Female protagonists in animated films have come a long way over the past several decades. Take the 1959 movie Sleeping Beauty: Soft-spoken and vulnerable, Princess Aurora is cursed as an infant by the evil fairy Maleficent and ultimately saved not by her own wits, but by a prince's kiss. Flash forward to 2016's Moana, whose bold teenage heroine belts out songs as she embarks on a daring voyage across the ocean. She makes her own choices, takes risks, gets knocked down, then pulls herself back up.
Yet a stark gender imbalance remains, a new UC Berkeley study has found - just not where you might think. While female human characters receive close to half of the total screen time in animated films, only about 25% of screen time among nonhumans - animals, monsters, robots, magical creatures and other similar beings - goes to female characters. Notably, Moana and its sequel give female nonhuman characters no screen time at all.
Brittany Hosea-Small
"We knew from prior research that there was a gender disparity in live-action films - male characters generally have three times as much screen time as female characters - but we were surprised that there's an even stronger male skew when looking at the screen time of nonhuman characters in animated films," said David Bamman, a Berkeley associate professor in the School of Information and lead author of the study, "Measuring Gender Representation in Animated Films."
For the study, the researchers analyzed 224 animated films that ranked among the top 50 movies at the box office each year from 1937 to 2025, with a particular focus on films released in 1980 and after, when the number of animated films began to take off. To identify and measure nonhuman characters, they trained computational models to recognize characters on screen, such as Olaf in Frozen or Judy Hopps in Zootopia, and then measured how much screen time each received. The team manually checked the models' work in 100 of those films to ensure they accurately recognized which characters were on screen.
Bamman co-authored the study with Allison Cooper, a cinema studies scholar at Bowdoin College, and Berkeley students Reina Kushihashi, Ruby Alvarez Rubio and Madison Mar, who graduated from Berkeley in May.
In the gender analysis, nonhuman characters had to have a speaking part played by a voice actor. Because animated characters do not self-identify, the researchers' gender classifications are necessarily interpretive: They relied on voice-actor gender and fan-community descriptions, including pronoun use, and manually reviewed cases where the evidence was unclear or the sources disagreed.
Using computational models, Bamman said, allowed the researchers to analyze films at a scale that would be impossible to do manually.
"We develop computational models with a goal of reproducing what a human sees - when they're watching a movie, for example - to measure some phenomena at a broader scale than what an individual reader or viewer could read or view in a lifetime," he said.
In order to carry out this large-scale computational research, Bamman worked with the UC Berkeley Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic to secure an exemption from the U.S. Copyright Office allowing the researchers to circumvent digital rights management on DVDs for research purposes.
Courtesy of Walt Disney Animation Studios
There are signs of progress, says Bamman. The study found that female human characters have gained screen time since the 1980s, and they are shown together more often than they were in earlier animated films. And recent movies like Raya and the Last Dragon and Inside Out 2 gave female nonhuman characters a large share of nonhuman screen time - nearly 79% and 78%, respectively. Yet across the study, nonhuman characters remain predominantly male, and the authors caution that gains for human characters may be offset by the lack of parity among animals, monsters and robots.
While the team didn't measure the effects of this male skew on children - the primary audience for animated films - Bamman says decades of research show that media shapes how children see themselves and interact with others. UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center highlights research suggesting that inclusive representation can foster empathy and belonging, while stereotyped portrayals can reinforce narrow gender norms.
"I think our research is so important because it exposes the gender disparity that exists not only within movies broadly, but even within animation," he said. "It shapes the ways children get acclimated to what's considered the norm."
Bamman and his team are also examining how the use of close-ups in live-action in film has evolved over the past century. In live-action movies, he said, women receive more close-ups than men - a disparity the researchers did not find in animation.
"Establishing this foundation about the kind of disparities that exist within this form of media, I think it does call out for more research getting at more causal questions of what happens when you change this kind of representation," he said, "and what kinds of effects happen in the minds of children who are exposed to them."
This research was supported by the Humanities and AI Virtual Institute (HAVI), a program of Schmidt Sciences, and used UC Berkeley's Secure Research Data and Compute Platform. The researchers have made their data, code and models publicly available through the GitHub repository.
