Topic: Specialized Roles

You might be asking yourself what I mean by specialized roles. Certainly you are familiar with roles in movies: the hero, the heroine, the villain, the sidekick. All of these are roles that are played by characters in the drama they enact for us. But I am talking about specialized roles, roles that you might not have thought of, but appear regularly in animation, especially in animated films, especially from Disney and their other American competitors. These roles are important, because they define certain things about the film -- and about the characters that fulfill them.

The first of these roles is the savior. The savior is the one who wins the day, the one who accomplishes the objective, who defeats the enemy. Usually the savior is the film's protagonist, but not always. In The Black Cauldron the savior is Gurgi, a sidekick. In the realm of sex/gender, what we most often see is that the savior is male.

The second role I have identified is the seeker. The seeker is the one who is seeking something, the one who is searching, looking, desiring. Again, this role has a distinct sex/gender stereotype, for the seeker is most often female. She seeks, he achieves. Think of women like Cinderella, who sought a better life only to win it from animals, or Ariel, who sought to live on land and was given it by her father. The seeker is almost never also the savior, though it can happen, as with Anastasia.

The third role that I have identified is the mover. The mover is the most active character in the story. The mover enables the action to move along -- they are the character about which could be said "x did this so y happened". Like the savior, the mover is most often a male character or, if female, a villain.

The mover, the seeker and the savior are the central characters in the film, and often a heroic character may combine their role of mover with one of the other two roles. We see a departure from these combinations in the mover role that Esmeralda plays in Disney's The Hunchback of Notre Dame, as she is neither seeker nor savior.

I think it is very important to look at who plays these roles in films where they are present. The savior and the mover are the most active characters in the film. Since women are often denied action in a film, but instead depicted as passive seekers who rely upon active males to achieve for them what they are seeking, we need to understand what these recurrent roles are showing us about the role of women. We need to see Cinderella, an exceedingly passive character, not as a role model for behavior, but as a pathetic victim who takes no action toward her own dreams. We need to understand that a woman like Anastasia, who is seeker and savior, is not necessarily "unfeminine", but active in determining her own destiny.