Do Animated Disney Characters Portray
and Promote the Beauty–Goodness Stereotype?
Doris Bazzini, Lisa
Curtin, and Serena Joslin, Shilpa Regan, Denise Martz
This source talks
about the beauty behind the Disney princess films. The stereotype, “what is
beautiful is good” is mentioned and it proves to be true in these films. Every
princess is flawless and beautiful. Even the newer princess Merida, who has
crazy curly red hair, has beautiful features. Disney spends millions of dollars
to create these movies, so making an “ugly” princess is a financial risk. In
the source, there were 2 different studies that took place, one with adults and
one with children. The basic idea of these studies was the see if physical
attractiveness was associated with goodness. The people generally agreed upon
the fact that if someone was physically attractive, they were perceived as a
good person and had nice characteristics. This is true with Disney films; the
princess is always beautiful and the villain, while although having decent
facial features, has a darker and more intense appearance. The studies also
found that the more physically attractive person (princess) consistently had a
better life outcome than the lesser attractive person (villain). So Disney
movies in a sense are saying, “if you’re pretty your life will be perfect and
everyone will like you. You’re out of luck if you’re ugly”. Disney movies are
intentionally made for a younger audience, so if a child isn’t the cutest thing
in the world, they will grow up thinking they are less than the pretty people.
That’s not a good message to be putting into people’s minds. This source provides
great examples and reasoning’s behind Disney princess films and will help me a
lot with my research paper.
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