How Kids’ Movies Stereotype Strabismus

What do Ed the hyena in The Lion King, Dave the octopus in Penguins of Madagascar and Darla in Finding Nemo have in common? They are all characters in children’s films with strabismus, a medical condition in which a person’s two eyes are pointing in different directions. It's commonly known as lazy eye. But what also unites these characters with strabismus is that they are portrayed negatively. Children's Hospital Colorado ophthalmologist Michael Puente, MD, first noticed this pattern when watching the children’s movie Luca.

In the film, the teenage protagonist is warned by his parents that he’ll have to spend time with his frightening uncle Ugo (who has strabismus) if he doesn’t behave. Dr. Puente realized that Ugo’s strabismus was intended to reinforce the idea that the character is frightening and strange — a far too common occurrence. “Off the top of my head, I couldn't think of a single character with strabismus who was portrayed positively in any animated movie, so I decided to look at it scientifically,” he says.

To understand how this pattern played out across different children's movies, Dr. Puente designed a study with support from University of Colorado School of Medicine students Jintong Liu, Aditya Mantha, Tyler D. Benjamin, Maksym Goryachok, Mohamoud Ahmed and Nathan Grove. This team of researchers watched 125 animated films from Disney, Pixar, DreamWorks and Studio Ghibli to identify characters with strabismus. The 46 characters they identified were 14 times as likely to be depicted as unintelligent rather than intelligent, and 6 times as likely to be a follower rather than a leader. Three times as many characters with strabismus were villains rather than heroes.

“We could only find one character with strabismus in any of the 125 movies who was portrayed positively,” Dr. Puente says. “Every single other character we found — and we found dozens — seemed to be portrayed pretty negatively.”

In the study, which has been accepted by the journal Pediatrics, the researchers point out that children with strabismus are more likely to face social isolation and be diagnosed with social phobia, anxiety and depression, and that children ages 8 to 12 are less likely to sit next to a child with exotropia (a form of strabismus where both eyes face outward). Films in which a character with strabismus is portrayed as evil, unhygienic, clumsy or dim-witted reinforce and worsen social environments for kids with strabismus.

Now, Dr. Puente and his colleagues plan to share their findings with creators at the four major animation studios used in the study. They hope that the filmmakers will create new characters that help viewers associate strabismus with positive traits, such as kindness and helpfulness, and that this in turn will help kids with the condition feel less ostracized in social groups.

“I don't want this paper to just be something that people think is interesting,” Dr. Puente says. “I want it to be something that leads to change.”