829871

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ANM0010.1177/1746847719829871AnimationRowe

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animation:

Shaping Girls: Analyzing an interdisciplinary journal

2019, Vol. 14(1) 22­–36
© The Author(s) 2019
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Shapes
https://doi.org/10.1177/1746847719829871
DOI: 10.1177/1746847719829871
journals.sagepub.com/home/anm

Rebecca Rowe
University of Connecticut, North Windham, USA

Abstract
The debate over whether television and film affect girls’ body image has been contentious.
Researchers argue that film and television negatively affect, only partially affect, or do not affect
girls’ body image. These studies have one common limitation: they approach animated female
bodies as if they are the same because they are, mostly, thin. In this project, the author seeks
to extend and complicate this existing scholarship by analyzing bodies in 67 films produced by
several American animation studios from 1989 through 2016. In this study, she classifies 239
female characters as one of four body types: Hourglass, Pear, Rectangle, or Inverted Triangle. Her
argument is two-fold: (1) over the last 30 years, there has been a shift from a singular dominant
shape (Hourglass) to the dominance of several body shapes (especially Pear and Rectangle); and
(2) young girls may be affected by characters their own age who have been largely ignored in
studies thus far. The author argues that young girls see diverse images of bodies rather than the
singular image that scholars study. Girls’ body image may be affected by animation, but animated
images are so diverse that this effect may be difficult to determine. A more nuanced understanding
of the body shapes animation utilizes may allow researchers to study the more complex messages
that girls do or do not internalize.

Keywords
animation, Blue Sky, body shape, Disney, DreamWorks, girls’ body image, Illumination,
qualitative content analysis, Pixar 

As early as 1994, Henry A Giroux argued that animated films, especially those produced by the
Walt Disney Company, ‘inspire at least as much cultural authority and legitimacy for teaching
specific roles, values, and ideals than more traditional sites of learning such as public schools,
religious institutions, and the family’ (p. 25). Moreover, psychological researchers have discovered
that ‘5- and 6-year-old participants identified animated cartoon characters resembling them more
frequently than their own family members’ (Hayes and Tantleff-Dunn, 2010: 414), perhaps because

Corresponding author:
Rebecca Rowe, University of Connecticut, Department of English, 215 Glenbrook Road, U-4025, Storrs, CT 06269-
4025, USA.
Email: rebecca.rowe@uconn.edu
Rowe 23

children in particular ‘are more likely to perceive the imagery … on television and other media as
real, rather than artificial’, even if the media is animated (Herbozo et al., 2004: 22). These animated
films mold children, partially because children still perceive animated images as real, suggesting
that we should pay attention to what these films show children. In particular, animators have con-
siderable control over what a character looks like as they design and draw that character, thus
affecting how children perceive bodies, but society influences animators who must create some-
thing commercially viable. Animated bodies capture animators’ (and their societies’) body ideals
directly as they create the perfectly commodified body. If animators control bodies and animation
affects children, how can animated bodies affect children?
This question is not new. The debate over whether television and film affect girls’ body image
has been contentious throughout the 21st century, with scholars studying everything from anima-
tion throughout the last century to today’s Disney Princess line. For example, Herbozo et al. (2004)
study popular children’s books and television to argue that ‘body image-related messages, espe-
cially those concerning beauty and thinness, are prevalent in many popular children’s videos’, with
beauty, which is linked to ‘physical attractiveness, specifically thinness’, ‘tend[ing] to be associ-
ated with goodness’ (p. 30). Likewise, Klein and Shiffman (2005, 2006) published two articles that
studied select cel cartoons created between the 1930s and mid-1990s by all major studios in which
they argue that animated cartoons reveal a clear message about bodies: ‘On virtually all dimensions
examined, socially desired traits were associated with thinness [or being attractive] and socially
disapproved characteristics were associated with being overweight [or ordinary-looking and/or
unattractive]’ (compiled quotes from 2005: 113; 2006: 361). Contrariwise, Hayes and Tantleff-
Dunn (2010) studied the effect of media such as the Disney Princess line on young girls and found
that ‘Although it was hypothesized that exposure to appearance-related media would result in
more appearance-related play activity, results failed to reveal any differences between the exposure
conditions’ or ‘any direct negative effect on girls’ body dissatisfaction’, suggesting that animated
bodies have little effect on girls younger than six (p. 422). These studies engage in a lively con-
versation around what bodies exist in animation and what kinds of media affect girls’ body image.
These studies, and others like them, have one common limitation: they read all thin bodies as
the same. In this project, I seek to extend and complicate this existing scholarship by analyzing
bodies in 67 films produced by several American animation studios from 1989 through 2016.
Within this study, I classify 239 female characters as one of four body types: Hourglass, Pear,
Rectangle, or Inverted Triangle.1 My argument is two-fold: (1) over the last 30 years, there has
been a shift from a singular dominant shape (Hourglass) to the dominance of several body shapes
(especially Pear and Rectangle); and (2) young girls may be affected by characters their own age
who have been largely ignored in studies thus far. I argue that young girls see diverse images of
bodies rather than the singular image that scholars study. Girls’ body image may be affected by
animation, but animated images are so diverse that this effect may be difficult to determine. A more
nuanced understanding of the body shapes animation utilizes may allow researchers to study the
more complex messages girls do or do not internalize.

