Structures of empowered protagonism

A codified analysis of female characters in contemporary North American animation cinema

Abstract

Cinema uses industrial narratives, which follow cycles of organization and reorganization. Within these cycles, structures, settings, and, above all, characters serve as mechanisms of construction – and, in their turn, are nourished by stereotypical social representations. This work starts from this observation to focus its attention on North American animated films from the years 2012 to 2022, with the aim of understanding how female characters interact with stereotypical characteristics during the supposed gender representational turn. The subject selection was made with a focus on films that had a greater social impact, aiming to analyze widely distributed films. To this end, after carefully selecting the works based on (1) the five highest-grossing films of each year within the established period and (2) based on the relevance of the characters in the narrative, we employ a coding methodology that, by watching the films, quantitatively scores each appearance of certain characteristics associated with gender roles. With this, we seek to make visible, through a heat map, the gender profile that the industrial cinema of animation actually assigns to its new protagonists.