Gender first draft

Gender

 

When you look at the representation of women in early animation they are often drawn over sexualised and portrayed to be weak never the main hero even when they are the main character. Men on the other hand have always been shown to be strong characters, with a tall muscular build, like Superman. Fred Moore, who drew Minnie Mouse said about how although Minnie and Mickey mouse were drawn the same, there were certain things to make them different.

 

“In order to make Minnie as feminine as possible, we should use everything in her make up to achieve this end. Her mouth could be smaller than Mickey’s and maybe never open so wide into a simile, take, expression etc. her eyelids could help very much in keeping her feminine as well as the skirt swaying from the body on different posses, displaying pants. Carrying the little finger in the extended possession also helps.”

(Fred Moore.)          

 

It is very clear when watching Popeye cartoons from the 40s that the animators do portray women as the weaker sex. A typical episode consists of Popeye and his nemesis Bluto trying to win the affections of Olive Oil. Bluto would kidnap her often and maybe tie her to a railway line, and then Popeye would come in, have a violent fist fight with Bluto, and save Olive. Throughout this Olive would constantly be screaming “oh Popeye, save me save me.” Even in the episode I yam what I yam, olive is being attacked by a group of natives. She is quite clearly beating them by repeatedly punching them and sending them flying, but still she is calling for Popeye to save her. Then once again at the end she is in his arms as if he is the hero of the day, even though she probably took out just as many as he did. It’s the same with Disney’s the little mermaid (1989). Although she is the main character of the film, it is ultimately Eric who saves the day killing Ursula unlike the original book which sees her as the hero when she has to kill the prince at the end in order to return to the sea. She is unable to do this and dissolves into foam.

 

In contrast to the Disney film is the 1932 daily mirror strip Jane, a “strip tease cartoon” about a “…dizzy blond…” (Chapman 2011, 39). The typical story would follow Jane on a misadventure where she would eventually shed her clothes, most frequently by accident catching them on tree branches and doors, so she would end up in just her undergarments and on occasions completely nude.  In one misadventure it only takes five pages before she has to take her dress off after sitting on some wet paint with her saying, “Oh, dear, Fritz, I'm supposed to be here interrogating and I haven’t been here ten minuets before I do a strip-tease in front of a poster of myself in the to nix!” Although every day would see her eventually losing her clothes, she was still the main heroin and was a good refection of the changing times.

 

“…the daily mirror nevertheless provided a fairly good reflection of wartime changes in British society. Jane herself transformed from a frivolous ‘bright you thing’ whose life revolved around cocktail parties and juggling boyfriends to a ‘mobile woman’ who works on the land…”

(Chapman, 2011, 42.)

 

It became very popular during the Second World War being seen as good for moral. It was read by several servicemen of the time as well as young schoolboy, it being “their first real expositor to female sexuality.” (Chapman, 2011, 40.) During the Blitz however there was a shortage of paper meaning that there might not be a Jane strip sometimes resulting in no spirit amongst the services. Jane had such an impact in the ranks that the armed forces were sometimes referred to as “Jane’s fighting men,” even in parliament it is clamed. At this time she was a recruit for British Intelligence for colonel Y at Hus Hush House.

After the war had ended she was still made out to be useful, which was a reflection of what was going on in Britain. During the war women had taken over the jobs that would have usually been done by men proving that they were just as capable. After the war they demanded that they would stay in employment and was the start of more women going to work and equality for women. Jane reflected these growing changes. Although by modern day standards the content of Jane would be considered exploitive to women and sexiest, it was acceptable by the 1940s standards and appealed to both sexes, not just men. A survey conducted by the daily mail found that 82% of its women readers looked at Jane where as only 71% of its male readers did. But of course not all people did approve of the Jane strip. One reader wrote complaining about the “absurd” letters that were being sent in about the strip wrote…

 

“… I have not seen anything extra funny in this strip. I have been taking about it with the girls in our office and the verdict was universal- corny. For all it is doing is lowering the high standards of womanhood. I observed also that every letter sent in was from the opposite sex.”

 

It wasn’t just women folk who objected to Jane though. When she first appeared in 1945 in the armed forces newspaper The Maple Leaf, she caused much controversy within the Canadian ranks. One solder requested for her removal asking her to be tossed out “on her much displayed posterior.” Another described the strip as the work of “an inspired degenerate.”