Methods
For this study, I focus on films created by Walt Disney Animation Studios, Pixar Animation
Studios, DreamWorks Animation, Illumination Entertainment, and Blue Sky Studios (along with
Blue Sky’s parent studio, Fox Animation Studios) in particular because these studios collectively
made 87 out of the 100 highest grossing animated films of all time.2 These studios represent a
significant proportion of American animation, especially the animated films viewed most often,
judging by how much these films make. I chose to look at studios as a whole because many of the
24 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 14(1)

top 100 animated films do not contain humans. Moreover, I focus on films made since 1989
because that year marks the beginning of the Disney renaissance, when the production rate of box-
office-topping animated movies began to increase.3 While children continue to view films pro-
duced before then, the research I respond to was published after this date and mostly studies films
from the 1990s onwards. In order to have a similar text sample, I chose to set my start date around
the same time as most of the current scholarship.
The characters from these films also have to meet several criteria to be included. First, the char-
acter has to be mostly if not wholly humanoid. Characters such as Captain Amelia in Treasure
Planet (2002) or Fiona in Shrek (2001)4 qualify because they still clearly have human body shapes.
Likewise, characters such as Ariel and Ursula from The Little Mermaid (1989) qualify because
they are mostly human and their non-human body parts do not distort their overall shape.
Anthropomorphized animals (such as in Chicken Little, Madagascar, and Zootopia), on the other
hand, are not included because their shapes, while human-esque, are influenced by animal bodies
that might skew the analysis. Second, each character must be identifiably female. While the ques-
tion of what constitutes ‘womanhood’ or ‘femininity’ is complex and has been under debate by
scholars for decades, cartoons, especially those made by largely conservative corporations such as
Disney, clearly label characters as either male or female, so I use these clear labels to choose the
subjects for my project. Third, the character has to be separate from other characters and not part
of an identical set. Groups like these are not included because these characters are not distinct,
though it might be interesting to look at how groups of women are shaped at a later date. Finally,
the character’s full body must be shown at some point in the film so that a clear body shape can be
determined.5 Furthermore, each character had to meet two of the three following conditions in
order to qualify: be named, be shown on screen separate from a crowd (though can be shown with
one or two other people) more than once, and/or speak at least twice. These conditions ensure that
the characters in this study are relatively noticeable in their movies and thus may impact the way
that viewers understand female bodies.
In order to assess the characters’ body shapes, I turn to the work of Connell et al. (2006) on
analyzing and defining the female figure, one of the few pieces of scholarship that attempts to
outline different female body shapes, rather than female size, as work on Body Mass Index does.
They establish four body shapes (Hourglass, Pear, Rectangle, and Inverted Triangle) that exist on
a continuum with a core or neutral shape in the middle (see Figure 1), whereon ‘figures could range
from barely belonging to a category to very clearly exhibiting that shape’ (p. 2006: 88). Connell
et al.’s use of a continuum allows characters to have differing degrees of traits and still belong to
similar overall shapes, encouraging clearer comparison across bodies. Accordingly, an Hourglass
shape has ‘increasingly indented waists relative to equal shoulder and hip widths’ (p. 88), such as
Chel from The Road to El Dorado (2000). The Rectangle body shape ‘transitions … to have no
waist definition between equal shoulder and hip widths’ (p. 88), like the titular character from
Mulan (1998) as well as Penny from Mr. Peabody and Sherman (2014). A Rectangle body shape
does not always mean that there is no curvature, as can be seen with Mulan; it simply means that
the curves are not nearly as pronounced as in other body shapes. The Pear shape ‘loses the appear-
ance of equal width between shoulders and hips as the lower half of the body becomes increasingly
wider than the shoulders’ (p. 88), as can be seen with Tiana from The Princess and the Frog (2009).
Finally, with the Inverted-Triangle shape, ‘the opposite is true’, with shoulders becoming wider
than hips, as can be seen with Calhoun in Wreck-It Ralph (2012).
These definitions informed my research as I analyzed images released by the studios for each
character.6 If I could not definitively determine the shape of the character from several pictures, I
would then watch the film to see the body in motion. In all cases, watching the film to see the
character while moving determined the shape. For several characters, it is difficult to determine
Rowe 25

