Bevendre

People, or at least Tumblr, have a tendency to attack Disney on character design more than other companies. Ghibli often reuses character designs among female protagonists, not all the time but often. Disney does the same thing, but they’re the ones who get bashed.

Dreamworks almost never uses non-white characters, while Disney has touched most ethnicities in the last 2 decades, but it was Disney that was slammed when it portrayed northern European settings as being predominately white in population (Frozen vs. HTTYD2).

People getting upset about a character is one thing. People looking at and for flaws is one thing.

Going after a single company for doing something that is fairly commonplace in the industry, while completely ignoring the very same issues from opposing companies. Completely disregarding characters, and the works of designers and animators because of similarities in design, and leaving the judgement solely with the design without regard for the aspects that /should/ be what defines a character above all else. Deigning a property unworthy of attention because of one member of a diverse cast being similar to those of previous works, months before anything else is seen of the property. That is another thing entirely.

As an artist, as a writer, as a critic, and as a person, it is that thing that makes me mad. It’s not the judgements themselves, but their focus and their cause that makes me livid.

Big Hero 6 doesn’t come out for months, yet the drama surrounding it is already pissing me off.  We’ve seen ONE PICTURE of a character, one picture in which said character’s head is partially covered and people are in an uproar because the facial model looks similar, or even identical, to that of Rapunzel, Anna and Elsa.  Because of this, there are already shouts that Disney is being lazy and recycling models.

It’s one picture.

We haven’t seen this character in motion.  We haven’t heard how she’s going to sound, or seen how she’s going to act.  All that people are going off of is one picture of one character out of a cast that is arguably the most diverse and dynamic in Disney’s animated history.

I don’t know how long Disney has had Big Hero 6 in the works, but given the past few animated movies and the space between them I really don’t think it should be as big of a deal as it is being made out to be.  This film is coming out within a year of Frozen, which came out within a year of Wreck-it-Ralph.  All of that is from the same studio.  That models are being reused on certain characters within movies that are released within one year of one another should be understandable, especially by artists who work to put out consistent works.

Could Disney have made a new face model for Anna/Elsa, or for this new character? Yes.  Does it make them lazy that they didn’t? No.  Why not? Because the characters SHOULD NOT BE DEFINED BY THE STRUCTURE OF THEIR FACES OR SHAPE OF THEIR BODIES.

If you want to be mad and complain about Big Hero 6, then that’s fine.  Please, save it for after we’ve seen more of these characters, or better yet for after the god damn movie comes out.