Disney put a lot of effort into character diversity.
According to Sean Griffin, a guest in the podcast "Disney Is Taking Stereotypes And Diversity Seriously, Or Is It?" (00:05:10), He works in Disney for decades and he believes Disney spends a lot of effort in character design. In order to expand their consumer base, They hire many people with different backgrounds to improve the diversity of their movies. This is evidence that character design is highly regarded by Disney. A single character can convey a lot of messages to us consciously or unconsciously.
Visual media could convey a lot of information to us unconsciously.
Jean Kilbourne mentioned, in her speech Killing Us Softly, "Only 8% of an ad's message is received by the conscious mind. The rest is worked and reworked deep within the recesses of the brain.”(4:03 Rance Crain) I believe it's the same story in the movies. Many details we see could structure the character and influence our opinion of the character. Our visual system could receive the same information no matter the source is an ad or a film. So The gender value we receive could be in the same way.
The movie is successful throughout the world.
According to www.boxofficemojo.com, Beauty and the Beast (2017) got $1,264,064,831 box office and ranked #15 in rank Top Lifetime Grosses. That means Beauty and the Beast is successful and meet most people's gender value. That could be another example to support our idea that Disney's character design had a profound effect on us.
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