Figure 1.  The body shape continuum created by Evelyn Brannon (© 2000) and reproduced from Connell
et al. (2006). This chart shows the core female body shape in the center with four shapes (Rectangle,
Inverted Triangle, Hourglass, and Pear) surrounding it. A female body can fall along a continuum in-
between the different shapes, demonstrating that bodies can more or less adhere to these general shapes.

what shape they have underneath clothes with a distinctive shape, so when a character is presented
in only one outfit that has its own shape, that outfit is considered part of the body shape because,
for the audience, that is the character’s shape. For example, Chaca, a young girl in The Emperor’s
New Groove (2000), wears a dress for the entire movie that has a perfect Hourglass shape; while it
is unlikely that a girl Chaca’s age would have an Hourglass shape, that is the only way that she is
presented, making the Hourglass shape the only shape associated with this character.
Finally, to explore body shape by age, I focus on two key age ranges, ‘Girl’ and ‘Young Adult’,
in order to differentiate between two levels of youth. According to Reid-Walsh (2011), the terms
‘girl’ and ‘girlhood’ vary by time and place and often even within the same culture. She suggests
that different audiences might use different age ranges to define a girl as ‘of preschool age, between
the ages of ten and fourteen … [or up to] eighteen’ or even later (p. 93). In order to create separa-
tion between ‘Girl’ and ‘Young Adult’, I will use the first two of these time-spans (preschool age
and between 10 and 14). Effectively, a Girl character in my study is any pre-adolescent character.
Talley (2011) argues that, much like my definition of Girl, Young Adult as a term is generally age-
bounded. For example, ‘The Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) denotes ages
twelve to eighteen as composing “young adult”’ but the ‘most expansive understanding of “young
adult” … includes the MTV demographic of readers as old as twenty-five’ (p. 229). This study
combines the two definitions, understanding Young Adult as any character between adolescence
and approximately 25. For clarity, I capitalize ‘Girl’ and ‘Young Adult’ when using the terms as
distinct age ranges for characters and do not do so when discussing real-world people.
As this explanation of my methodology makes clear, this project exists somewhere between
qualitative and quantitative methods. While much of my work below relies on data points, per-
centages, and numerical changes over time or across age range (quantitative), my data was
26 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 14(1)

collected through subjective observation rather than objective measurement (qualitative). This
methodology echoes many current studies on this topic. For example, Klein and Shiffman’s two
articles (2005, 2006) and Herbozo et al.’s article (2004) all rely on researchers turning bodies
into data points through subjective observation (Is that body fat or thin? Attractive or ugly?) then
scientifically and objectively analyzing the data. Moreover, my mixed methods bridge tradi-
tional humanities scholarship and the social sciences, bringing together textual analysis as seen
in English, film, and cultural studies with numerical analysis often seen in psychology, sociol-
ogy, or anthropology. Since this project exists between the worlds of textual analysis (the films
themselves) and audience analysis (the effects they could have on girls), my methods reflect this
interdisciplinary nature.

