Coming this fall, the world will see that Disney went on a diet. Well, not really, but classic Disney characters will be seen in a brand new role as skinny runway fashion models.

Disney has partnered with Barney’s Department store for their 2012 holiday campaign called “Electric Holiday.” Rina Raphael of TODAY reported on this story on Today’s “Look.” The ads will highlight the classic Disney characters like Minnie Mouse, Goofy, and Daisy Duck. The campaign is also intended to be a reflection of Disneyland’s famous Electric Parade.

The visuals of the Barney’s ads portray the characters as runway models. As the creative director and team began fitting the toons into the high-end couture clothing, they ran into a problem: Minnie and her friends did not wear the animated clothes well in their round physiques. The solution was to elongate and change the shapes of the classic characters. Now, images of a very slender Minnie Mouse and friends are causing quite a stir. Some are even saying Minnie looks anorexic.

Oh my – what is the right response to this? Shame the creators who took our beloved round-figured cartoons and turned them into an impossibly thin model? Or, do we just go with it and not worry because they’re just drawings? Is this reinforcing negative images of beauty to our young children, especially young girls? Is Minnie now the new bad role model?
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Adobe Photoshop, the new face of beauty. Whenever we open a magazine, we find models and actresses looking flawless. In fact, they look so good they don’t even seem real. Well, thanks to Adobe Photoshop, anyone in the entertainment industry can achieve this level of ridiculously-good-looking. It’s hard to not say, “I wish I looked like (insert celebrity/model name).” But, we can’t look like them if they are airbrushed!

Julia Bluhm was tired of hearing her peers in ballet class complain about their weight, so the eighth grader started a campaign against altered photos in April. She started her petition on Change.org, she asked for magazines to print one unaltered photo spread once a month. Julia’s petition had more than 80,000 signatures from people around the world. Her campaign proved to be successful when Ann Shoket, Seventeen‘s editor-in-chief, invited Julia for a meeting about the magazine’s new policy on photo enhancements.

Shoket said, the magazine “never has, never will” alter the body or face shapes of its models in an upcoming editor’s letter, which can be seen in Seventeen‘s August’s issue. She also writes that the staff at Seventeen signed an eight-point Body Peace Treaty vowing not to alter natural shapes and include only images of “real girls and models who are healthy.”

“This is a huge victory, and I’m so unbelievably happy,” Bluhm writes on her online petition page about the changes happening at Seventeen.
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