Gender Roles In Snow White

Starting from the 1930’s with the Walt Disney Company’s first animated feature film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Disney has begun to illustrate stereotypical gender roles. Fast-forward to 2013, almost eighty years later, Disney still continues to shape the mold of depicting their main characters as one-dimensional and cliché symbols of their gender. By being a household go-to of movies the whole family can enjoy, some people tend to overlook the questionable gender roles because of the old-fashioned beliefs performed during the release of the movies.
When Frozen, Disney’s 53rd animated feature film, opened, some people were quick to claim it a revolutionary feminist movie because it had what no other Disney movie had before it: two female leading heroines and a focus on the love between two sisters. People were also quick to point out that Frozen is a reformer of past Disney animations because it passes the Bechdel
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs has a staggering 10 male characters to two females. Although Frozen, as previously stated, has less male leads than Snow White, there are still only two female main roles. In the original story that Frozen is based off, The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Andersen, most of the central characters are women. The Walt Disney Company leaned over backward to change the gender of the characters, but for what reason? If the main focus of the movie is supposedly the relationship between the two sisters, why include a male love interest for Anna? Arguing that the inclusion of the character Hans to give the movie a necessary antagonist doesn’t explain the unnecessary addition of Anna’s second male love interest, Kristoff into the story. Likewise, the portrayal of Olaf, a snowman, or Sven, the reindeer, as male characters can be argued as irrelevant and redundant additions to the