Body shapes change over time

Moving from the 1990s through the new millennium, body shapes have become more diverse, sug-
gesting that young girls may be affected by the increased variety of images they see in animation,
a shift that is unacknowledged in current research. There are three distinct trends in research con-
sidering connections between media and girls’ body image.
First, research from the early 2000s almost unanimously agrees that media negatively affects
girls’ self-image and perception of others’ bodies. Herbozo et al.’s (2004) article and Klein and
Shiffman’s (2005, 2006) two articles mentioned in the introduction fall under this category as all
three argue that children’s film and animation have a positive correlation between thinness, beauty,
and goodness, impacting how children view real bodies. As early as 2000, Harrison argued that
‘television viewing positively predicted eating disorder symptomatology’ in first-, second-, and
third-grade children (p. 631). Likewise, Latner et al. (2007) studied how mass media affects the
way children treat obese children and found that ‘children’s exposure to mass media was signifi-
cantly associated with stigmatizing attitudes towards obese children’, suggesting that the mass
media, specifically television, video games, and magazines, affect the way children understand
bodies and thus treat other bodies (p. 151). In a later example of such an argument, Moriarty and
Harrison (2008) studied the effect of television-viewing on 315 Black and White first-, second-,
and third-grade boys and girls and found that, for girls, ‘there was a significant relationship between
television exposure and disordered eating over time, regardless of initial level of disordered eating
and other controls’ (p. 372). Published between 2000 and 2008, these articles all argue that chil-
dren’s understanding of bodies can be affected by media, including by animation and other chil-
dren’s programming.
Second, by the mid- to late-2000s, researchers started to qualify their arguments, suggesting
that media’s effect on girls’ understanding of bodies is not universal. While reviewing research on
this topic, Levine and Murnen (2009: 31) argue that ‘the content, use, and experience of mass
media – in and of themselves, and in the context of synergistic messages from peers, parents, and
coaches – renders them a possible causal risk factor’, primarily when the mass media is reinforced
through a child’s environment. This language is much more cautious and begins to position media
effects within a wider context. In fact, many scholars after Levine and Murnen begin to focus on
contextual details that may affect how media affects children. For example, López-Guimerà et al.
(2010) argue that, among other things, ‘Developmental factors, ethnicity (including level of eth-
nic identity and acculturation), cross-cultural differences and similarities … and the impact of
new(er) media’ may all affect how children internalize such concepts as the thin ideal or body
dissatisfaction from media sources (p. 409). Some scholars even argue that viewers’ personalities
affect how they internalize media messages. For example, while studying young women, Roberts
and Good (2010: 214) found that ‘Women high in neuroticism appeared uniquely vulnerable to
Rowe 27

the deleterious effects of these [negative body] images’ while ‘high levels of the other traits’,
including conscientiousness, openness to experience, extroversion, and agreeableness, ‘tended to
be associated with more favorable feelings about themselves following exposure to idealized
images’. In a meta-analytic review, Ferguson (2013) concurred with Roberts and Good, arguing
that ‘the argument that media effects on body dissatisfaction are widespread, strong, and popula-
tion-wide is not supported by the available evidence’ but that ‘the data across experimental stud-
ies support the assertion of Roberts and Good’ that women with certain personality traits were
susceptible to media influence over body image (p. 32).
Third, and most recently, scholars argue that media might not affect girls’ body image at all.
Ferguson et al. (2014) studied ‘whether television and social media use could predict body dis-
satisfaction and eating disorder symptoms in teen girls, beyond what would be expected from
peer competition in real life’ and found that ‘only peer competition, not television or social
media use, predicted negative outcomes’, suggesting that factors other than media have been the
real cause of body image issues (p. 9). Ferguson et al.’s study, like many before it, focused on
teenage girls, but, as more focus has been spent on younger girls and their media, scholars have
been more hesitant to argue that media has any real effect on body image. For example, Coyne
et al. (2016) found that, for children younger than six, ‘engagement [with Disney Princess mate-
rials] was not associated with concurrent body esteem for either boys or girls’ in either a negative
or positive way (p. 1922), confirming Hayes and Tantleff-Dunn’s (2010: 424) assertion that
‘very young girls do not appear to be affected by these messages in ways comparable to their
older counterparts.’ Anschutz et al. (2012: 611) even argue that ‘young girls who internalised the
thin ideal felt better about their body after exposure to thin ideal cartoon characters than after
exposure to characters (animated or real) with no thin ideal features’, suggesting that animation
may have a positive effect on girls’ body image.
Each of these responses is more or less chronologically bound: those who believe in media’s
effect published between 2000 and 2008, those who qualified their arguments published between
2009 and 2013, and those who argued against media’s effect published between 2010 and 2016.
While these date ranges overlap, they do show a pattern: the further into the new millennium schol-
ars publish, the less likely they are to believe that media affects body image negatively. While some
of this shift may be due to methodological differences,7 these studies do not account for changing
images in the media. For example, Coyne et al. (2016) and Hayes and Tantleff-Dunn (2010) study
characters like the Disney princesses and how that image affects young girls. They view the Disney
princesses as a single unit because the princesses all have small waists and thus appear thin even
though these characters have different shapes, often due to when the princess was designed, so
when girls do not internalize one definitive message from the princesses, they argue that girls are
simply unaffected by media.
To resolve this critical impasse, I argue that there has been a shift in the frequency of certain
body shapes that may complicate the body messages girls receive. The two graphs below show
how body shape frequency has shifted over the last 30 years. Figure 2 shows how many examples
of each body shape appear in each 4-year block. As can be seen, the first block does not have much
diversity in body shape: Hourglass is the predominant shape with a few outlying Pear shapes. As
time goes by, more body shapes appear more often. Figure 3 tells the same story but with a differ-
ent emphasis: this graph shows the percentage of characters who have each body shape for each
year block. In Figure 2, we see that the Hourglass shape has more or less the same number of bod-
ies for each time block (5, 3, 16, 5, 7, 8, 4), with only one block acting as outlier, suggesting that
the Hourglass shape has maintained its overall frequency levels. However, Figure 3 shows that the
Hourglass shape has decreased in percentage of shapes shown (~ 63%, 43%, 42%, 16%, 24%,
13%, 6%), suggesting that its dominance has been diluted by other shapes. Both graphs show the
28 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 14(1)

