Davis Amy M. Good Girls and Wicked Witches: Women in Disney’s Feature Animation

John Libbey Publishing, 2011. — 356 p. — ISBN: 978-0-86196-901-2In Good Girls and Wicked Witches, Amy M. Davis re-examines the notion that Disney heroines are rewarded for passivity. Davis proceeds from the assumption that, in their representations of femininity, Disney films both reflected and helped shape the attitudes of the wider society, both at the time of their first release and subsequently. Analyzing the construction of (mainly human) female characters in the animated films of the Walt Disney Studio between 1937 and 2001, she attempts to establish the extent to which these characterizations were shaped by wider popular stereotypes. Davis argues that it is within the most constructed of all moving images of the female form―the heroine of the animated film―that the most telling aspects of Woman as the subject of Hollywood iconography and cultural ideas of American womanhood are to be found.Film as a Cultural Mirror
A Brief History of Animation
The Early Life of Walt Disney and the Beginnings of the Disney Studio, 1901–1937
Disney Films 1937–1967: The “Classic” Years
Disney Films 1967–1988: The “Middle” Era
Disney Films 1989–2005: The “Eisner” Era
Disney’s full-length animated feature films
Disney films analysed in this study, with plot summaries