Disney’s hottest animated animal characters, ranked

polygon.com:

Before the Disney edition of “Would You Rather?” became a TikTok fad, it was one of my favorite games to play with my theater-nerd friends. We ranked the typical Disney princes and princesses as potential suitors — Flynn Rider, Jasmine, Aladdin, Esmeralda, etc. But every so often, an animal snuck into our rankings, too, because Disney’s anthropomorphic animals are designed to be as attractive as the humans.

There are scientific reasons for people to be attracted to Disney animals. In Nicholas Sammond’s book Babes in Tomorrowland: Walt Disney and the Making of the American Child, Bambi animator Marc Davis recalls studying real animals to inspire his drawings, but giving them human expressions and relatable movements so viewers could emotionally identify with them: “I took a huge book on baby behavior and every interesting child’s face… I would interpret it into the mask of this young deer.”

A Century of Disney

The Bambi animals weren’t as cartoonish as the ones in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which supervising animator Eric Larson said resembled “big flour sacks.” And as the decades went on, the line between human and animal characteristics in Disney characters continued to blur.

In an online interview, Sex and Sexuality in Modern Screen Remakes authorDr. Lauren Rosewarne, explains why people get so thirsty for Disney animals: “When a character that is putatively an animal speaks with a sexy voice and human physical elements (curved hips/cleavage/biceps etc), the producer is presenting a sexualised animal to the audience — none of this is an accident,” she said. “For some audiences, this presentation won’t be particularly meaningful, in others it’s vaguely attractive, and for others […] the display will be