Karin Martin (1998) would argue that the clothes that children wear “shape the experiences of their bodies in gendered ways.” 1 Girls are encouraged to wear dresses when they see most of the female characters in movies wearing dresses, but dresses limit a girls’ physicality in many ways. So what implications does this have for young girls?
When young children watch g-rated films, such as The Polar Express, the get the idea that girls and women are supposed to wear pink dresses and have their long beautiful hair carefully done and that anything outside of this is considered abnormal. The physical appearance of the female characters in this film plays into many of our stereotypes about women and girls. Not only were they in dresses, but also the majority of the girls were dressed in stereotypically “feminine colors”, such as pink and purple, with their long hair “done” with a bow, a clip, pigtails, or braids.
One of the first things I noticed in this film is that every female character is wearing a dress, more specifically a nightgown.
Although the main focus of this film is on the boy, there is one female character who plays a significant role in the storyline and then there are numerous other girls and women shown throughout the film. The Polar Express is a G-rated film about a young boy who goes on an adventure to the North Pole.
