Disney Exec Says Women Are Harder to Animate

2013.10.09

Disney is releasing Frozen this Thanksgiving. It's an animated family film with a cast of characters that include a reindeer, talking snowman, and four animated humans. And this was quite the feat, apparently, because according to one Disney exec, female characters are harder to animate than male ones due to their having to show a "wide range of emotions" and having to "keep them pretty" in the midst of movement.

Er.. Okay..

Disney's head of animation for film, Lino Disalyo lauded the achievements of the animation crew who worked on Frozen to a visiting animation blogger, saying that it was a unique challenge making the film look good, because:

Historically speaking, animating female characters are really, really difficult, ’cause they have to go through these range of emotions, but they’re very, very — you have to keep them pretty and they’re very sensitive to — you can get them off a model very quickly. So, having a film with two hero female characters was really tough, and having them both in the scene and look very different if they’re echoing the same expression; that Elsa looking angry looks different from Anna being angry.

One Tumblr called bullshit on the whole thing almost immediately, creating this image below to show just how similar the faces of all three human female characters actually look.

And yeah they do look kind of identical.

[Fan Voice]