative gender stereotypes. Even beyond the obvious examples of the women who pose nude (or nearly so) in various male-targeted weekly and monthly publications (and, surprisingly, in many of the daily tabloid newspapers published in Britain), women’s magazines, mainly written by women for a female audience, have continually reminded women (through articles, fashion advice, beauty tips, and pictorial advertisements) that they should pay particular importance to their looks and general physical attractiveness. Many such magazines, by the last decades of the twentieth century, were also propagating the positive message that women should be proud of their femininity and comfortable with expressing their sexuality. Yet their general tenor was still to reinforce the patriarchal view that women are meant to be valued more for their beauty than their brains, and that this new sexual “freedom” meant making themselves more available to men, rather than giving women the freedom to be more choosey in their choice of (or refusal to choose) a sexual partner.

Women’s magazines can generally be divided into two principal groups: those concerned with childcare and the various aspects of home-making, and those predominantly aimed at helping women find a partner/husband. The notion that women must find a marriage partner is deeply engrained in American (and Western) history and a variety of cultural formations. It is fore-grounded by women’s magazines, advice books, films, advertisements, and television programmes. One of the latter offered an even more specific reason for the phenomenon. In a 1998 episode of Ally McBeal, the following dialogue took place between the lead character and her roommate on their return home from being bridesmaids at a wedding:

ALLY McBEAL: Seriously, Renee, this thing about being married. Why do you think women ...?

RENEE RADICK: We’re brainwashed. The first stories we hear as babies – Snow White, Cinderella – [are] all about getting a guy, being saved by the guy. Today it’s Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Pocahontas. All about getting a guy.

ALLY: So basically we’re screwed up because of ...

RENEE: (throws her bridesmaid’s dress on the open fire) (scornfully): Disney!¹¹

This dialogue takes place in the opening sequence of an episode from a show which is all about a sad, lonely, slightly strange Generation X-er who cannot find satisfaction in her life – despite her good friends and successful career – because she has been wounded in love once and has yet to find true love since. While trivial in itself, the dialogue quoted above does raise certain issues of relevance to this book.

There are a number of reasons why Disney as a subject has become an increasingly prominent topic of public discourse in recent years. Firstly, Disney itself – during the late 1980s and the 1990s – became much more visible both as a movie studio and as a corporation. In 1987, a retail chain (the Disney Store) was established, Walt Disney World was expanded with the addition of the Disney/MGM Studio theme park in 1989, a new Disney theme park was opened near Paris, France, in 1992, and Disney’s Animal Kingdom was opened in 1998. During these years, Disney animated films became available for purchase on video, and, although they were only hesitantly released by the studio at first, they quickly began to dominate the children’s video market. Secondly, Walt Disney’s and the Disney studio’s places in both American society and other cultures began to receive both popular and scholarly attention. This ranged from highly critical “popular” biographies of Disney, such as that by Marc Eliot,¹² through attacks on anything and everything Disney in works such as Eleanor Byrne and Martin McQuillan’s Deconstructing Disney¹³ and anthropological polemics such as Inside the Mouse: Work and Play at Disney World by a group calling themselves “The Project on Disney”,¹⁴ to romanticised accounts of Disney’s life in Bob Thomas’ biography Walt Disney: An American Original,¹⁵ more serious academic studies such as Elizabeth Bell, Lynda Haas, and Laura Sells’ From Mouse to Mermaid: The Politics of Film, Gender, and Culture¹⁶ and, finally, truly scholarly, self-confident works such as Steven Watts’ The Magic Kingdom: Walt Disney and the American Way of Life¹⁷ and Nicholas Sammond’s Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, 1930–1960.¹⁸ However, despite the claims made by writers and commentators for thoroughness and fair-mindedness, many of them have reflected many misconceptions and misunderstandings of Walt Disney, the studio which bears his name and, more often than not, have contributed more to the myths surrounding Disney than they did to an accurate understanding.

