Animated films give female animals, monsters and robots about a quarter of nonhuman screen time
UC Berkeley researchers found female characters get about 25% of nonhuman screen time across 224 animated films, against close to half for human characters. On this measure the human share is near parity and the remaining imbalance sits among nonhumans.
The Scientist · Science desk
Raya and the Last Dragon gives female characters nearly 79% of nonhuman screen time and Inside Out 2 gives them 78%, against about 25% of screen time among nonhuman characters across the study.
| Figure | Value | Note | Claim |
|---|---|---|---|
| Raya and the Last Dragon: female nonhuman share, nearly | 79% | 11 | |
| Inside Out 2 | 78% | 11 | |
| Study-wide, about | 25% | 2 |
What happened
- The films were drawn from each year's top 50 at the box office, 1937 to 2025, with most attention on releases from 1980 onward.
- Nonhuman here means animals, monsters, robots, magical creatures and similar beings.
- Researchers trained computational models to recognize characters on screen and time them, then checked the models' output by hand in 100 of the films.
Why it matters
- Who's exposed exposure The 25% rests on gender labels inferred from voice-actor gender and fan pronouns, so any systematic error in those labels flows straight into the figure.
- What it limits constraint Only nonhumans with a speaking part played by a voice actor enter the gender count, so the 25% describes talking creatures and silent ones fall outside it.
- What's now possible capability A Copyright Office exemption to bypass DVD copy protection for research let the team count on-screen time at this scale, so repeating it on disc-only titles needs similar permission.
Take the 25% at face value and male nonhuman characters hold three times the screen time of female ones [18]. That is the ratio Bamman cites for live-action films, drawn from prior research [14]. He describes the nonhuman skew as stronger than that. Bamman said "we were surprised that there's an even stronger male skew when looking at the screen time of nonhuman characters in animated films" [5]. The 25% is given as "about", so the unrounded figure in the paper would show how much stronger [2].
The screen-time counts come from trained models, and the manual check covered 100 of the 224 films, about 45% of the sample [17].
A single pooled share also spans films at both ends of the range. Raya and the Last Dragon gives female nonhuman characters nearly 79% of nonhuman screen time and Inside Out 2 gives them 78% [11]. Moana and its sequel give them none [4].
Whether the imbalance moved depends on a trend the release reports for one side only. Female human characters have gained screen time since the 1980s [10]. The nonhuman share appears as one pooled figure [2]. The authors warn that the imbalance among animals, monsters and robots could cancel out what human characters have gained [12]. In our view that supports saying the imbalance persists among nonhumans while it narrows among humans. Saying it migrated from one group to the other would need the nonhuman share by decade.
The thing this doesn't tell you is what the skew does to viewers. The team did not measure effects on children, the primary audience for these films [13]. The work is a preprint on arXiv [16].
What to watch
- The paper's nonhuman share by decade, which would show whether the imbalance moved or stayed put.
- The unrounded nonhuman share, which would settle how it compares with the three-to-one live-action ratio.
- Any study that measures what the nonhuman skew does to children, since this team did not.
Clarity's read
What the record supports and how the coverage leans. The claims behind it follow.
Reality
- Evidence58
- Adoption
- Not scored
- Hype gap+10
- Incentives
- Not scored
- Confidence55
Claim ledger
Ranked by verification strength, evidence, and original report placement.
- [1]
Female human characters receive close to half of the total screen time in animated films.
- [2]
Only about 25% of screen time among nonhuman characters goes to female characters.
- [3]
Nonhumans in the study are animals, monsters, robots, magical creatures and other similar beings.
- [4]
Moana and its sequel give female nonhuman characters no screen time at all.
- [5]
David Bamman said: "we were surprised that there's an even stronger male skew when looking at the screen time of nonhuman characters in animated films".
- [6]
The researchers analyzed 224 animated films that ranked among the top 50 movies at the box office each year from 1937 to 2025, with a particular focus on films released in 1980 and after.
- [7]
The researchers trained computational models to recognize characters on screen and measured how much screen time each received, and manually checked the models' work in 100 of those films.
- [8]
In the gender analysis, nonhuman characters had to have a speaking part played by a voice actor.
- [9]
Because animated characters do not self-identify, the researchers' gender classifications are interpretive: they relied on voice-actor gender and fan-community descriptions, including pronoun use, and manually reviewed cases where the evidence was unclear or the sources disagreed.
- [10]
Female human characters have gained screen time since the 1980s, and they are shown together more often than in earlier animated films.
- [11]
Recent movies Raya and the Last Dragon and Inside Out 2 gave female nonhuman characters a large share of nonhuman screen time, nearly 79% and 78% respectively.
- [12]
The authors caution that gains for human characters may be offset by the lack of parity among animals, monsters and robots.
- [13]
The team did not measure the effects of the male skew on children, the primary audience for animated films.
- [14]
Bamman said prior research found that in live-action films male characters generally have three times as much screen time as female characters.
- [15]
Bamman worked with the UC Berkeley Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic to secure an exemption from the U.S. Copyright Office allowing the researchers to circumvent digital rights management on DVDs for research purposes.
- [16]
The research is published on the arXiv preprint server.
- [17]
The manual check covered about 45% of the 224 films.
- [18]
If female characters hold 25% of nonhuman screen time, male nonhuman characters hold about three times as much as female ones.
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Sources
1 independent publisher whose own reporting we read for this story.
- phys.orgIn animated films, nonhuman characters are still overwhelmingly male
1 article · October 15, 2026
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