One British lieutenant banned his whole battalion from reading Jane calling it an “unhealthy sex stimulate” and said that it was his duty to “protect my men from such moral degradation, and the temptation to immorality away form them.” But such was the popularity of Jane even the House of Commons were on her side and said that the Colonel had “over-stepped his mark.”

  

In john Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, once again like Crooks, it portrays Curlys wife in a view of the time. The men’s attitude toward her is that of a second class citizen, but she deals with it in a different way to Crooks. Crooks tries to keep himself to himself where as Curlys wife seems to play up to the view of her not being much use by flouncing herself about. Again, this was a view of the time about women and quite a contrast to Jane, who was being published in England at the same time. Steinbeck’s book reflected the still widespread view of women not being of any use. The characters don’t like Curlys wife because she keeps giving everyone “the eye” making them think of her as a bit of a slag, referring to her as “a tart”. But in reality she is just in want of attention which she finds in Lenny, but ends up dead because of it. What little power she does have she uses against Crooks the stable buck with the threat of getting him hung, as said in the chapter on race. It is also shown that she has more power than the white workers as well. When Candy stands up to her also in Crooks defence, she shoots him down telling him “Tell an’ be damned,” “Nobody’d listen to you, an’ you know it.”

The men also talk about going into town to spend their earnings at a brothel. This reflected that women at this time were just seen as objects for men to use whether it be for cleaning around the house, or sex, one of the main trades of Victorian women and still was in America. The view of women not being proper people is also reflected in the fact that Curlys wife is not given a name.

 

Equality for women in the work place is the theme of the Nigel Coles 2010 film, made in Dagenham. It is about the strike at Ford by the sewing machinists which started on the 7^th of June 1968. The female workers walk out in protest against sexual discrimination, after learning that they would be paid 15% less than the full rate received by men. This strike lead to the Equal Pay Act of 1970 law which came into force on the 29^th of December 1975. But women in the media were still being shown as the source of jokes. In 1968 the then newly created London Weekend Television broadcasted the first episode of the sitcom Never a cross word. It was extreme in its sexism, relying on the view of the women being stupid and just an object of Scopophilia and domestic housework. The plotline sees wife Deirdre played by Nyree Dawn Porterp as a scatterbrained wife who is banned from driving her new car by husband Ronald, portrayed by Paul Daneman, in case she crashes it after doing so in the opening of the episode. He gets her a new mini and she advises for a lodger to try and help pay for it as a way of thanks, Ronald being the one who goes out to work. He thinks that he is in charge of the house and her. This is highlighted from the very start when he tells her she should have got up when the alarm went off, and because she didn’t he is now late. When she questions why he doesn’t get up when the alarm goes off he replies, “because I am the bread winner and need those extra seconds to charge my batteries,” and then orders his breakfast. It is also shown from the start that Deirdre isn’t all that bright. When filling out the form to describe her car it asks the body type, she thinks it means her measurements not the cars. Ronald tells her to just sign it and he’ll fill out the rest later.

 On arriving home with the car he then tells her that he won’t give her the money to get ensured until she has had more lessons, so she goes about getting the money herself but he threatens to blacklist her and stop her from doing so. She then drives the new car without his knowledge and before she even has left the garage crashes it once again. She then says to the lodger, “some idiot has put the gear handle on the wrong way. You know that little diagram on top of the stick thing? Well I put it into reverse and it went forward.” The garage owner first offers to take payment in the form of a striptease from Deirdre for the repairs on the car, again showing women to be something just there for men to gaze upon for pleasure.

 

This paved the way for the typical 1970s comedies, witch are parodied nowadays. Things such as the carry on films, and on the buses, which are famous for their blatant sexism and innuendoes. In fact the whole plotline for the 1971 screen adaptation of on the buses is getting ride of the newly hired women drivers, which in the end they succeed at. The equality act is also referred to when Stan asks Jack what the union is doing about it he says, “There’s nothing they can do about it. Under then new act there can be no discrimination…”  It’s also similar to the plotline of carry on cabby form 1963. This sees a new cab firm run by women, Glamcabs, start up in town in competition with an all male one. The way they are shown to get customers is by basically looking sexy. But they are also shown to be just as efficient in contrast to on the buses. In both films their male contemporaries try and sabotage their operations. In on the buses they play various pranks like putting up signs to direct the women in the wrong direction, putting pills in their teas so they have to go to the toilet every five minuets, and placing spiders in the cab of the bus, because they assume that all women are scared of spiders. All these pranks pay off in the end and they get ride of the women drivers. But in carry on cabby the women come out on top. One of the men pulls off the fan belt from the engine of a Glamcab so that the battery runs down. But when he pulls up and sees her at the side of the road, she has a spare tucked under her skirt. Most of the time it just shows them at the side of the road broken down, with a male passenger fixing the car for them. So still it’s a man who comes to the aid and knows how to fix the mechanical problem. Although it shows women still being seen as sex objects, it also highlights how they in this film have learnt to use that to their advantage, especially in a time where they weren’t seen as equals and men to be the weaker sex in that they’ll do anything for a pretty face. The women make a point of saying how they are going to get the customers when they first get going. They are also shown to outsmart them men in a scene where one of them men dresses as a woman in order to let the others in and tamper with their cars to put them off the road. the women go along with it letting the men get in, only to spry them with water at the last second, forcing the manager of them men’s taxies to come in the next day to propose a truce.

