Brenda Chapman, the creator and co-director of the 2012 Pixar movie Brave, said she came under fire for attempting to make certain characters more realistic-looking.

“At one point they thought I was making the mom too big, her bum too big,” she told Time. “And that was frustrating for me because I wanted her to feel like a real middle aged woman.”

So what explains the company's emphasis on hackneyed female attractiveness?

In his extensive Disney history, Tinker Belles and Evil Queens, Sean Griffin describes Disney's transformation from a churner of slapstick, often raunchy, cartoon shorts to a producer of values-oriented animated features as it chased after box-office success.

One of the earliest Disney heroines was, in fact, anything but a fair damsel who dreamed only of taking a pumpkin-coach ride with her prince.

The star of Disney's 1920s cartoons was a spunky, live-action 5-year-old named Alice, played by Virginia Davis, who was constantly getting into scrapes and challenging authority. Her antics were captured on film and then spliced into a cartoon world filled with zany, cartoon friends. (Think proto-Blue's Clues).

In the 1924 cartoon Alice Gets in Dutch, for example, the heroine daydreams about battling her dour schoolteacher, Griffin notes. In 1925's Alice the Jail Bird, she goes to jail for stealing a pie and takes part in a prison riot.

Disney often infused these films with "butt humor," as Griffin puts it, with characters sustaining multiple gluteal injuries in a single cartoon.

In the 1930s, however, the country's new Production Code pushed studios to tone down the slapstick and appeal more to virtuous scruples.

Magazines ran "Family Movie Guides" and admonished parents against allowing children to see movies that are "harmful," Griffin notes. Disney seemed happy to fill this new niche, and journalists began to promote the company as a reliable source of family entertainment.

"By 1935, the conversation was absolute, and Walt was considered America's mythmaker in residence," Griffin writes.

The wholesome aesthetic permeated Disney offices, too, as the company tried to brand itself as purer than the rest of Hollywood. A 1936 Harper's Bazaar article noted "Law and Order reign[ed] there, without seeming unattractive."

The dress code mandated that men wear coats and ties, and it prohibited pants for women. Disney didn't employ women in creative work, only in "inking and painting" the cartoons after they're drawn. (Some researchers point out, though, that this was not inconsistent with hiring practices at the time.) At Disney, women were physically separated from the men, and their department was nicknamed the "Nunnery."

A 1937 promotional film for the Disney animation studio describes "hundreds of pretty girls" toiling "in a comfortable building all their own," coloring and tracing using sheets of transparent celluloid.