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Good Girls and Wicked Witches: Women in Disney's Feature Animation. By Amy M. Davis. Eastleigh, UK: John Libbey, 2006. Distributed by Indiana University Press in the United States. 274 pp.
The title of this book is somewhat misleading. It seems to indicate that Amy Davis will provide some kind oí feminist reading of how women are portrayed in Walt Disney Studios animated films. On the contrary, her study, based on a PhD dissertation at the University of Ulster, is a polite and sober rationalization of the sexism in the Disney Studios' use of women in its organization and for the manner in which the studio, now a major corporation, has consistently produced films that disregard the actual living conditions of women and that reinforce the patronizing manner in which females have been treated in Western societies. Indeed, Davis's positivist study of the diverse ways that females have always been put into their "Disney prescribed" places, whether in film or in the corporation, rationalizes the Disney ideology and aesthetic to such an extent that the book's real title should be How Good Girls and Wicked Witches Can Come to Terms with Poor Misunderstood Walt and His Boys.
The book is organized into six chapters that cover the film as cultural mirror; a brief history of animation; the early life of Walt Disney and the Disney Studio, 1901-1937; Disney films, 1937-1967, the "Classic Years"; Disney films, 1967-1988, the "Middle Era"; Disney films, 1989-2005, the "Eisner Era." There are also four helpful appendixes: a list of Disney's full-length animated feature films; synopses of selected Disney films; a bibliography; and a filmography Davis's major thesis is "to correct the perception of how women are represented in...