Measuring Gender Representation in Animated Films

2026-08-16

AI Summary

研究通过计算方法识别动画电影中的角色，分析了224部动画片中性别表现的差异，发现人类与非人类角色间存在显著的性别比例差异。

Abstract

Animated films--often developed with an audience of children in mind--are an important vector for enculturation, and empirical work that has examined the representation of gender at scale in these films has largely focused on counting the gender composition of the cast rather than deploying a more fine-grained instrument (such as assessing the visibility of those characters in overall screentime). In this work, we develop a computational pipeline for recognizing animated characters in these films, and use it to test several hypotheses about gender representation in a corpus of 224 popular animated movies. We find that while the overall representation of female characters in animated films largely tracks with those of live-action films (over the period 1980-2025), we see stark differences between the representation of human characters (much greater representation among women and girls) and non-humans (largely male). Contrary to past work on Disney, we do not see female characters declining in antagonist roles in animated films, and characters who are women and girls are much more likely to share scenes together than their live action contemporaneous counterparts.

Problem

• Gender Representation
• Animated Films
• Character Visibility

Innovation

• computational pipeline
• animated characters recognition
• gender representation