A while back, during my usual cartoon research, I noticed this interesting thing going on in Disney’s 1933 Silly Symphony, The Three Little Pigs. I’ve explained it to several people, including my largely disinterested History of Animation students, but I’ve never actually written it up until now.
In short, I see a major strain of castration anxiety running through this cartoon. It presents masculinity as something both invaluable and precarious, and indeed takes that masculinity away from one character in a stunningly direct depiction of emasculation.
We begin with this premise: In this cartoon, characters with their masculinity intact are recognizable because they wear pants. It’s pretty straightforward, really. If a character wears pants, we assume they have genitals. If they don’t wear pants (this not being a Ralph Bakshi cartoon) we can see that they lack genitals. And of course, in keeping with the cultural associations surrounding masculinity, those who wear pants and have genitals are depicted as virile, competent, and empowered to enact their wills upon the world. Those lacking pants and genitals are flippant, ineffectual, powerless creatures. This is, it should go without saying, a harmful and inaccurate view of the intersection between physical sex and social roles, but it’s certainly the view at play in this cartoon.
We first observe this conflation of pants, sex, and power in the portrayal of the three pigs. Fifer Pig and Fiddler Pig lack pants, displaying their featureless, Porky-esque loins to the world. Practical Pig, on the other hand, is fully equipped with a pair of overalls (as well as a deeper, more masculine voice than the other two). He’s also, in addition to being practical, the only pig who displays any courage or heroism. Fifer and Fiddler claim not to be afraid of the Big Bad Wolf, but they lack the cojones to stand up to him when he shows up. Upon his arrival, we see that the Wolf also wears pants, his aggressive masculinity enabling him to blow down houses and bully the poor neutered piggies. When he comes up against Practical Pig’s house of bricks, however, that changes.
I recommend the entire cartoon* if you haven’t seen it in a while, but if you just want to see the Wolf’s emasculation, go to 6:44:
Yes, once the Big Bad Wolf runs into the superior, brick-hard masculinity of Practical Pig, he loses his pants and turns out to be no more equipped than Fifer and Fiddler. Robbed of his ability to blow houses down, he attempts to sneak in through the chimney. Of course, this only leads to further injury for his nether regions, and the emasculated Wolf flees, emitting high pitched yelps and howls as he goes.
The Wolf’s emasculation continues in his next Silly Symphony appearance, but I’m saving that for a separate entry.
I’ve been trying to decide if the “pants=masculinity” theory can be applied to other classic cartoons. It definitely doesn’t work outside of Disney, as Bugs Bunny and Bimbo the Dog are both active, libidinous, and pantsless. As for the other Disney shorts, I can see Donald Duck as possibly less virile than Mickey, but is he really more ineffectual than Goofy? And what does this say about Pluto? Clearly, further research is needed.
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*This version of The Three Little Pigs, by the way, is the sanitized version in which the Wolf’s “Fuller Brush Man” disguise is less of a Jewish stereotype than in the original (although the voice is unchanged). If you’d like to see it with antisemitism intact, go here.
I can’t really call myself an animation blogger, but I’m certainly a film blogger who has a vocal love of animation (particularly classic American animation). As such, I felt obligated to see The Princess and the Frog, Disney’s return to hand drawn musical fairy tales, but I wasn’t terribly enthusiastic. The trailer was a jumble of too many disparate elements, and to be honest I was a little annoyed they didn’t hire someone more daring than Randy Newman to do the music. I love Newman’s work, and I know he knows his way around the music of New Orleans (and everywhere else), but it would’ve been nice to see the job go to someone younger, hipper, and maybe, you know, black.
Newman does, of course, pull through just fine. The music isn’t knock-your-socks-off spectacular, but it’s fun while it’s happening and it moves the story along. In addition to the swinging jazz that plays in the New Orleans sequences, there’s also some zydeco (performed by fireflies) when the story moves out into the bayou, and a great (spiritually nonspecific) gospel number by the wise woman character, Mama Odie. I was disappointed that the Shadow Man’s big number wasn’t a little stronger, because villain songs are often my favorite. “Friends on the Other Side” starts out great, but it peters out for too long when the tarot readings start, and the climax seems to come from nowhere.
