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Abstract
In this article, I consider discourses of gender and beauty in the production of computer-animated hair, arguing that these discourses reveal the gendered (en)coding of Disney Princesses characters and indicate how social norms influence production practices and entrench themselves in girls’ cultural texts. Building on explorations in post-feminist literature, cultural histories of hair, and the social construction of technology, this research contributes to our understanding of technology’s relationship to gender by examining Disney Princesses film texts and interrogating the computer animation production texts that surround them. I first situate my analysis within feminist considerations of gender, especially as it concerns post-feminism and girl power representations of Disney Princesses. I then explore how animation producers unconsciously incorporate gender and race scripts into the technological production of hair, citing evidence from the two films, Tangled and Brave, and drawing from animation papers published by software engineers and animators. Ultimately, this research expands research on representation by incorporating the production of media technologies into our understanding of aesthetics.
Acknowledgments
The figures in this manuscript are the Author’s screen captures from different films and constitute fair use due to their transformative nature and minimal use.
Notes
1. Photorealism refers to the way objects look in real life, or as if they were captured in a photograph or recorded on digital video.
2. The animation papers I researched for this project include published conference papers and journal articles related to the research and application of computer graphics technology. I focused specifically on Disney and Pixar-produced papers, but also drew from heavily referenced papers on hair animation’s history and evolution. These papers are read and written primarily by researchers and workers in film, gaming, and other animation fields. As a result, much of the content details innovations in design and technology.
3. The franchise is mostly made up of girls and young women either born as princesses or who marry into royalty, though the addition of historical figures of color like Pocahontas and Mulan resulted in Disney bending its definition of “princess.”
4. From Snow White (1937), Cinderella (1950), and Sleeping Beauty (1959), respectively.
5. Tangled and Brave are distinct in terms of narrative style and brand—Tangled is a musical with bright color tones more typical of Disney Animation and Brave uses a film score and plays with dull, dark colors, intensifying the glow of Merida’s hair. While Disney and Pixar are separate companies, their overlap in artistic and technical teams indicate a strong degree of cooperation. The production credits for Brave, as well as other Disney-Pixar creations show substantial overlap in crew, from above-the-line labors like directors and screenwriters to below-the-line creative crew with the art department, technical team, and other animation positions. See IMDb (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1217209/fullcredits?ref_=tt_ql_1) for crew credits.
6. Elsa and Anna are not official Disney Princesses, though they are on the Disney Princess homepage and are used in promotions for Disney’s girl-oriented franchises. As such, they are often referred to as Disney Princesses.
7. Disney released a few empty threats to stop making Princess-oriented musicals in 2010, just before the release of Tangled. https://www.yahoo.com/movies/bp/disney-stop-making-princess-movies-because-boys-think-050207663.html and http://articles.latimes.com/2010/nov/21/entertainment/la-et-1121-tangled-20101121
8. Rendering refers to the generation of an image, including the movement, lighting, and color work animators may perform on an animated object.
9. Modeling refers to the process of building a structure and set of physical behaviors for a hair animation system.
10. Engineers first create the hair’s form through modeling and animators then render it as an animated moving image.