Figure 2.  A bar graph representing the number of characters with each body shape in 4-year blocks. ©
Rebecca Rowe.

increased use of the Rectangle shape as well as the maintained use of the Pear shape, suggesting
that these two body shapes have become more dominant in the last 20 years as the Hourglass shape
becomes less dominant. This data suggests that girls have access to more diverse body shapes than
even two decades ago.
Hourglass, Pear, and Rectangle shapes all have small waists and so may be called thin by
those analyzing body size, so it might not seem significant that animators shifted from one type
of small-waisted shape to another. Most scholars studying body image focus primarily if not
solely on body size. From obesity to the ‘thin ideal’, these articles focus on the size of the char-
acters, the size of the young girl participants, and the size the participants wish to be, but not on
body shape. The few times that shape is mentioned, it is used as another descriptor of body size
rather than a description of actual shape. For instance, Harrison (2000) includes ‘Body Shape
Standards’ in the title of her article on how media affects young girls’ eating disorders, but the
sub-heading for ‘body shape standards’ is followed by a discussion of body size and ideal body
size (p. 627). By focusing on body size, researchers describe a binary: they study thinness and
obesity, but rarely discuss the various shapes women’s bodies have, masking the wider array of
bodies that exists both in media and in real life by implying that the only way to describe a body
is by its size. These scholars treat a thin Hourglass-shaped character the same as a thin Pear-
shaped or Rectangle-shaped character because the body weight is relatively similar, even if it is
located in different parts of the body.
However, the differences between Hourglass and Pear are especially significant because they
emphasize body weight in different areas. An Hourglass-shaped character, such as Jasmine from
Aladdin (1992), often has an exaggeratedly small waist that almost seems biologically impossible.
The large parts of her body are the sexualized parts (breasts and hips), emphasizing her sexuality
while effectively erasing the part of the body where vital organs are located. A Pear-shaped char-
acter, such as Disgust from Inside Out (2015), on the other hand, generally has a waist proportional
to her bust and a larger posterior. This shape has become so popular that Maria Hart (2015) says
that the ‘booty bonanza’ is ‘this decade’s contribution to the shifting landscape of women’s body
image’, but people with many different body sizes can have Pear body shapes. For example, char-
acters in my study who have a Pear shape can be as thin as Yzma from The Emperor’s New Groove
(2000) or as overweight as Sophie from Anastasia (1997). The prevalence of the Pear shape com-
plicates current studies which focus on body size because Pear-shaped characters have areas of the
body that are ‘thin’ and areas that are ‘overweight’. As more and more characters have Pear shapes,
there are more shapes available to girls to understand what they can look like, suggesting that we
Rowe 29

Figure 3.  A bar graph representing the percent of characters with each body shape in four-year blocks.
© Rebecca Rowe.

need to look at body shape to understand the complex body messages of today’s films instead of
just body size.
However, the Rectangle shape has also risen in popularity, even more drastically than the Pear
shape. The Rectangle shape often, though not always, has a small waist and so may be considered
thin in body-size conversations. This corresponding rise in Rectangle-shaped characters with the
rise in Pear-shaped characters may explain why researchers have been getting mixed results: girls
see characters that have clearly overall thin figures in positive roles, but they also see characters in
positive roles who have thin waists and large hips. These two images of bodies both have small
waists and so may seem thin to body-size scholars, but they are drastically different shapes. The
diversification of body shapes over the last three decades coupled with the concurrent rise in two
competing body shapes may explain why researchers no longer gather conclusive data on how
media affects body image: the image has become images, and it is difficult to see how all the
diverse images may affect girls’ own body image if researchers are only looking at body size.

