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  • Good Girls & Wicked Witches: Women in Disney's Feature Animation
  • Karen Hollinger
Good Girls & Wicked Witches: Women in Disney's Feature Animation. By Amy M. Davis. Eastleigh, UK: John Libbey Publishing. Distributed in North America by Indiana University Press. 2006.

In Good Girls and Wicked Witches, Amy M. Davis sets out to defend the Disney Studio against what she calls "often angry—even hysterical—[. . .] polemics" that label Disney films "the cause of America's social ills" (223). She adds that these "hysterical" polemicists "deal in misinformation and half-truths [rather] than engage in in-depth analysis" in order to accuse Disney of "actively promoting passivity and stupidity in women as virtues" (229). These are certainly fighting words, but who exactly is Davis fighting. There are no footnotes identifying these angry hysterical critics, but the use of the loaded word "hysterical" certainly fits with pejoratives that have been used against feminists. I have certainly read some negative criticisms of Disney's regressive portrayals of women, but I never found them to be hysterical polemics blaming Disney for all of America's social ills.

Davis sets out to right the wrongs against poor Walt. She seems so attached to him that she makes the unfortunate decision to refer to him throughout her book by his first name. She says she does this to distinguish between him and his studio, but the use of his first name establishes a sympathy between author and subject that suggests a lack of objectivity on Davis's part. For Davis, Walt Disney was just a conservative guy who reflected the views toward women of his times. Actually, this is the crux of her argument. She maintains that the animated films produced by the Disney Studio from 1937 to 2005 simply reflect societal views of women at the time of their release. Davis then goes on to examine the animated portrayals of human female characters in Disney feature films through three distinct periods: a classical era (1937–1967), the middle years (1967–88), and the Eisner era (1989–2005, when the studio was under the leadership of Michael Eisner).

What Davis does show convincingly is that once Disney died in 1967, ending what she calls the studio's classical period, the images of the Disney Studio's female characters became less regressive, most notably so in the Eisner era. Davis admits that in the classical period Disney heroines, especially Snow White, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty, were largely powerless victims. These beautiful, but pathetically helpless female characters were unable to fight against their oppressors and simply waited for their princes to come along and rescue them. According to Davis, after this classical phase, female images in Disney features began to present "an image of women—and femininity—which although not perfect, is largely positive in its overall make-up" (235). Well, I, for one, am just not convinced. Certainly, it would be unfair to say that there are no positive aspects to Disney heroines, especially in the more recent Eisner period, and Davis takes pains to point them all out in films such as The Little Mermaid (1989), Aladdin (1992), Pocahontas (1995), and Mulan (1998). Whereas Davis thinks she has demonstrated that Disney's female characters are largely positive, what she really shows is that they represent a mixture of progressive and regressive traits.

It is perhaps the major flaw in Davis's otherwise readable, if badly copy edited, study that she holds so firmly to an outdated "images of women" approach. This approach was popular with early feminist analysts like Molly Haskell in From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies and Marjorie Rosen in Popcorn Venus (both published in 1974). It involves a simplistic reflection thesis that approaches female characters as straightforward representations of ideas about women prevalent at the time, and the critic's task is to decide if these images are positive or negative. Since these early [End Page 75] days, feminists have concluded that film images are rarely, if ever, entirely positive or negative, and Hollywood in particular is adept at luring audiences in with fantasy bribes only to recuperate this progressivity for patriarchy by the film's end...

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