In her criticism of Disney in the above dialogue, for example, Ally’s roommate, Renee, alleges that Disney films from “Snow White [to] Cinderella - [are] all about getting a guy, being saved by the guy. Today it’s Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Pocahontas. All about getting a guy.” This itself emphasises two common misconceptions: that all of Disney’s human female characters are princesses (certainly, all of the films she cites have princesses in them, though there are a much larger number which do not) and that all of Disney’s female characters – past and present – are weak, passive figures who sit around waiting to be “saved by the guy”. Even in just the last three films she cites – The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, and Pocahontas – if there is one thing the three main female characters are not doing, it is sitting around waiting to be “saved by the guy”. In all three of these films, in fact, the heroine actively saves the hero’s life in some way or another at least once. And their motivation to do what they do is never solely romantic love. Ariel (The Little Mermaid) is motivated by love more than either of the other two, but she is also heavily influenced by her deep-seated curiosity about humans, the human world and her fascination with anything and everything human. This aspect of her personality is highlighted well before she ever lays eyes on Prince Eric. In Aladdin, Jasmine, although she is a princess and is beloved by her father, feels stifled by her life and is desperate for adventure in the larger world. It is only because she finally decides to break free of her life as a princess and disguises herself as a peasant that she and Aladdin are ever able to meet. Also, her refusal to marry for any reason other than love and her insistence that the man she marries be someone who, above all, treats her with honour and respect – indeed, it is these qualities in Aladdin which make her fall in love with him – are paramount in Jasmine’s portrayal. Likewise, in Pocahontas, Pocahontas’ love for John Smith is only a small part of her motivation for her actions in the film, as its narrative development makes clear. In fact, she is motivated predominately by her desire to prevent war; in the end, she says good-bye to Smith in order to take up her place as a leader amongst her people.

These are all strong female characters with strong, positive aspects to their depictions. They are also typical of the kinds of female characters to be found in the Disney films of the 1990s. Furthermore, such strong, active women were to be seen in Disney animated films of the late 1970s and 1980s, and instances of such independence and energy are to be found even amongst some of the characters of the first era of the Disney studio’s feature animation production (characters such as Slue-Foot Sue and, to a lesser extent, Katrina van Tassel are examples of strong, less-than-passive characters from Disney’s earlier years). Yet, because two of the most famous classic Disney characters from two of its most popularly successful films – Snow White and Cinderella – are both (to a lesser and greater extent, respectively) depicted as passive fairy tale princesses, the reputation that Disney films are full of weak, passive women has gained a widespread, largely unquestioned acceptance.

Disney’s films are important in cultural terms because Disney himself was probably the closest thing the twentieth-century produced to a teller of national (and international) folk stories. In the past, from the most ancient times until relatively recently, it was through the telling of tales (or rather, listening to tales being told) that human beings learned about their society’s ways, traditions, history, and beliefs. In other words, it was through stories that people learned about the culture in which they lived in a more studied, self-conscious way than they might have simply by living in it. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, in her study of folk- and fairy-tales Women Who Run With the Wolves, in which she discussed the role of story in society, described such stories as a kind of “medicine”.¹⁹ Estés noted that “Stories enable us to understand the need for and the ways to raise a submerged archetype”.²⁰ Estés is referring to archetypes which still exist, but which have been repressed – or ignored – within the cultural concepts and folklore of a society. For her, these “submerged archetypes” are still present, technically, in the sense that they have not been lost or forgotten; their stories are not told, however, because – for whatever reasons – these archetypes do not resonate within society during a particular era. Her book focused, in particular, upon the ways in which various stories can teach and heal the souls/psyches of women. In earlier times, the younger generations turned habitually to the older members of their society for knowledge concerning the problems both of daily life and of life’s more complicated issues. In pre-industrial societies in particular, the various generations were more likely to spend time in contact with one another, and, especially in less literate societies, storytelling was perhaps the most common means of answering complex questions to do with such themes as love, morality, religion, justice, and truth.

