Artist reveals Disney characters’ ‘real’ faces 

Ever wondered how the adorable Rapunzel from Disney’s “Tangled” would look like if she didn’t have those exaggerated, huge eyes? How about “101 Dalmatians'” Cruella de Vil, if her monstrous cheekbones weren’t so sharp?

 

Israeli digital artist and photo manipulator Karen Graw, also known as “Avalonis” on deviantArt, was probably wondering the same thing when she started working on “Real Disney Character Faces.”

 

Originally uploaded on March 27, 2011, “Real Disney Character Faces” has now caught the eye of the collective Disney fandom, and has begun to appear on a multitude of websites, from science-centric io9 to online news outlets like the UK’s Mail Online. 

 

The concept of the piece is simple: take the exaggerated facial features of the cartoon characters, and make them as believably human as possible. For her purposes, Graw took features of real people (from existing photographs) and then digitally manipulated them until they resembled realistic versions of their intended cartoon counterparts

 

The results, as you can see below, are quite amazing.

 

 

Beginning from the top left to the right, and then continuing to the next rows, we have: Rapunzel, Flynn Rider, Mother Gothel, Tiana, Charlottle LaBouffe, Esmeralda, Frollo, Quasimodo, Giselle, Jane, Tarzan, Cinderella, Belle, Prince Adam, Gaston, Jafar, Mulan, Alice, Jasmine, Aladdin, Aurora, Prince Philip, Maleficent, Cruella, Meg, Hercules, Pocahontas, Snow White, The Evil Queen, Ariel, Prince Eric and, finally, Ursula.

 

With her masterpieces appearing literally everywhere on the internet, Graw herself isn’t quite sure how to handle her newfound stardom. 

 

“Ok, so I wake up yesterday flooded with emails and people asking me to use my work, and I see it appearing all over news websites and such,” she wrote in her deviantArt journal. “I have no idea how this happened, and I’m quite shocked and a little freaked out by all the attention.”

 

GMA News Online contacted Graw for comments and her process and she was happy to oblige.

"Real" princes and princesses

 

“I know it’s been done before, the realistic-looking Disney characters, but for me, they didn’t go far enough,” she said when asked what made her decide to make realistic portraits of Disney characters.

“What would Disney characters look like if I saw their ID photos, just like any other person in line for groceries? I wanted to look at the characters and think, hey, these people could exist, there’s some Disney doppelgangers running around the world. So I tried as much as possible to de-cartoonize them.”

 

Graw provided a brief overview of the process involved in the creation of a portrait: “I started with lots and lots of references, including close up frontal portraits of the Disney characters from the films. I chose faces from real life and celebrities who had corresponding features, and used a morphing program to make the combination of faces in the right amount of realism. I then used Photoshop to change facial features and build on top of them, fitting to how I envision the characters.”

 

Because they were done long ago, Graw could no longer give exact figures when asked how long it took her to complete a single portrait. “I just remember some of them took longer than others, and I spent more time on characters I had a personal love for. I spent a week or so all in all on the project,” she explained.

 

“I think I enjoyed the main princesses the most, I suppose because to begin with their facial proportions weren’t completely cartoonish like the villains,” she added.

 

She admitted that, although the portraits were realistic, she could have made them even more life-like. “If I had put more effort into them, I could have added pimples, skin defects, and other things that humanize the characters. I have gotten criticized for how perfect they look compared to regular people, and that just shows how Disney portrays people, not a lot of room for zits and imperfections!”

 

Unrealistic proportions

 

The unrealistic proportions of Disney’s animated characters have been the subject of repeated criticism. For example, some were quick to point out that, in Disney’s most recent success-story, ”Frozen”, main heroine Anna’s wrists are smaller than her eyes, and are also roughly only 33% the size of Prince Hans’s wrists.

 

According to University of Maryland sociologist Philip Cohen’s observations, Disney has a tendency to make their already-slim females even slimmer when the film requires them to be the focus of romantic attention.

 

“I think the evidence suggests that Disney favors compositions in which women’s hands are tiny compared to men’s, especially when they are in romantic relationships,” he stated.

 

Cohen analyzed seven studies that surveyed the average sizes of wrists, and found “a range for women of 15.4cm to 16.3cm and for men of 17.5cm to 18.1cm.”

 

Similarly, a survey that examined the average ratio of men’s to women’s wrist sizes of US Army members showed a 1.15 to 1 ratio. According to Cohen, Disney does not accurately represent this correlation in their animated characters.

 

Graw herself is aware of these points and agrees with them.

 

“I definitely agree with the criticism against Disney for creating such unrealistic body proportions, among other things like Barbie and other dolls,” she told GMA News Online.

“I grew up with these images without a second thought, and I think there’s not a lot of room for realism in the media, as the more people see something, the more the demand for perfection. There would have to be a huge change in the depiction of women in the media in general for there to be a trickle-down change into cartoons.”

 

While Graw believes animated women probably won’t be getting the realistic treatment any time soon, she also admits that cartoons are meant to be a bit more unrealistic and “silly-looking,” and that she is “more forgiving about them.”

 

Her main concern is how real people are portrayed in the media. “It actually bothers me more to see the media Photoshopping real people in ads and magazines than to see it in cartoons,” she said.

 

As for the "Real Disney Character Faces" project, it was “done with fun in mind, nothing to take seriously.” — KDM, GMA News