Analyzing younger bodies

One of the major shifts in representation over the last 20 years is the growing number of Girl char-
acters, most of whom have the increasingly popular Rectangle shape. I argue that young girls may
relate to Girl characters more than Young-Adult characters, so researchers should study the body
shape of these younger characters. Many studies on how media affect young girls’ body image
focus on the leading ladies of film and television, primarily Young-Adult, voluptuous women who
are much older than the girls being studied. Herbozo et al. (2004) study predominantly children’s
movies with few or no major child characters in them, such as many of the Disney Princess films,
Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and The Wizard of Oz. Anschutz et al. (2012) study children’s media
about high-school-aged characters, including animated shows like Kim Possible. Dohnt and
Tiggemann (2006) focus on some children’s shows but primarily shows that feature adult bodies,
such as Friends and pop music video shows, which focus on singers who are in their late teenage
years or adulthood. These studies, and many others, focus on how Young Adult characters do or do
not affect young girls. This issue becomes glaringly obvious in studies on children’s animation in
particular. For example, Coyne et al.’s (2016) and Hayes and Tantleff-Dunn’s (2010) studies on
how Disney affects young girls focus only on the Disney princesses or similar characters, such as
the titular character in Anastasia (1997). These Young-Adult heroines (as well as the models,
30 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 14(1)

Figure 4.  A pie chart representing the percentages of Young-Adult characters studied displaying each
body shape, developed from data compiled by author. © Rebecca Rowe.

actresses, and singers studied by others) often possess big breasts, small waists, and large hips, but
they do not exist within a vacuum. By focusing on the most prevalent image of bodies (the image
of the Young-Adult woman), the researchers may have missed other important images of bodies in
television and film that may also affect girls.
In fact, my study suggests that these Young-Adult characters have distinctive body shapes that
may make it seem like animated characters have a particular shape if researchers only focus on that
age range. Figure 4 shows that approximately 31 percent of Young-Adult characters have an
Hourglass shape while approximately 35 percent have a Pear shape, both body shapes that often
have small waists with exaggerated curves. I found that Young Adults are much more likely to have
an Hourglass shape than Girls younger or women older than them. In fact, Figure 5 shows that
nearly twice as many animated female characters have a Rectangle shape than have an Hourglass
shape. If researchers focus on this Young-Adult group, then they will see mostly characters with
small waists and overly curvy body shapes, shapes that do not correspond to overall body-shape
trends. One might safely hypothesize that a monolithic image like the curvy Young-Adult character
would affect how girls perceive body image because the voluptuous image seems the only image
available. However, recent studies which focus on Young-Adult characters, such as Cordwell’s
‘The shattered slipper project’ (2016), find that young girls have not internalized the images they
see in the media. Cordwell’s 10-year-old respondents ‘expressed frustration with the proportions
of the [Disney, Young-Adult] princesses, as they do not accurately reflect those of real [girls]’, so
Cordwell concluded that girls were simply unaffected by media representations of female bodies
(p. 42). When girls like Cordwell’s participants critique rather than glorify the image of animated
Young-Adult female characters, researchers assume that media does not affect girls at all.
While scholars focus on images of Young-Adult characters, research suggests that girls may
identify more with, and thus may be affected by, characters their own age. Tian and Hoffner (2010)
argue that when people see a character like themselves, they are more likely to act like that character
than a character they perceive as dissimilar to themselves because viewers develop parasocial rela-
tionships. They define parasocial relationships as the relationships that viewers feel they have with
people in film and television, ‘characterized by minimal or no actual interactivity’ which most often
Rowe 31

Figure 5.  A pie chart representing the percentages of all female characters studied displaying each body
shape, developed from data compiled by author. © Rebecca Rowe.

