We know that Disney doesn't always reflect the most realistic beauty standards or diversity [1] through its animated female characters, but what about the characters' most basic facial features? After years of watching Pixar's animated films, you've probably noticed similarities among most of the female leads — the round face, small nose, and perfect smile. No big deal, except it seems that the animators give more attention to detail when it comes to the male characters' facial features . . . quite a bit more, actually.

Before Frozen's release, Lino DiSalvo, head of the film's animation, made remarks [2] about how difficult it is to animate women because they have to be kept pretty while expressing a range of emotion. "Historically speaking, animating female characters are [sic] really, really difficult, because they have to go through these range of emotions, but you have to keep them pretty," he said.

While I'm not an animator, I'm not sure what the gender of a character has to do with how easy or difficult it is to depict different emotions and facial features.

Tumblr user Alex, or Every Flavored Bean [3], had been noticing the recurring pattern of similar female faces for a while — so she decided to look a little deeper [4] and trace the faces of both male and female characters from a variety of Pixar movies over the last 10 years. Here's what she found.

Alex saw the trailer for the new Pixar movie Inside Out, and something bothered her.

"At first I thought the characters were three women and two aliens, but after seeing the trailer I realized the purple and red things were supposed to be dudes. After tracing their faces, I figured out why I was so weirded out," she said.

The two male characters have really distinct facial structures, while the three female structures are the same.

Round face + button nose.

So, Alex decided to see exactly how far this pattern went.

"And boy does it go far," she said.

She took photos of popular characters from a lot of recent Disney Pixar movies.

And then she traced the faces — check out all the outlines of the male faces.

And now take a look at the traces of the female characters' faces.

No, those aren't drawings of boobs; they're the outline of each female character's face. I'm guessing you wouldn't be able to tell who was who because, well, they're basically identical. "Apparently every Disney woman is a clone/direct descendant of some primordial creature with huge round cheeks and a disturbingly small nose," Alex said.

What do you think?

Is this investigation reading too much into it, or do you think it's time Disney breaks the mold of this predictable portrayal of women?