 

So carry on cabby presents an interesting case if you look at when it was made. Its still shows sexism in the work place, but it’s highlighting the sexism in the world, showing the view of the useless woman in the male characters eyes, but then demonstrating that they are not useless but in fact just as good. It shows the male characters to be the stupid ones not knowing how to deal with competition. In on the buses and not a cross words, it uses women and sexism as the main joke, reinforcing the view of the useless woman. This is interesting as they were both made after carry on cabby, so shows a return to a sexist viewpoint. The theme of the on the buses film is also interesting as it was made at the time when the new equal pay act was just going through, so you would have thought that it might not have attempted to make women look stupid, it is very much an old-fashioned film considering when it was made. In carry on cabby it seems to be introducing the idea of women in the workplace as equals, then on the buses sees a complete step back in those terms.

 

But women themselves have also had an impact in the way they are represented in the world of animations and have used it to their advantage. In the Paul Wells book understanding animation he says about the representation of women in animation in a part called, Wayward girls and wicked women: the feminine aesthetic.

 

“… it is ironically, women filmmakers who have recognised animation as a form in which they can work and achieve significant ends that are not available in any other film form.”

(Wells, 1998. 198)

 

He talks about how it differs when women themselves design the look of these women and also how women animators have used animation in order to say things that they are unable to in live action, or male animators are unable to in the same way, again backing up another of my theories put forward in my introduction, that animation can be used in a way that live action cannot. Again looking at Jane in a time when nudity in or even partial nudity was socially unacceptable, the cartoon strip of Jane was able to get away with such things because it wasn’t real life whereas the model Chrystabel Leighton-Porter whom modelled for the artist was often subject to questions of her chosen profession.

 

“I suppose I was the only person in Britain whose war work was getting undressed.”

(Chrystabel Leighton-Porter.)

 

Evelyn Lambert was a very important person in terms of not just animation as she was the first female animator in Canada, but also film in general being one of the few women in the world during the 40s and 50s working as a co-director in any form of cinema. She implies that “the Disney industrial and aesthetic ethos was inherently informed by a lack of individuality and a fixedness in approach.” This view point backs up the idea that once Disney came into existence as an animation studio, the animators had a set of “rules” they had to follow and didn’t have the freedom they use to in the past, there was a set of guidelines they had to follow now, which is backed up with what Fred Moore said about drawing Minnie Mouse.

Popeye

Another classic cartoon I have looked at is Popeye. If you look at what I would call the proper cartoons, you can see that most of it is made up of violence. Each episode has the same basic story line being Popeye’s rivalry with Bluto to try and win over Olive Oil, who isn’t the most attractive woman in the world. In the first episode Popeye destroys an entire train line probably killing hundreds of people, just to save Olive, and in the 7^th episode in order to keep silence for a baby to sleep, he goes on a sort of killing spree. He punches a harp player to death, massacres a whole music school, sinks an entire cruse ship, knocks out a man on the wireless, destroys a construction site full of people, flattens, every car in a traffic jam, and above all this, he gives his pipe to the baby to smoke.

Popeye and Bluto constantly have to prove their manhood. This is illustrated the most in probably my favourite episode entitled, can you take it? This one is all about Popeye trying to join a club of men who just beat each other up. There is also a smoking competition, something you would never get away with in kids cartoons today. That is one of Popeye train marks as well, his pipe that never leaves his mouth. The whole of Popeye is so un-PC, but I love it. I never view it as anything other that just good plain fun. It’s not setting out to offend anyone.