‘occur while viewing a media representation’ (pp. 251–252). They discovered that ‘perceived simi-
larity was related to respondents’ efforts to emulate the behavior and characteristics of characters’
because ‘perceived similarity played an important role both in the process of identifying with a
character during media consumption and in the development of a parasocial bond’. Moreover, once
viewers have formed these parasocial relationships, they ‘may adopt certain attitudes or behavior
because they have observed them in characters with whom they have parasocial relationships’ (pp.
263–264). Effectively, Tian and Hoffner found that when viewers believe that they are similar to a
character, they identify with them, which then leads to parasocial relationships; these parasocial
relationships cause people to change not only their perceptions and ideals but also how they act.8
I build on this research to hypothesize that Girl characters may strongly affect young girls
because girls may form these parasocial relationships with Girl characters. This is not to say that
girls do not have parasocial relationships with Young-Adult characters; after all, many of these
films have no Girl characters and star Young Adults. However, for those movies with both Young-
Adult and Girl characters, girls may form stronger parasocial bonds with the Girl characters than
with the Young-Adult characters and so may internalize body messages from the younger charac-
ters, even if the older characters are featured more prominently. Moreover, as Figure 6 demon-
strates, films are including more and more Girl characters, with films such as Despicable Me
(2010), Despicable Me 2 (2013), Rise of the Guardians (2012), and The Peanuts Movie (2015)
containing many different Girl-aged characters and more movies containing at least one Girl-aged
character. There are still more Young-Adult characters than Girl characters, but the gap shrinks for
every year block. As Girl characters become more prominent, we should analyze the Girl charac-
ters along with the Young-Adult characters already under consideration to see if these younger
bodies affect girls differently.
My study shows that Girl bodies are overwhelmingly different from their Young-Adult compan-
ions. Perhaps unsurprisingly, 93 percent of all Girl characters in this study have a Rectangle shape,
as can be seen in Figure 7, the shape that most clearly correlates with prepubescent girls’ bodies
32 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 14(1)

Figure 6.  A bar chart representing the number of characters for each 4-year block broken down into
three age ranges: Girl, Young Adult, and Adult, or any character older than Young Adult. © Rebbeca
Rowe.

Figure 7.  A pie chart representing the percentages of Girl characters studied displaying each body shape,
developed from data compiled by author. © Rebecca Rowe.

due to the lack of breasts and hips most often developed during puberty. These Rectangle shapes
can sometimes appear thin, such as Penny from Mr. Peabody and Sherman (2014) mentioned
above, while other times, the characters can appear to have more weight, such as Lilo from Disney’s
Lilo & Stitch (2002). Researchers may have looked at these characters’ different body sizes, but
most of the Girl characters have a similar shape, a shape that is not overly busty for a prepubescent
girl and thus does not correspond to the Young-Adult shape.
Yet Girl body shapes are not being studied. The focus on Young-Adult bodies suggests that girls
are affected by bodies that they aspire to be some day, but not those that look like them today. I argue
Rowe 33

that research on parasocial relationships indicates otherwise, especially since recent films place Girl-
aged characters in leading and heroic roles, encouraging girls to bond with these younger characters.
Girl characters can be heroes who face great odds in decidedly Girl bodies, like Lilo, or they can grow
and learn, making mistakes and having to overcome obstacles, like Penny. Movies can even provide
differently-aged Girl bodies so that girls of any age can find themselves on screen, as the Despicable
Me series does. These Girls are strong and weak and cool and nerdy and naive and smart and girly
and tomboyish, etc. These characters provide plenty of personalities and bodies for girls to bond with,
so researchers may need to consider how the images of Girl body shapes affect how girls perceive
their own bodies in tandem with the images of Young-Adult bodies that they already assess.

