Good Girls and Wicked Witches

American womanhood as seen through the eyes of Disney

Looks at how human female characters have been represented during the first 60 years of feature-length animation at Disney. Tallying up which films have had human females in leading roles and analysing how such issues as activity/passivity have been handled, this book re-examines the notion that Disney heroines are rewarded for passivity.

In 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.