The story follows a pretty simple romance/quest/overcoming adversity formula, but it stays pretty engaging throughout. Disney also does their best to make amends for some of the damaging messages they’ve injected into the culture in the past. The explicitly stated moral of this story is that you have to work to build the life you want- you can’t just wish on a star or wait for your prince to come. I loved how they deal with Prince Naveen’s acknowledgment that his pampered upbringing has left him with almost no useful skills. I also thought it was a nice touch that the spoiled rich girl, Charlotte, turns out to be a decent person and a good friend, just a problematic one. Making her a villain in the end would have been both easier and far less interesting.
As far as the race thing which many people (myself included) were just waiting for Disney to screw up, I think they did okay. The movie feels a little focus-grouped at times, but I’d call that an improvement over egregious racism. If the protagonist were white, the portrayals of the villain and helpful wise woman as black would be unfortunate, but with a majority-black cast everything seems pretty balanced out. The ambiguity of Prince Naveen’s race is a little strange, particularly in the way he seems to be regarded by the film’s version of 1920′s society as an acceptable partner for either black or white women. Regardless of where he’s from (my guess was somewhere in French-colonized North Africa), it’s hard to believe that the Americans he meets wouldn’t want to immediately box him into a racial identity they understand and keep him there. Perhaps this is meant to be his aristocratic privilege mixed with the unique cultural dynamic of New Orleans?
The look of the film was beautiful, taking the old school Disney aesthetic and bringing it adeptly into the 21st Century. I loved the character designs, except for the Cajun firefly, who was a little too overtly silly-looking for me. Mama Odie was especially great, particularly the way her skin hangs off her face in the manner of the very old. Charlotte’s design was also a standout. You can see how she’d be regarded as a pretty girl, but her pug face has none of the classic Disney beauty about it. Tiana, in contrast, is immediately recognizable (for better or worse) as a “Disney Princess,” despite any efforts to give her recognizably black facial features. The frogs that she and Naveen transform into capture their human personalities to an impressive degree, while still maintaining their frogness (frogocity?).
Marketing aside, will The Princess and the Frog stand the test of time and be regarded as a Disney classic? Eh. Who knows what that even means anymore. It will certainly stand up better than anything they’ve made since The Lion King (all respect to the dedicated fans of The Emperor’s New Groove and Lilo and Stitch), which is no small feat. I hope that it leads to more big-scale animated musicals, and particularly more that are set in the last hundred years, and more protagonists of color. For all the problems people have with the stuff Disney produces (many of which I agree with), I’d love to see them go back to being a force to be reckoned with in the animation world, instead of continuing to focus their energy in the realms of television and pop music.
Since I’ve become rather busy with school, I’ve decided to let other writers handle some Character Spotlights. This will also give us some insights into characters that I haven’t necessarily spent much time considering. This first one is by my sister, Jill Meredith Collins Sinnott, a talented feminist writer who’s been published in Off Our Backs. –Dustin L.
Character Spotlight: Jessica Rabbit by Jill Meredith Collins Sinnott
Visitors to this blog are doubtlessly familiar with female sexuality as expressed through animation, which for years took the form of Betty Boop. However, in 1988, Betty made an appearance in Who Framed Roger Rabbit, wherein she briefly shared screen time with another, more colorful, far bustier female: Jessica Rabbit, the title character’s wife.
Betty Boop seems to realize and accept that she’s being upstaged. She works as a cigarette girl at the Ink and Paint Club during Jessica’s performance, and calmly picks up Eddie Valiant’s jaw when he drops it after seeing Jessica for the first time.
I don’t think Betty needs to worry too much. Betty Boop may be past her prime, but her curves will always be appreciated for being both hot and realistic. Every woman I know appreciates the fact that broad hips and meaty thighs were once considered glamourous, even without a tiny waist between them.