Conclusion
My study suggests that researchers have not been able to determine a clear effect that animation has
on girls’ body image because they are focusing on one stagnant image of Young-Adult characters
rather than animation’s diverse body shapes which change over time. When researchers view ani-
mated female bodies as all the same, they believe that girls have only one image to internalize. When
girls do not internalize this singular image, researchers assume that animation does not affect girls’
body image. However, girls’ body image may be affected by animation, just in a more complex way
than what researchers are currently studying. As Pear and Rectangle shapes become more prominent
in animation, girls have a wider range of shapes to see, understand, and internalize that is currently
masked by the body-size conversation. Likewise, young girls, who are likely to form parasocial
relationships with Girl-aged characters, may be affected by animated Girls’ Rectangle body shape
more than what the current conversation about Young-Adult characters suggests. This article does
not measure whether these more complex images actually affect young girls. I can see from the body
shapes within these films that animated body images are more complex and interesting than current
research suggests, which I hypothesize causes a disparity in researchers’ results, but this hypothesis
still needs to be tested. I encourage researchers to engage with the more complex patterns of body
shape to resolve the differing findings in the current scholarship.
I hope this project leads to exciting further research. I have suggested two ways that we can
analyze body shape (by when the character was created and by character age), but there are many
other traits that could be considered. In the preliminary data-collecting stage, I also looked at the
role a character plays within the plotline, and I found some interesting patterns. For instance, while
heroines have the Hourglass shape often discussed (and explored above), characters filling other
roles have less clear trends, such as women of all body shapes occupying the villain role. Does this
suggest that heroines predominantly have one body shape but villains can be any shape? Moreover,
as suggested in an earlier footnote, one could study race and body shape; do animators give certain
races specific body shapes more often than others? Do these body shapes correspond to realistic
trends? In my data set, there are still not enough characters of color to determine any trends, but
moving forward, that may change. There may be other traits worth tracking along with the body
shape, such as ability, morality, audience identification, setting of the film (both location and time),
changes between movies in series, studio preferences, animation styles, particular artist or director
styles, and so many more that I have not explored here. There may be any number of connections
between body shape and girls’ body image that we have not begun to consider, so I encourage
researchers to find and discuss those connections.

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit
sectors and there is no conflict of interest.
34 animation: an interdisciplinary journal 14(1)

Notes
1. Full details, including the films consulted, the characters studied, and the body shapes assigned can be
made available to interested parties.
2. According to both Box Office Mojo and IMDb on 9 June 2018, although these numbers are constantly
updating and may change.
3. The Disney renaissance began in 1989 and lasted for approximately 10 years during which time Disney
released 10 chart-topping films. These films made Disney relevant again for both viewers and scholars,
as can be seen by Giroux’s (1994) article, published halfway through the renaissance and arguing that
Disney and animation was just beginning to take over children’s culture. For more on the Disney renais-
sance, see Waking Sleeping Beauty (2010), a documentary covering the years leading up to the renais-
sance and explaining how the renaissance happened.
4. There are a few movies in my study, like Shrek (2001) and Toy Story (1995), which have several sequels.
Each sequel is included, and repeating characters, like Fiona, are included each time for two reasons: (1)
the character is still being seen and can still affect the way girls understand body shape. The character
being seen over and over again in different situations may actually enforce body shape messages even
more, so the repetition of the characters in my data reflects this increased influence possibility; (2) some-
times the body shape changes from film to film. This happens often when a character grows up (as can
be seen with Molly Davis in the Toy Story series), but sometimes the character is just reimagined from
one film to the next. Their inclusion reflects this change.
5. In the real world, some people have differently shaped and abled bodies. As yet, these differences do not
appear in animation in significant numbers and so will not be discussed. However, later studies may need
to consider how body shape affects differently-abled characters and people.
6. While I did most of the data compilation on my own, my colleague, Kaitlin Downing, helped determine
the shape and age of all the Disney characters, for which I am most grateful.
7. For instance, Herbozo et al. (2004) and Klein and Shiffman (2005, 2006) analyze the body messages they
see in films. Hayes and Tantleff-Dunn (2010), on the other hand, interviewed girls about body messages
and watched how they played after the girls watched Disney Princess films, and Coyne et al. (2016)
conducted surveys with children and their parents and teachers to see how children understood their own
bodies after increased exposure to Disney princesses. These later, more reception-based studies provided
some doubt that media affects girls’ body image, but they also focused on the Young-Adult characters
without considering how their bodies changed over time.
8. While outside the scope of this study, it would be interesting to consider how race may affect this iden-
tification. Scholars such as Hurley (2005) have already found that the Disney Princess line affects how
young Black girls view their race, so it may be interesting to see how the race of characters affects how
girls perceive body shape. Other traits may also affect this identification and parasocial relationship, such
as class, nationality, culture, ability, or sexuality.

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Author biography
Rebecca Rowe is a PhD student and First-Year-Writing Graduate Assistant at the University of Connecticut.
Her research interests include children’s literature and film, adaptations to and from the screen, fairy tales, and
depictions of the body in children’s culture. She has published in Children’s Literature and Adaptation.