Post-Princess Models Of Gender: The New Man In Pixar/Disney
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Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, and many other Disney movies all have one thing in common, they feature a female lead who need a male figure to save them. However, things started to change after the release of Mulan in 1988. Movies that were only representing female leads as weak and always needed to rely on someone, started to feature females who showed off their more masculine side. Mulan was one of the first animated film that had started to dive into that, not to mention it was based on a true story, making it even powerful. In the article Post-Princess Models of Gender: The New Man in Pixar/Disney, authors Ken Gillam and Shannon R. Wooden explored the idea that Pixar movies were starting to show male characters who weren't afraid to show their emotions and feminine attributes, to promote the New Man model. The…show more content… Gillam and Wooden effectively convey their argument that characters are evolving into a New Man, through the use of compare and contrast, examples of homosocial bonds between characters, and their own personal experience/ ideas of why this is important for films to do.
Gillam and Wooden compare and contrast many male characters from old Disney movies to characters in newer Pixar movies, who are all striving to be the alpha-male in their own way. “The phrase alpha male may stand for… unquestioned authority, physical power and social dominance, competitiveness for positions of status and leadership, lack of visible or shared emotion, social isolation” (Gillam and Wooden 472). Knowing how the authors describe the phrase alpha-male is important to understand why they think certain characters strive for this more effectively. Without analyzing how these characters exhibit these characteristics, the authors would have nothing to back up their