Jessica Rabbit, on the other hand, sports an almost comically tiny waist and a bust so large that her strapless, backless dress seems to be defying gravity. Her legs are shapely (and fully exposed by an immodestly high slit in her dress), and it seems impossible that her slender ankles and dainty feet could support everything else. In short, Jessica’s sex appeal is so over-the-top and in-your-face that it’s difficult to take it seriously. As John Grant notes in the Encyclopedia of Walt Disney’s Animated Characters, “She is more a caricature of a desirable woman than any pretence of an accurate depiction of one.” I suppose that’s why it’s so easy for me, like Betty Boop, to laugh off the male viewer’s reaction to Jessica Rabbit: not only could I not look like that if I tried, I wouldn’t really want to.
Neither, it stands to reason, does Jessica Rabbit. She tells Eddie Valiant, “You don’t know how hard it is being a woman looking the way I do.” She may use her overwhelming sensuality to her advantage (both in her occupation as a lounge singer and to get help with her husband’s legal troubles), but she’s a cartoon woman in 1947, and her resources are limited.
She may not even be flirtatious by choice–the movie makes it clear that toons answer to different laws of physics than humans do. Roger states that he can only do what is funny, so perhaps Jessica can only do what is sexy. But the restraints of their nature didn’t stop them from falling in love and remaining faithful to one another, which is really the heart of why Who Framed Roger Rabbit is one of my favorite movies, and also why I feel the need to defend Jessica Rabbit.
My husband has said many times that the song “Rescue” by Eve 6 reminds him of the beginning of our relationship. This song contains the line “Like Jessica Rabbit, she collects bad habits, gets her drinks for free,” which compels me to ask what Jessica Rabbit and I could possibly have in common, other than a taste for somewhat goofy men. My husband just rolls his eyes and tells me I’m taking the song too literally, which is, of course, true. It’s that same tendency towards the literal that makes me ask, “What do they mean, Jessica Rabbit collects bad habits?”
Think about it. Jessica is established in pop culture as a woman whose reputation precedes her, but what has she ever done to warrant that reputation? In the course of the movie, the only morally questionable thing she does is pose for patty cake pictures, and we soon learn that she was blackmailed into that. She truly loves her husband, and remains fiercely loyal to him (she does hit him on the head with a frying pan at one point, but it’s for his protection).
Jessica’s signature line is “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way.” It’s my opinion that the line is less of a joke than an honest statement. Her sad tone of voice makes it clear that she’s resigned herself to the hard truth that female sexuality is seen as mainstream society as “bad.” What she’s referring to, specifically, is Eddie Valiant’s assumption that she must be a slut. From the moment Eddie lays eyes on her, he assumes that she’s guilty of adultery, that a woman like her couldn’t possibly be satisfied by Roger Rabbit. He figures the marriage must be a joke to her, like it is to everyone else. But Eddie is wrong. As soon as they meet face to face, Jessica makes it clear that she loves her husband. It was out of concern for his career that she allowed herself to be blackmailed, and now that Roger’s being accused of murder, she’ll do anything to clear his name.
Ultimately, Jessica Rabbit is just one more woman being pigeonholed and stereotyped due to her appearance. Her problem is exacerbated by the fact that she is the product of someone’s drawing, giving her even less control over her appearance than the average woman. Given the fact that she wears the rather impractical evening gown throughout the entire film, I have to wonder if she’s even able to change clothes. If nothing else, it can’t be easy to find toon clothing to fit her measurements.
The husband and wife pair share little screen time, bringing dramatic effect to the final scenes, where Jessica showers her husband with kisses and compliments. They walk into the sunset together, and Jessica promises to bake Roger a carrot cake when they get home, fully rounding out her role as the perfect wife. Hope is restored among all the men in the audience, that one day the perfect woman will love them because they make her laugh.
Oddly, Kathleen Turner was uncredited for her role as the voice of Jessica Rabbit. The credits name the voice of each character who made a cameo appearance, each of the weasel henchmen, and each human bit part, but no credit appears for Jessica. Somehow, this oddity adds to her overall effect: perhaps Jessica Rabbit was never a cartoon character in a movie at all, but a force of nature, finding her own way onto the screen by sheer willpower. A woman will, after all, go to great lengths for the man she loves.
