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galactic-glamour-girl-posts · 11 months

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And now, an essay about Dot Warner because I have nothing better to do

In the series bible for Animaniacs, Dot is described as:

"everything that all animated female characters have never been"

Was that true at the time?

I think so, and Here's Why

Before I begin, I'd like to mention this is mostly gonna revolve around western animation...and by "western" I mean "not anime". Okay? OK.

Part 1 : Her design

I'll start by comparing Dot's design to the design of many other female animal cartoon characters that came before her, because a lot of them are...not great. For context, Animaniacs (and therefore Dot herself) debuted in 1993. At the time (and after) when it came to animal cartoon characters, guys would often be designed as "the default" or "the norm", and girls would be given extra visual signifiers to make it clear that they are, in fact, girls. Stuff like human-like hair, and/or really long eyelashes, and/or human-like body parts such as hips and breasts so they needed to be fully clothed, and/or smaller noses and mouths than the guys to make them look "cuter", and/or permanent makeup, etc.

Let's take The Chipettes for example:

They barely look like chipmunks! They're basically human girls with chipmunk noses! Their-I guess it's probably fur-looks pale enough to pass as white skin, they have human lips, even human hair. Their hair doesn't even match their "fur" colour, which makes it look like skin even more. I know it's a cartoon, I don't expect them to resemble real chipmunks completely, but I should still be able to recognise them as chipmunks, shouldn't I? Just look at them compared to the boys, it's jarring:

Although at least in their case, both the guys and girls are in full outfits rather than just the girls.

Gadget's probably another one of the best examples (pre-1993) of what I'm talking about (she has human hair and a more human-like body and hence needs a full outfit, meanwhile Chip and Dale do not), but Toodles is also a pretty good example (she has smaller, more human hands than Tom's, permanent makeup, really long eyelashes, and her figure even more human than Tom's). Even if they weren't in full outfits they usually were made to look more human:

Female animals were constantly given more human attributes than the guys, usually just to make them look "prettier". Honestly a lot of female animal characters are still designed this way.

Meanwhile guys can look as cartoony as possible and go around in half-complete outfits no problem, because they were drawn to be funny talking animals, not conventionally attractive human/animal hybrids:

Then in some cases they'd just take one of the pre-existing male characters, add a bow or skirt or eyelashes or something, and BOOM! A "new" character:

Yeah they have no human hair and have cartoony proportions, just like the guys...but they didn't have to make them look just like the guys to do that. I prefer these over the previous examples but...actually creative designs would be nice.

Now let's look at Dot:

See this? This is nice.

She has no human hair (the hair on her head is just more of her fur), no permanent makeup, no eyelashes needed to signify "she's the girl" (she's only drawn with eyelashes for comedic effect or when she's trying to look extra cute), no curves or hips, and isn't fully clothed and goes around with no shirt like Yakko, because she's a funny talking animal and should look like one, not a human girl.

Now let's compare her to her brothers:

She's a different height, has no whiskers, a slightly different head shape, and has longer but not human-like hair. She looks similar enough to look related to them, but she's not just Yakko or Wakko in a skirt.

For this section I'm mostly just talking about animated animal characters, but I also want to mention that even with human characters male leads often were allowed to look round or blocky or basically any body type, and didn't have to look conventionally attractive; but female leads were almost never designed to look as cartoony, and were often drawn to look as conventionally attractive or cute as possible by being given more (even if just slightly) realistic proportions, and were usually of the same body type.

Now, the three human examples I showed aren't actually bad designs. Honestly, on their own, they're good designs! But they're once again showing that there was a clear difference regarding how guys were drawn vs how girls were drawn.

Dot's cute but they don't draw her anymore realistically than they do her brothers nor is her cuteness over-exaggerated by giving her more human attributes than necessary to make her as conventionally pretty as possible. She's anthropomorphic, but no more so than her brothers.

Part 2 : Her personality

Now, there were of female leads before Dot where the tropes I mentioned don't apply and whose designs are unique, like for example Olive Oyl, who's allowed to look wacky (stick thin and not curvy, lanky with noodle arms, circular head, large hands and feet) and Penelope Pussycat, who's allowed to look like an anthropomorphic, but still cartoony cat and not too human. So what I talked about before wasn't the case every time.

But then you have to consider their personalities (or sometimes, lack thereof).

Many animated female leads were flat characters compared to the male leads, often because they fell under cliché tropes.

Some of the most prominent being: the token love interest, the eye candy, the damsel in distress, or the sensible one because "girl", who would often mostly just exist to set up punchlines the male characters would deliver.

Of course this didn't apply to every animated female lead, especially not by the early 90's, but it was still the norm.

Even Babs Bunny, who predates and is similar to Dot whilst being a good character in her own right, falls under the token love interest trope (also her design is basically a pink Buster in bows, although in her case that was intentional given that their "No relation" catchphrase was meant to poke fun at the "male and female love interests look and are even named suspiciously similarly" trope, so for her it works). Basically in some cases they'd just staple these tropes onto decent characters who didn't really need them.

However, Dot doesn't fall under any of these categories. She's the younger sister so obviously she couldn't be a love interest, I just went over the fact that she wasn't designed to be eye candy, just cute but not in an over-exaggerated way, and she wasn't just cute to look appealing. Her cuteness benefited her character; either by the shock value of seeing a cute little girl swear or scare Satan or something like that, or by Dot using her cuteness fool foes (or at least make them look bad). She could hold her own in any situation and although both her and her brothers were captured a few times on the show, they escaped pretty easily each time. The one time she alone got kidnapped she basically saved herself, so I wouldn't count her as a damsel in distress because it never really feels like she's in real danger; the audience knows she's got this.

