Stop exaggerating feminine bodies in cartoons

With technology accessible for billions globally, it is common for children to grow up watching cartoons and engaging with other forms of animated media, such as graphic novels, comics, and animated films.

Children watch their favorite characters, such as Disney Princesses, heroines like Superwoman, or clever scientists like Honey Lemon with admiration. There is an endless list of characters that children idolize at a young age. However, most of these characters, especially female characters, possess attributes that people cannot physically achieve.

What most don’t recognize are the consequences of these characters’ bodies — each meticulously designed to have eyes larger than their waist, an hourglass figure, and unrealistic bodily proportions.

There are complex risks that come with over-exaggerating and sexualizing feminine body parts in animated media. Not only is it offensive and degrading to women, but it also creates a subconscious standard for young girls who look up to these characters.

One of the most popular mass media companies targeting a young audience is Walt Disney. This entertainment conglomerate appears in numerous countries around the world, featuring its characters through television, games, books, music, toys, and theme parks.

In Disney’s 1997 film, Hercules, the female protagonist Megara is depicted with an unbelievably slim waist, disproportionate to the rest of her body. As a young girl, I worshipped this character. Soon, I began to look in the mirror and hold my breath, envisioning the same waistline as Megara. Yet, I quickly realized that the size of my ribs and the length of my torso would not allow me to achieve her same look.

Women’s bodies are often fetishized for these exaggerated body parts. In our society, older men frequently objectify and lament the loss of characters’ “sex appeal” if body features such as the waist, breasts, or butt are not emphasized. For example, She-Ra from Netflix’s She-Ra and the Princesses of Power was openly criticized because her body was not “sexy enough.”

Since the late 20th century, these body images have been designed in the same sickening format in the majority of animated media, most of which is dedicated to a young audience. This furthers the growing self-esteem issues in young girls, and it pushes beauty standards onto kids from an incredibly young age.

A similar pattern occurs in Totally Spies, an animated Marathon Media series featuring three teenage female protagonists. They possess incredibly mature bodies, despite viewers being fully aware that these girls are children. 

In other cases, when animation attempts to portray characters who are slightly less slim or “curvy” like Jessica Rabbit, it often depicts a false idea of what a larger figure looks like. This dehumanizes female characters, and instead displays them as objects. 

The bigger problem is how this has become standard practice. The exaggeration and objectification of animated female characters risks the mental and physical health of growing generations. Human bodies are physically incapable of forming the shapes of these animated figures. These characters lack realistic anatomy, yet we rarely see an apparent change in the mass media.

Dehumanizing women in animated form plays a significant role in the ongoing topic of sexism and how it affects the growing population of our world. Representations of physical beauty should be more inclusive and diverse to promote self-confidence and self-love, rather than self-objectification. Every young girl should know that their body is valid.

Instead of overtly thin and unrealistic body types typically presented in animated media, more realistic body types should be presented to normalize bodies of all races, shapes, sizes, and abilities. The media must stop solely portraying characters with a slender body type, and alternatively, represent the multitudes of bodies that exist in our society.