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“I think the new design of Merida would be fine if you just made her always look pissed off and sullen because she has to dress that way for marketing purposes. Or you could mitigate the changes by opting to tear the dress up, muss up her hair, cover both in blood, and have her standing astride the arrow-pierced corpse of a demon bear and roaring at the sky in triumph to heathen Scottish gods. Her bow broken in desperate struggle, but the string looped around bearelzebub’s neck to form an improvised garrote. The other Disney princesses, shown cowering behind wreckage left in the wake of ursinemageddon. Trembling in fear and awe at the sight of blood gushing forth from Merida’s mouth, but be it hers or her fallen nemesis’s, we know not which. That should offset the pretty makeup, disarmed and watered down attitude and all the sparkles.”

-Mike Akers

I recently posted a link on Facebook to this petition regarding the redesign of Merida from “Brave” that Disney is reportedly doing to include her in the Disney Princess line and I got this response.

> “I don’t get the hoopla over this. Apart from wearing a different outfit and being drawn by a different artist, I don’t really see a difference. Is it that a woman without a weapon is weak?”

Character design matters.

If there’s one thing the character design class I took in college stressed more than anything else it’s that a good character design informs the viewer who the character is, what they are like. What they wear, how they stand, how they do their hair, the shape of their face, their standard expressions, what they carry with them, these are all vital decisions in a good design.

Few have embraced this philosophy more wholeheartedly than Disney. Take a look at some of these designs and think about how well the designer conveys the basic concepts of the character through the design alone.

(source)

Disney knows how to do this and their choices are deliberate. A misstep in the design of a character can make the difference between one that is marketable and one that is not. That’s extremely important to Disney, and a task that they do not treat cavalierly. If you have to sum up the character in just one image, like you often have to do with marketing materials or toys, qualities like the ones listed above are the only tools you have.

Artistic Interpretations

(source)

The argument that a character always looks somewhat different when a different artist draws them doesn’t apply when your’e talking about Disney. If you think I’m wrong, think of how many drawings you’ve seen Disney publish of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Aladdin, or Woody that look exactly like they did in the movies. While things like comics have some leeway to veer off model a bit, marketing materials need to match as closely as possible to key images and are scrutinized by Disney for inaccuracies. I’ve had friends who have drawn licensed properties professionally and, in general, if you aren’t able to keep your drawing “on model” you aren’t going to keep working on the project. The point being that the changes in the design of Merida were most likely not a decision made by an individual artist on a whim, but something that Disney has signed off on.

An Experiment

Think about the choices that were made in designing the original Merida and the ones that were made in the redesign.

If you were asked to design a character that was a beautiful, rough and tumble, scottish adventurer who was technically a princess but rebelled against the frill, pomp, and sexisim that came with her post, what are some good choices you could make?

• You could dress her in a plain green wool dress that fits with her earthy surroundings.
• You could give her a wide, plain face, and the expressions of a normal attractive girl; likely avoiding the full red lips, thick eyelashes, or pointed jaw that you might find on a princesses such as, say, Cinderella.
• You could make her standard postures and facial expressions defiant, strong, and powerful.
• You could give her a weapon and you could make it one of her defining characteristics. If you really wanted to drive the point home, you could make her weapon a defining element of the plot and marketing of the film.

Now, let’s say you were given the task of taking the established Merida design from the film and re-imagining her to more closely resemble the typical damsel in distress that the Disney princess line seems to champion. What choices could you make given that she still needs to be recognizable as the character from the movie?

• Perhaps you could take her plain wool dress and make it a beautiful gown. You could take the earthy green color and change it to a shimmering turquoise, cover it with sparkles, and drop the neckline over the shoulders.
• You could add intricate gold embellishment wherever possible including an elaborate foot wide band around the hem of her dress.
• You could drastically thin her waist and face and thicken her eyelashes.
• You would have to remove her bow and pouch full of arrows, replacing the strap that held the arrows in place with a wide belt and giant gold belt buckle.
• Attached to the buckle you could put a shimmering turquoise scarf.
• You could change her standard postures and facial expressions from aggressive, assertive, and defiant to sassy, cute, and submissive.

Do the above descriptions sound like something the character from the film would be excited about?

Who would win in a fight, Bruce Wayne or Disney Princess Merida?

Now, you could point out that the redesign isn’t that much of a stretch. Merida does wear a more glamorous gown in the movie that does, with the help of an excruciatingly painful corset, make her appear much thinner. She is sometimes sassy. Both points are true and a good choice for the filmmakers to have made. Allowing a character to have multiple different qualities, sometimes contradictory, can make a story better, but we’re not talking about a story in this circumstance. We’re talking about marketing.

When you market a character you have to boil them down to their essential elements. Take Batman for example. Bruce Wayne can sometimes be dressed to the nines; handsome and glamorous, but when you choose the images you’re going to use to market Batman those qualities don’t come up so much. You want Batman to be strong, heroic, aggressive, adventurous, and sometimes menacing. That’s why the children’s section at Walmart has a lot of things that look like this:

and less that look like this:

Merida was originally marketed similarly. She was depicted in trailers and posters as strong, determined, adventurous, beautiful, and heroic.

This redesign de-emphasizes those qualities and pushes for a Merida that is more glamorous, sassy, and passive.

I drew a brief sketch of a corresponding version of Batman:

Here’s a link to that petition again.

UPDATE: 05–15–2013 I added a line to the paragraph about being on model to clarify that the individual illustrator most likely didn’t make these changes on a whim.

austinkleon:

“The key to eternal happiness is low overhead and no debt.”
—Lynda Barry

Anybody who tells people to “do what you love no matter what” should also have to teach a money management course.

Low overhead + no debt + “do what you love” = a good life.

“I deserve nice things” + debt + “do what you love” = a time bomb.

(Image from Steal Like An Artist)

Posted while at my day job answering phones.

“I wonder what my father really thought about his life. He married a beautiful woman and I believe they loved each other. Whatever had happened in West Palm Beach stayed in West Palm Beach. He married in his late thirties, held a good-paying job, owned his own home on a corner lot. He debated politics with my Republican uncle Everett Stumm, was militantly pro-union, had me worried when Eisenhower defeated Stevenson the second time. He never said so, but I got the notion that the Republicans were not good people. He read all the time. In another generation, he would surely have gone to university and read books with his feet up on the desk, and he wanted me to do that for him. Sometimes I resented him, as when blinded by summer sweat while pulling bagworms from evergreens while he repeated, ‘If the job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well.’ He wouldn’t let me have my dog Blackie in the house. He thought rugs were more important than dogs. Did I know how much I loved him? I do now.”

From “Life Itself” by Roger Ebert.