Are you studying ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ and finding it difficult to craft a Band 6 analysis?
Well, we’re here to help! We’re going to walk you through the key characters and themes of ‘Little Miss Sunshine’, as well as give you a step-by-step guide on how to perfect your analysis.
PLUS we’ll provide you with a sample analysis table (also called a TEE table) and an example of a Band 6 paragraph for ‘‘Little Miss Sunshine’! What more could you ask for?
So, what are you waiting for? It’s time to fly through your analysis of Little Miss Sunshine — let’s jump into it!
Little Miss Sunshine Summary
Key Characters in Little Miss Sunshine
Context
Themes Explored in Little Miss Sunshine
Essay Analysis of Little Miss Sunshine
Little Miss Sunshine deals with content relating to suicide and drug use. Please be advised that some of these quotes contain sensitive language that may be upsetting to some readers.
Little Miss Sunshine Summary
Directed by Valerie Faris and Jonathan Dayton, ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ is a 2006 drama-comedy that follows the lives of the dysfunctional Hoover family as they take a road trip from Albuquerque to participate in the Little Miss Sunshine pageant in Redondo Beach, California.
When seven-year-old Olive unexpectedly wins a local pageant competition, she sets in a motion a cross-country trip that throws her parents, brother, grandfather, and uncle in a beat-up van for three days.
Richard, Olive’s father, is a motivational speaker who is awaiting a call for a lucrative book deal that is set to propel his nine-point program for success to stardom.
Sheryl, his wife, is struggling to keep the family from falling apart.
Her brother, Frank, is a Proust scholar who had a failed suicide attempt following a rejection from his boyfriend. Dwayne, Olive’s brother, has taken a vow of silence until he achieves his gold of becoming a fighter pilot.
Edwin, Frank’s father, is a foul-mouthed heroin-addict who coaches Olive for her pageant shows.
Together with the optimistic Olive, the family tackle tension, motor problems, and hard truths as they take the journey to show their support for Olive’s dream.
Key Characters in Little Miss Sunshine
Olive
Olive is an energetic and naïve seven-year-old who longs to be crowned a beauty queen.
While Olive has a lot of self-confidence, she worries about not winning the competition due to her father’s view on winners and losers.
Despite not winning Little Miss Sunshine, Olive enjoys her time on stage and is surrounded by the support of her family.
Richard
Richard is obsessed with his ambition of becoming a life coach and lives accordingly to his nine steps for success.
Preaching self-improvement, Richard speaks to the rest of the family through motivational messages and pushes the value of winning and losing.
As such, he encourages Olive to watch her weight to conform with the slim bodies of the other competitors. However, by the end of the film, Richard undergoes a realisation that happiness trumps winning.
Sheryl
Sheryl, Olive and Dwayne’s mother, tries her best to keep the spirits of the family up despite the bickering.
She supports Olive in her goal to compete in the Little Miss Sunshine pageant, and she works toward creating peace in the family.
Frank
Following an attempted suicide, Frank is taken in by the Hoover family as he struggles to find joy in life after his boyfriend left him for his academic competition.
As the ‘number 1 Proust scholar’, Frank uses his wisdom to teach Dwayne that despite the pain of suffering, it’s an essential part of life that helps to form an individual.
Dwayne
Guided by his admiration of Nietzsche, Dwayne is an angsty 15-year-old who has isolated from his family by taking a vow of silence.
After discovering that he can no longer fulfil his dream of becoming a jet pilot due to his colour-blindness, Dwayne has a breakdown and ends his vow of silence.
Comforted by Olive, Dwayne endeavours to continue fighting for his dream and recognises that he has the support of his family.
Edwin
Evicted from his retirement home for abusing heroin, Edwin lives with the Hoover family and chimes in with vulgar comments.
Despite his foul-mouth, Edwin expresses his pride for his son and acts as Olive’s pageant coach, teaching her dance routine and encouraging her to follow her passion.
Context
Set against the backdrop of the early 2000s, ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ is a sharp family satire that explores the myth of the American Dream through its portrayal of family values and beauty expectations.
As an average middle-class family, the dysfunctional dynamic of the Hoovers sheds light on family roles and values. Despite the portrayal of Richard as the traditional breadwinner and Cheryl as the suburban housewife, neither of these roles are properly fulfilled.
Although Richard is not successful with his career aspirations and Sheryl is not the perfect cook, they both fulfil their role as parents by supporting their children.
Similarly, the American family values of togetherness and stability are subverted in ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ as the frequent conflicts illuminate these values in unique situations.
For a deeper dive into the American Dream, check out our guide to analysing the Great Gatsby!
Beauty Standards and Feminism
Reflecting the beauty standards of the 2000s, Olive’s dream to win the Little Miss Sunshines pageant micmicks the aspirations of thousands of young girls across the world.
Little Miss Sunshine is set in the era of ‘postfeminism’, where society felt that feminism was finally “accomplished” and gender inequality was a thing of the past. A key feature is the return of increasing beauty standards, especially with fashion magazines selling makeup and fashion as a form of empowerment.
In the late postfeminist ‘90s, glitz pageants blew up in popularity, where-in heavily tanned, glammed, and scantily dressed child contestants were the norm. In ‘Little Miss Sunshine’, Olive’s non-conformance to these superficial standards of femininity levels a critique of the pageant industry’s sexualisation and objectification of young girls.
Themes Explored in Little Miss Sunshine
‘Little Miss Sunshine’ explores a variety of themes relating to family, success, and societal expectations.