As Western society became more literate, printed media began to replace the older form of storytelling. While printing stories does give them the advantages of being more widely disseminated and, therefore, ensures that they have a greater likelihood of being preserved, there are two great disadvantages inherent in the teaching capacity of the printed tale: (1) it is less likely to be “told” (or read, which-ever is the case) in response to a particular question or situation which may have arisen (and about which it might be able to shed some light) and is more likely simply to be read at random; (2) the story loses its cultural fluidity. This second aspect will be referred to later in relation to Disney’s modifications of traditional tales. If one individual is telling a “teaching tale”, he or she can alter certain aspects of the tale so that the listeners at that moment will hear something which is especially relevant to them at that time in their lives and, thereby, gain more from the tale than they might have otherwise. A printed story, however, as a consequence of being written down, is forced to be the same tale every time it is read. Although the ways individuals interpret what they read can vary widely, the words themselves – as physical structures printed on a page – of course do not alter themselves on the page in order to suit the needs of each individual reader. And it was in this way, as printed media became “traditional” for later generations, that certain versions of stories became “standard” or, in some cases (such as with the Grimm Brothers’ or Hans Christian Anderson’s versions) came to be seen as the “original” version of a tale. As with surviving oral versions of various folk tales and fairy tales, the historian can learn much about a society not only from the way a tale is told and preserved; much can also be learned from knowing which tales a society deems worthy of preservation and which tales it allows to disappear.

And then comes the medium of film. The ability of film to tell a story was recognised almost from the start, and effective uses of film as story-teller were quickly found. Stories could be told and retold in many different ways on film, and both film historians and cultural historians have noted the multitude of ways in which attitudes to love, war, religion, the family, and other “larger” topics and issues could be conveyed in films set in both historical and contemporary times.²¹ For example, it is possible to compare, amongst many alternative themes, the changes in the culturally-expected “effects” of marriage on a young woman’s life by looking at both the 1950 and 1991 Hollywood versions of the Edward Streeter novel, Father of the Bride. It is then possible to explore this theme further, as well as such themes as motherhood, ageing (Stanley/George Banks becoming a “grandpa”) and how to “let go” of one’s adult offspring in both Father of the Bride sequels, Father’s Little Dividend (1951) and the less-creatively titled Father of the Bride Part II (1995). It is because of this aspect of film’s use as a vehicle to explore larger themes, as well as Hollywood’s habit both of remaking older films and of producing different filmic versions of the same story (usually a literary text),²² that what is shown on-screen – and how this can change in different versions (as is the case with adaptations of classic literary tales or remakes of the same type as the Father of the Bride movies) – can very effectively illustrate changes in a society’s attitudes and beliefs over time.

And again, as with folk/fairy tales, the historian can learn a great deal from examining not only what types of stories have been made into films, but also how the stories were presented, what was left in the story, what was altered, what was left out altogether, and what new elements were added to it. For folklorist Vladimir Propp, these successive “variants” (as he called them) were crucial to understanding a society, since examining the differences between variants revealed much about both the internal and external changes society had undergone.²³ As Propp expressed this idea: “Folklore formations arise not as a direct reflection of life (this is a comparatively rare case), but out of the clash of two ages or of two systems and ideologies”.²⁴

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:

The old is changed in accordance with the new life, new ideas, new forms of consciousness. Transformation into an opposite is only one type of reinterpretation. Changes can be carried so far as to make things unrecognizable, and discovery of the original forms is possible only given a great deal of comparative data on various peoples and at varying stages of their development.²⁶

Walt Disney was certainly seen by some of his contemporaries as being a “modern-day” storyteller. In a Today’s Cinema article from 1938, an anonymous writer, known as “Onlooker”, wrote of Disney that “Disney is one of the great creative artists that are destined to immortality. He is the Hans Anderson of the modern medium.”²⁷ And, just as Propp emphasised that the written variants of folk tales were historical documents to be examined by scholars, so too are Disney’s film variants – they are simply filmed, rather than written, and their dialogue and images are, as historical documents, open to analysis and interpretation. In other words, Disney films carry on the tradition of telling these stories in ways which are relevant to their audiences: the stories went from being constructed for oral presentation, to being altered to make them suitable for print, then transformed to make them suitable for filming. Concurrently to changing them so as to fit the constraints of each new medium, each new teller has also re-formed and re-shaped elements of the stories to fit both the medium they were using and the audience they were targeting.

