Disney Heroines and America:

Yesterday and Today

Haley Hayes
English 311c
Section 02

Movies reflect current American values. Symbols and signs of these shifting values creep into every aspect of the American people’s lives. The entertainment industry provides an example by depicting the powerful influence animated heroines have on cultural trends. In animation, the heroine archetype has come to mean the “ideal person”: a symbol of the qualities, attitudes, popular trends, and those socially acceptable norms which are the most desirable. Has the public brought this upon themselves by buying into the movie-madness scheme, which dictates how one should think, feel, and, in part, be? This introduces another interesting question: Does the shift in societal values affect the nature and content of animation, or do the values portrayed in animation and public’s willingness to be overpowered create these changes in American beliefs? Regardless of which comes first, analyzing a character is synonymous with analyzing the culture from which the character is spawned. These symbols in animation, unfortunately, don’t always depict America’s best values and more often than not are targeted at children. Truly, the influential impact of animation on children is most perfectly depicted in the famed Walt Disney Heroines. These Disney girls have come to reflect America’s ever-changing values and the evolution of its popular culture. Despite the public’s initial skepticism, Walt Disney chose to create the world’s first feature-length animated film on December 21, 1937. Snow White hit theaters, ironically grossing 80 million dollars in the U.S. alone! Snow White not only pioneered a great new entertainment field, it was a significant screen innovation in which millions of families would increasingly identify with the characters projected on their