These themes are underpinned by philosophies that guide the character narratives, including Nietzsche’s nihilism and Proust’s ideals of suffering and love.
Below are some of the key themes from ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ that make for a strong starting point to structure your analysis:
Family
Forming a dysfunctional, middle-class family, the Hoovers are an eccentric set of characters with competing personalities and dreams who subvert the trope of the nuclear family.
Despite their differences, the value of family as a source of support functions as a central tenant throughout the film, with their difficult trip to California reflecting their championing of Olive’s dream.
Winning and Losing
Richard lives his life through the binary of winning and losing, with his hyper-competitiveness guiding his perspectives of success and happiness.
However, the myth of winners and losers loses its grasp as the family’s journey reveals that attaining happiness is not contingent upon conforming to society’s expectations of success.
The American Ideal
Richard’s obsession with self-improvement and success stems from his desire to emulate the American ideal of success.
As a middle-class family, Richard fights for a shift in his family’s class structure and works hard to find success through his work rather than as a father.
Beauty
Set against the backdrop of the Little Miss Sunshine pageant, the societal expectations of beauty frame Olive’s journey of confidence and self-esteem.
Olive’s non-conformance to the typical beauty standards of pageant contestants is questioned by Richard, leading her to re-evaluate her chances of winning and, therefore, her value in the eyes of her father.
How to Analyse ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ in 3 Steps
A common issue that students run into while attempting to answer an essay question is starting with their thesis. Rather than focus on your thesis, you should use your analysis as a spring-board to structure your argument.
Analysing your text is a great way to gain an in-depth understanding of its underlying meanings before you begin to answer anything about it.
After you’ve analysed your text, you will be able to build more easily on its themes and narrow down your thesis ideas.
To help you out, we’re going to walk you through creating an analysis for ‘Little Miss Sunshine’ with three easy steps!
Step 1: Choose your example
When choosing an example, a key tip is to search for a scene that contains a technique.
Techniques are crucial to helping you dig deeper into what meaning the composer is trying to convey and create a connection between language and thematic concerns.
For this example, we have chosen to look at two quotes that focus on the symbolism of ice-cream.
“Those women in Miss America, are they skinny or are they fat? I guess they don’t eat a lot of ice cream.”
And
“Do you eat ice cream? / Yes. My favorite is Chocolate Cherry Garcia… except technically I think it’s a frozen yogurt.”
Step 2: Identify your technique(s)
When trying to identify a technique within your example, the best method is to identify a technique that enables you to uncover a deeper subtext of your work and elevate your argument and analysis.
Rather than referencing simple language techniques like alliteration and rhyme, try searching for techniques that unveil symbolic meanings like metaphors, motifs, allusions, and intertextuality.
We have identified three techniques in the two quotes above: Hypophora, contrast, superlative and symbolism
Tip: As a rule of thumb, it’s always better to try and find multiple techniques in your quotes rather than just one, so you can really show off your analysis skills!
Step 3: Write the analysis
When you write your analysis, the key focus should be on what effect the technique has. Simply labelling what the technique is will not count as analysing and will award you minimal marks. Technique labelling would look like this:
When Richard states “Those women in Miss America, are they skinny or are they fat? I guess they don’t eat a lot of ice cream”, the use of hypophora shows that Richard is confident in his assumption that to win a pageant, women need to be slim, which means they don’t eat ice-cream.
So, not only does this example only label techniques, but it also fails to go into deeper detail about how these techniques allow a closer reading of the film.
If we were to rewrite this analysis with a more nuanced explanation of how these techniques communicate the symbolic value of ice-cream, the paragraph would like a little more like this:
During the diner scene, Richard posits Olive with a contrasting hypophora “Those women in Miss America, are they skinny or are they fat? I guess they don’t eat a lot of ice cream”. Using the superlative of Miss America against his daughter, Richard dampens Olive’s excitement over the symbolic meal of waffles and ice-cream — his own black-and-white bias between winning and losing reflects the peverse impact of 2000s American ethos on young girls, wherein beauty is already used as a form of self-improvement.
Step 4: Practise with sample essay questions
Even if you’ve written an incredible essay, if you don’t respond to the question or stimulus that you’re given in an exam, you could miss out on a Band 6.
Luckily for you, we’ve got plenty of practise questions on our resources page for you to use!
Here are 20 Questions for the Year 11 Common Module: Reading to Write to get you started!
And, that’s a wrap!
Check out other texts we’ve created guides for below:
- Pride and Prejudice
- Così
- Blade Runner
- Frankenstein
- After Darkness
- I Felt A Funeral, in My Brain
- Like a House on Fire
- Mabo
- Photograph 51
- The 7 Stages of Grieving
- All the Light We Cannot See
- Lord of the Flies
Are you looking for some extra help with your essay analysis of Little Miss Sunshine?
We have an incredible team of tutors and mentors!
We can help you master your essay analysis of Little Miss Sunshine by taking you through the summary, context, key characters and themes. We’ll also help you ace your upcoming English assessments with personalised lessons conducted one-on-one in your home or online!
We’ve supported over 8,000 students over the last 11 years, and on average our students score mark improvements of over 20%!
To find out more and get started with an inspirational tutor and mentor, get in touch today or give us a ring on 1300 267 888!
Ashley Sullivan is a Senior Content Writer for Art of Smart Education and is currently undertaking a double degree in Communications (Journalism) and a Bachelor of Laws at UTS. Ashley is an editor for UTS Vertigo. She is a film, fashion, and fiction enthusiast who enjoys learning about philosophy, psychology, and unsolved mysteries in her spare time.