 

Something else that makes me love Popeye is just the clever use of animation and how anything can happen. Things that do make sense, but still are completely absurd. There is a great bit in eat my spinach where Popeye punches a bull and when the bull lands on the ground it has turned into a meat market. In another episode Bluto is about to hit Popeye with a tree, but Popeye knocks him into the air. The tree comes down with Bluto and forms a coffin round him. Those sorts of silly things just don’t happen now, cartoons are just not fun.

Another thing you can see in Popeye which I love is the clever use of animation that I don’t think is used enough today. The overall shape of each character is so odd for a start. Whenever Olive is in trouble her arms wave in the most unnatural way as if she had about thirty separate bones in them.

There is a bit in family guy that illustrates the bazaar look of Popeye brilliantly.

 

Dumbo

The first thing I have looked at is the 1941 Disney film, Dumbo. This film is rated with a U certificate. I hadn’t seen it for many years now, but remember loving it when I was a child. On viewing it again, it struck me how bazaar the film was. I loved the classic animation style of the time, with the movement characters so fast paste and flexible no matter what their body shape.

The emotions that come across in their faces bring tears to you eyes, like the part when Dumbo goes to see his mother who has been incinerated, it’s very emotional. The style of animation can be quite dark in places, and I remembered finding a lot of it a little scary when I was young, but not being old enough to really understand, so I never got nightmares. There is a lot of rain in it, which adds to the horror. The part when they are putting up the tent I could see might give nightmares as it is very dark and the workers also are a tad scary. But in all these parts you usually get a break in the darkness with a little comic relief, like Dumbo making a little mistake, and the audience will go “awwww, how cute.” That is a common factor throughout the film. Dumbo is shown to be a cute little creature, an innocent minor. This adds to the character and you can really relate to him. But even with the cuteness of Dumbo, I think if you were to make this film now in the same style of dark animation, it would be rated as a PG. I don’t think that children would be as scared as the as the people who put certificates on films think, this has been proven as I never suffered from watching it over and over, but because things are too strict now. People do I think wrap kids up in cotton wall and are over protective sometimes. Another thing that stood out to me on viewing was the issue if race. When putting up the tent, the men are all black migrant workers. The owner of the circus and the performers are a white, and also the people who come to visit, like the children who torment Mrs Jumbo, are all white. This is something that had never occurred to me when I picked this film out to review, but again says a lot about the time it was made in and what was acceptable. I don’t think it was a deliberate attempted at being racist, it was just how things were at that time. The crows are also quite obviously black stereotypes, but still, I don’t think it was intended to be making fun of them; it was just used as their characters.

 

The next issue in this film that would certainly not be allowed now is the views on smoking and alcohol. One of the most famous parts of Dumbo is the song, “the elephants on parade.” This whole sequence in induced by Dumbo and his mouse friend Timothy drink too much campaign after the clowns spill it in the water bucket. It also shows the clowns constantly drinking too. If this film was made, it would have to incorporate the sequence in some other form, or cut it completely. I think that would be the most likely as when you do watch it is one of the freakiest bits in the film. A lot of people say that that part always scared them as a child, especially the part with the elephant made entirely of heads. They crows in the end are also smoking; something that would not be allowed at all in cartoons now. In those days however it was nothing. One of the crows wakes Timothy up by blowing smoke at him, and then repeatedly does so. Now if you tried putting that in a kids cartoon now people would be saying that it was encouraging children to smoke.

Some of the dialogue used is also very un-PC. On several occasions Dumbo is described as a freak because of his oversized ears, and on the side of his mothers prison it say mad elephant. You also wouldn’t get the level of abuse that the animals receive in the film nowadays. Circuses now don’t use as much animal acts; it is more gymnasts and clowns because of animal rights movements and the issue of animal cruelty. The film is of its time really, but that is still the way people envision circuses, even today. If you were to make a film involving a circus now, you would most probably include all the traditional animal acts in it even if they aren’t true of the time, because that it’s what people expect to see.

 

I think because of all the guide lines put down in, not just animation but in society itself, you would not be allowed to make a film like Dumbo now. it may seem a very sweet innocent film on the suffice, but when you scratch deep and take another look, there are many things that would not be allowed. This I think is a terrible shame, and means that some brilliant films might not be able to be made. If you’re only just thinking “oh that’s a good point, I never thought of that watching it. but now you say that, its true,” it just shows that it really doesn’t matter if you include smoking and drinking in a film like this because people don’t really think about it that much, they just want to enjoy the film. Ok so it might get a PG, but that doesn’t mean you have to cut so much out of it.