It is the intention of this book to begin to delve into the ways in which the Disney studio re-told traditional tales, and by doing so, sought to find ways that would make these stories work cinematically, as well as making them relevant and attractive to contemporary movie audiences. The study itself is concerned primarily with an examination of the characterisations of women in a selection of Disney’s animated feature films. The question will be posed as to whether or not these characterisations reflect not only contemporary stereotypes, but also modern stereotypes of women within Western society. In particular, my focus will centre on those films in which the main character is not only female, but human. There are a few films in the selection which have a male character as a leading role, but these films also have an important female character who is pivotal to the plot-line, such as the role of Wendy in Peter Pan (1953). While other films will be mentioned as necessary, the films which will serve as my primary focus are Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Melody Time (1948), The Adventures of lchabod and Mr. Toad (1949), Cinderella (1950), Alice in Wonderland (1951), Peter Pan (1953), Sleeping Beauty (1959), 101 Dalmatians (1961), The Rescuers (1977), The Fox and the Hound (1981), The Black Cauldron (1985), The Little Mermaid (1989), Beauty and the Beast (1991), Aladdin (1992), Pocahontas (1995), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1996), Hercules (1997), Mulan (1998), Tarzan (1999), The Emperor’s New Groove (2000), Atlantis (2001), Lilo and Stitch (2002), and Treasure Planet (2004). It is the hope of this book to add to the understanding of twentieth-century American social and cultural perceptions of women, as well as to contribute to a better understanding of the content of traditional “2D” Disney animated features and their place in American society. It should be noted here that, as is becoming standard practice amongst Disney scholars, “Disney” or “the studio” will refer to the Disney studio, and “Walt” will refer to Walt Disney the man (except, of course, within quotes; in such cases, naturally, quotes will be recorded accurately, with clarifications inserted where necessary). The Disney corporation will be referred to as either the Disney corporation or the Disney company.

The book begins with two chapters outlining the basic background to the problems to be analysed. Having looked briefly at constructions of femininity within American popular culture in this introduction and in the following chapter, it is intended that this initial discussion will serve as a basis for the in-depth examinations of constructions of femininity which will be undertaken on a film-by-film basis in the fourth, fifth, and sixth chapters. Chapters one and two will serve also as background for the later chapters, with Chapter two providing the reader with an explanation of the history and mechanics of animation. This chapter is included because, in order to examine and analyse accurately a body of films such as these, certain aspects of how animation as a medium has evolved is essential for understanding why certain choices were made in terms of story, design, and the scale of each project. Chapter three will begin to narrow the study’s focus by introducing the history of the rise of the Disney studio, and will also give some biographical details of Walt Disney’s childhood, youth, and early adulthood as a way of looking at some of the possible roots of his attitudes and beliefs about women in order to better understand how much the attitudes in these films come from Walt himself, and how much they were normal ideas, attitudes, and values of twentieth century America. Chapter four will emphasise the Disney studio’s history between 1937 and 1967, focusing predominately upon the analysis of the films made during that period which fit the criteria of this study. Following this same format, Chapter five will concentrate on films made between 1967 and 1989 and the state of the Disney studio during those years, and Chapter six will offer analysis of films made from 1989 to 2004. This chronological division of the studio’s history is one which has been used by others when looking at the history of the studio. In my opinion, it is a useful format for me to follow: firstly, it links this study to earlier histories of the Disney studio; secondly, it reflects the very real differences in management styles at different periods within the company’s history, in order to allow some consideration of the effects these have had on the animation studio’s thinking and output; thirdly, they reflect (perhaps not coincidentally) the rise, decline, and rebirth of the studio’s fortunes as a producer of entertainment within Hollywood and for the US and world markets.

That the Disney studio has been a Hollywood success story is unquestionable: beginning as a tiny independent studio with a staff of four (including Walt, his brother Roy as the business manager, and two animators, Ub Iwerks and Ham Hamilton) in October 1923,²⁸ it has since grown into one of the richest and most powerful multi-media conglomerates and corporations in the world. That this success is owed, for the most part, to the studio’s ability to produce entertainment which appeals strongly to audiences is evidence that the ways it has told these stories resonates with viewers.

The fact that many of these films have achieved classic status, that they are continuously referenced by other films and animated works, that they are deemed to warrant scholarly attention, and that they continue to be measurably popular with audiences, shows that these films play an important cultural role. How much they tap into their culture’s ideas, hopes, fears, and attitudes is what this study seeks to understand.