Someone Depressing said:
I do like it when Disney tries to do non-generic, non-rail thins designs like that. I liked Jane because she was more reminiscent of a bishoujo/puni girl that you tend to see in romantic comedy anime, and I liked Nani because she was designed by the movie's director and storyboarder, whose illustrations I will put in the bottom of the post because he is da boss.
I noticed that in Beauty and The Beast, my, like, second favourite movie ever, that the Bimbettes looked the same. And the woman buying stuff from the baker. Busty, leggy and hourglass-shaped, all with the same slightly pudgy but still cute face.
This really irritated me: All the men look different, and so do all the "unnatractive women", and Belle is different because she's the main character. So, it's just Disney being lazy and slightly mysoginist.
Like... really mysoginistic.
Boy, for somebody who hates misogyny so much, you don't hesitate to use a word like "bimbettes" to casually describe a set of attractive females.
Anyway, as somebody else already pointed out, this is something that has existed in cartoons and art in general for a long time, now. Male characters have a huge range of possibly attractive features (or at least, non unattractive features), and with females the range tends to be much narrower. I think it's a combination of artist's tastes being similar and the general range of attractive female features being smaller than the general range of attractive male features. However, the way is still pretty narrow for men in general. You'll notice in Frozen Hans and Christoff have very similar builds, the main differences being almost the same as the main differences between Anna and Elsa: hair color and a couple of things in the face. And Hans has sideburns, but facial hair is a category of variance that women lack.
So of course characters who aren't supposed to look attractive look very different--it's a very narrow range of features that constitute attractiveness. And in animation, especially from the same studios within the same generation of artists (such is the case with the the Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast, and Frozen and Tangled), of course the style is going to be similar. The main thing I was annoyed by was the similarity between the horses in Tangled and Frozen--those I felt were copied basically verbatim excepting their manes and tails. The girls are similar, especially in stills, but in their respective films they do have very different mannerisms and ranges of facial expressions. They were uniquely designed, but still modeled by many of the same artists.
Though according to your tirade on Frozen you haven't seen the film, so you may not have noticed.