Most of all, she was definitely not the sensible one of the group. Sure she'd get annoyed when Yakko and Wakko did the Hello Nurse bit, but she was just as bad, and would react the same way whenever she came across a cute guy. She was of course written this way on purpose, she is very bit as wacky and silly and chaotic as her brothers. It didn't matter that she was the "cute one", she would go off-model if it meant she could make a funnier face. She'd gladly join in on tormenting their "special friends", without worrying about if their feelings got hurt or preaching that they should all try to get along. She'd gladly indulge in excessive violence. She'd gladly mess about and wreak havoc just as much as her brothers. I'm all for smart female characters (Dot is smart after all), but in a main group of guys and at least one girl, a girl doesn't have to be the sensible one every time.

It's no secret that Dot was written to be feminine. At the time, characters that were written to be very feminine often were written to fit within gender norms, meaning many were: passive, demure, soft-spoken, gentle, wide-eyed and innocent, and/or sensitive, etc; or at the very least more so than the masculine characters.

But Dot just wasn't any of those things. She was assertive, confident and acerbic, loud and outspoken, often acted more violent and angry then her brothers, witty, is as lustful and dirty-minded as her brothers, and doesn't get her feelings hurt easily and will instead pretend to be extremely upset/hurt for sympathy or for dramatic effect.

Before and around about the time of Dot's debut, if animated female leads were given personalities that broke many gender norms (and that already wasn't too common), they'd usually be tomboys. Now let me be clear, there is nothing wrong with tomboys. They're just as valid as girly girls and deserve to be and should be depicted in a positive light in animation, but this perpetuated the idea that to be tough and/or wacky, you had to be masculine, which just isn't true.

Dot was wacky and tough but still feminine and was by no means a tomboy, and I think that's important! She liked to look pretty, she liked pink and dresses and flowers, but she also made silly faces, liked to play rough and was more than willing to beat the living daylights out of someone who was asking for it.

Female characters in cartoons often either had decent personalities but their designs were lacklustre, or vice versa. Sometimes both their designs and personalities were lacklustre. Sometimes neither was a problem but their character was held back by having some trope forced onto them because "girl". Dot was a (at the time) rare case of none being the case whilst not having to sacrifice her femininity to be wild and strong.

Part 3 : Her role

By 1993, even if a female character had a good and unique design that didn't come with double standards and had a well-written personality that didn't submit to too many gender stereotypes, they were often:

A - An antagonist

I'm not saying these characters aren't bad people, but a lot of the time when we did get a fun female character, she was a villain.

Also (for this next point I'm not really talking about the three examples above), sometimes they were the only female characters in their show/movie/etc to go against gender stereotypes, which just perpetuates the idea that female characters breaking gender norms is wrong.

B - Essentially a clone of a male character

They'd act exactly like one of the male leads with minimal personality differences (those differences usually being more gender stereotypes) between the two, if there were any; again perpetuating the idea you had to be masculine to be wacky and/or tough.

Basically a distaff counterpart, or a half-identical twin, stuff like that.

C - Less important

Even when we did get a well-written, well designed female animated character who didn't fall under tropes associated with gender stereotypes, chances were she'd be a side character, or at the very least perceived as less important than the male leads.

I'll just use one example for this section since it's a lot more broad in terms of scope; Granny from Looney Tunes. She's one of the most well known female Looney Tunes characters, but even she was never really the "star" of the cartoons she was in. They're not called "Sylvester, Tweety, and Granny" cartoons, they're called "Sylvester and Tweety" cartoons. Even the show that was about Granny solving mysteries, what was it called?

But Dot doesn't fall under any of these categories. She's not a side character, she's not even a tritagonist, she's a protagonist. Yakko may have been the leader, but all the Warners acted as a unit and were presented as just important as each other. We call them "Yakko, Wakko and Dot", "The Warner Brothers, and the Warner Sister", etc.

I've already mentioned that's she's not designed as a clone of Yakko or Wakko, but she also had a distinct personality. She was more anger-prone than Yakko, she was wittier than Wakko, and she had a way bigger ego than both of them combined!

Dot's definitely not an antagonist, she wasn't a saint and she may have been chaotic, but you're meant to root for her. The people she and her brothers would go up against in their cartoons were often jerks, bullies, pompous, etc. Meanwhile the Warners had a strong sense of justice and morality. They weren't malicious (to people who didn't bother them at least), they just liked acting silly. When viewers saw Dot unapologetically being herself without conforming completely to how society thinks a cute little girl should act like, they weren't meant to hate her or love to hate her or anything like that, they were just meant to like her and laugh.

Part 4 : Today

There will probably always be room for improvement when it comes to female representation in cartoons, I mean, a lot of the tropes I mentioned are still commonly used (although I must stress that not all of them are inherently bad). However, it's better today than it was back then. We've gotten tons of well designed female leads over the past 30 years with three-dimensional personalities, ones who are gender non-conforming but still heroic, or who are strong but still feminine, or who are allowed to look and act as wacky as the guys on their show (if not more so), you get the idea.

I'm not saying Dot is the first good animated female character (or that her character was handled perfectly in the original Animaniacs-it wasn't), we all know that's not true, but she defied many tropes that so many animated female characters before her fell under, through her design, personality AND role. Notice that a lot of other animated female leads that also do that (both the examples I gave and any extra ones that you can think of) most likely debuted after Dot did.

To be 100% honest, you could argue that, even as of 1993 (or I guess 1991 considering that's when the series bible was written), describing Dot as "everything that all animated female characters have never been" is debatable, but I do think there was some truth to that statement at the time. I can't say for sure that she was a trend setter when it came to how girls in cartoons were handled, but I'll always appreciate the fact that her character turned out the way it did in spite of when she was created.