For my graduation project I was to create my own brief. I looked into the depth of the Disney fairytales and found gender stereotypes and neagative messages within them. 

 

The aim of my project was to critique the stereotypes that Disney portrays through their female heroines.

I focused on three stereotypes: the beautiful ideal, the domestic ideal and the female object as a prize portrayed through the chartacters Cinderella, Jasmine, The little Mermaid, Sleeping Beauty and Snow White.

 

This project uses contemporary settings and parody to give each image a contmeporary twist aimed

at females in their young twenties.

 

Check out my Facebook page if you want to see more: http://www.facebook.com/AlanaRoseMays

 

In the Disney film ‘Aladdin’, the heroine Jasmine has been stereotyped to be a prize. Men desired Jasmine for her title and beauty instead of her inner beauty. The concept shows Jasmine inside of a life size game machine, surrounded by toy cars, to play on the idea that she is a prize or trophy to be won by a male. She is worried as she knows that eventually she will be won by a man rather than be swept of her feet by a man of her choice. This idea implies that women are sometimes seen as an object rather than as an individual.

 

In the Disney film ‘Sleeping Beauty’, the main character Aurora, that we all know of is stereotyped as beautiful. In this concept there is an un-attractive version of Sleeping Beauty inside of a kissing booth at a carnival, asleep as she has been waiting for too long for some one to arrive. This idea shows that if females don’t meet the expectations of beauty then they will be an object of ridicule and will not be noticed by a male.

 

In the Disney film ‘The Little Mermaid’, the character Ariel is the sterotypical example of compromises made to meet the concept of ideal beauty. She transformes her tail for a pair of legs and sells her voice to win the man of her dreams. Disney is displaying ideals of beauty through portraying female characters as not good enough the way they are and that they should be willing to change their body for someone. 

 

This concept  shows Ariel getting plastic surgery transformation which shows that women today are 

focusing on their outer appearance and are going to the extremes of plastic surgery to meet societies expectations of beauty.

 

In the Disney film ‘Cinderella’, the heroine is stereotyped as a poor domestic slave. In this concept Cinderella is in an office where she is working but is still wearing her dirty used kitchen gloves. This shows that even though women have the right to work these days, they still bear the title of being the domestic house wives

when they go home.

I chose to display my illustrations through gift cards. This is one of the methods in which the illustrations can be brought to the public eye.