Context of Practice: Creative/Animated Visual Response to Gender Idea Development

When it came to creating a visual response for Gender it admittedly took me a very long time to come up with any idea. Gender seemed to be a popular choice of subject amongst our group and to me I never had an idea that could successfully represent what I was wanting to talk about with gender. At the start I couldn't seem to get Disney out of my head. Every idea I had kept coming back to the idea of Disney princesses and how these fictional characters differentiate from reality.

But I knew satirising Disney would be a more obvious choice to go for and a very popular subject to work with. Therefore, I decided to stay away from Disney altogether as I knew if I came up with any idea that involved Disney, even if it was a really good idea, chances are it would have already been done.

I started to think about other animated studios with a very distinct, instantly recognisable style that i felt were also guilty of poor gender representation. That is when I moved over to Hanna-Barbera.

Even at first glance of the above image of some of the main Hanna-Barbera cartoon characters, the gender representation and issue Hanna-Barbera cartoons have with gender immediately stands out. Firstly, the female characters seem very few in number compared to the amount of male characters and the female human characters all look very similar. They all fit under a sort of female cartoon character checklist; they are all thin, attractive, wear dresses and something else that stood out to me is that they all seem to be wives of a male character and these male characters are generally the stars of their respected shows. 

I found my findings, just by looking at one image very interesting, especially because it proved that to find out about the poor gender representation in Hanna-Barbera cartoons, you really do not need to look far. Plus the males in this image seem relatively diverse, physically they all appear different shapes and sizes, thin, overweight, short, tall. 

I then thought about cartoons of the modern age and how to me it seems women have to fit into these narrow margins; be thin, attractive, smart etc. whereas the male protagonists in these shows do not have to meet these high standards and are often typically overweight, dumb, lazy, rude. 

I found it humorous to imagine what a fantasy interview would be like for a modern cartoon. The female actress would have to pass dozens of specifications whereas the male actor could get the role by being completely incompetent, and probably wouldn't even need to be an actor. That is when I decided to develop a visual response with this narrative.

When I was designing characters for my visual response I wanted them to be very much in that Hanna-Barbera style but I also looked at other examples of animations that are also in that Hanna-Barbera style. 

The Ricky Gervais show is an example of a cartoon that is animated in that Hanna-Barbera style. What I love about the visual style of this show is that, yes it does have that traditional hand drawn Hanna-Barbera look, but it is also it's own thing because it's been modernised. The series appears to at least have been coloured and rendered on a computer in keeping with the 2D style so it gives the show a nice modern/traditional look. This is the style I want for my visual response.

Above is a mood board I created when I was coming up with ideas for how to go about creating my visual response. As you can see, there are images from subjects I spoke about in my essay and new images such as the Hanna-Barbera images and Ricky Gervais Show images that I took inspiration from. I haven't used mood boards as much in the past as I probably should have as they are very useful for finding inspiration.