Character diversity

I feel because of the hype around female designs in Tangled, Frozen and even Big Hero 6, a lot of questions pop up regarding diversity in character design. There's been a lot of discussion and controversy regarding Disney recycling their designs (especially in their 3D releases) and thus recreating the same images for their female characters. Girls with big, doe-like eyes, tiny noses and slim lips.

One of the questions that always seem to reach the surface is, Is Disney capable of creating a more diverse collection of designs for their female leads? Capable, yes. Wishing to do so, probably not. Ever since the start of their female leads in animations, the girls have had big, bright eyes and tiny facial features (not all, but a lot). This reoccurring phenomenon gives me the idea this is a trademark for Disney films, for I have seen quite a variety of designs for girls in other films. For example: Fiona and the princesses in Shrek have all quite realistic looking features and proportions, other films from Dreamworks feature a lot of diversity in features of their females as well. Same goes for Pixar, every film calls another style of human characters (when they make an appearance), thus not gathering a same look for them all.

So of course, it is very possible to create a large diversity in designs for 3D animated characters, but I feel we don't see it as often than for 2D animated films. And I wonder why. What I noticed is that the big shots like Disney, Pixar and Dreamworks, play it relative safe when it comes to designing their characters for 3D films, at least safer when they did for 2D films. There are designs in some films that don't fit the "mould" but still feel very realistic. While I get the feeling that "more unknown" (and with that I mean companies not as big branded as the former three, like Sony or Blue Sky) studios play around more with their designs in some instances.

Even though Disney's princesses/female leads "continue to look the same" a lot of the extra characters seem to get a lot more diversity, where in other films I feel they try to distribute the diversity over the whole cast. While in Tangled the mains were all gorgeous (Rapunzel, Flynn, Mother Gothel), the extras (the Thugs) were quite diverse, but in Brave or the Incredibles for example, all the characters have distinctive style. What I'm getting here at is, while a lot of people try and use the excuse: "it's hard to create a lot of diversity in 3D animated characters, so the reason they play it safe is because of that", I beg to differ. There already have been created lots of diverse characters in the past fifteen years, and I feel this is only growing. The reason why a lot of 3D characters will probably still look alike, just like a lot of 2D characters did, is just a creative choice of the directors of a film and not an incapability.