Letters to the Editor
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Get Real...
Filmmakers can, do, and should create any kind of characters and stories they want. That is what they do. The very idea that they are under some sort of obligation to create characters that are just like you, or situations that are just like yours is as offensive as it is stupid.
If you don't like what you're looking at, get up and walk away and go find something better. But don't support these artists with your time and money and then expect them to start taking instructions from whiny audience members who can't be satisfied by stories that aren't all about themselves. That kind of obnoxious attitude deserves all the crappy sequels and unfunny comedies ever made.
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Male lead = boys and girls
They do it because male characters appeal to both boys and girls. If it was a female lead, you would lose a lot of boys. Male leads don't lose as many girls.
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Allie is right about women in CGI
If Catherine Price wants to see more female characters, maybe she should have been an animator instead.
I also work in CGI, and like Allie said, the studios are dying to hire more women, who would probably make more female lead characters. Every studio I know of will hire a woman over an equally skilled man, and yet they're still like 90% male. There really aren't many qualified women for some reason. And as Allie pointed out, many women for some reason don't want to learn the technical skills or get really good chops. There are some women artists who are great. And they tend be appreciated for it, big time. But there are really damn few. It's unfortunate but that is the reality of it.
Many women go into production and the HR side of things instead. HR, production assistants, and many of the "glue" jobs tend to be women in CGI companies.
Japanese anime has more gender balance in child characters; however, the characters tend to be androgynous to start with, and are mostly by male writers/artists. Ghibli's characters for example tend to be very androgynous children. Regardless, the studio's art and direction are almost entirely male staffed.
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Chromosome Combos and Gender Agendas
I’m lucky enough to work in animation, in a studio in South Africa where a third of our employees (and half our 3D department) are women who decidedly don’t suck.
Neither do our female characters, which is particularly relevant in a country ravaged by horrific gender violence. We don’t just have to deal with rape, we have to deal with baby rape and one of the worst AIDS rates in the world.
South Africa is dealing with this in some interesting ways. We have the only Sesame Street with an HIV-positive muppet, who is, not by accident, a precocious little fluffly sunshiny GIRL called Kami.
One of the best animation shorts to come out of this country was Lara Foot-Newton & Gerhard Marx’s painful and evocative stop-motion, And There In the Dust, which interrogated the rape of a nine month old baby in 2001. Of course, that’s not suitable viewing for young kids, but the subject matter speaks volumes for the need for inculcating strong girl characters in our culture.
It’s not just about preventing violence or encouraging the value of girls, but encouraging girls to value themselves, to give them kickass role models to look up to.
Ultimately, it shouldn’t be about gender agendas or creating stale cardboard figureheads, but developing rich, nuanced characters who hold a story whatever their chromosome combo.
A couple of things I’d like to respond to from other letter writers:
The argument that men can’t write women or vice versa is preposterous. If the characters are thoroughly realised, you should be able to climb inside their heads whatever their sex or species, whether it’s an alien amoeba or a girl who dreams of battling alien amoebas.
Do I think we could do with more female protagonists? There’s no doubt. We’re already seeing it in TV series from The Powerpuff Girls to Dora the Explorer, Atomic Betty, Kim Possible and The Life and Times of Juniper Lee, to name but a few.
As for the movies, both Brad Bird and that other animation rockstar, Chris Sanders write great female characters. Dorey stole the show in Finding Nemo. Elastigirl struggles with that favourite Broadsheet hot topic, kids versus career and Lilo was one of the greatest James Dean-style rebels in the under 10 age range. And while we’re on it, one of the greatest moments in kids’ animation had to be the scene where Fiona rejected the princess fantasy to stay an ogre in Shrek 1.
As for Toy Story recast with Bratz versus Barbie, let’s remember that in a previous incarnation, before she was a drag queen hooker (let’s face it, who else wears heels like that), Barbie was once an astronaut too.
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Gender roles
"For some reason, Americans realize it's necessary to push ten-year-old girls to be gymnasts or violinists or ballerinas, but they don't understand that they need to start just as early to be comic book artists and animators and video game level designers. For whatever reason, more boys than girls are naturally drawn to the technical aspects (generally boys coming into the field know the technical stuff and learn the storytelling later). There are a lot of women out there today who love games and have storytelling ideas they would like to express. Everyone has a story for a video game - it's like everyone having a screenplay - what gets you through the door and into the industry is having some technical skill that allows you to translate your story into the medium."
As for boys being drawn to the technical aspects, sometimes I wonder if it's a matter of gender roles than anything else. Currently, one of my cousin's thinking of becoming a chef, and he's facing pressure not to simply because of cultural pressure -- men don't cook only women do (his parents have actually said this). There was an interesting book about this, Necessary Dreams by Anna Fels, which talked about how societal pressure can be shaped people's lives. You have to be a rebel to swim against the current, and the fact is that most people aren't -- we want approval and safe lives. Let's face it, if you get compliments for your dancing, you're naturally going to want to be a ballerina no matter how mad your math skillz are. Rumiko Takahashi, the most well-paid comic book artist, is probably a perfect example of Anna Fels's theory since even though she enjoyed manga, she never seriously considered it as a career until she won a contest. Approval really did shape her life.
"Ghibli's characters for example tend to be very androgynous children."
But aren't children fairly androgynous in real life. Girls might have longer hair, but the real differences between males and females physically don't pop up until puberty. I had a young girl point this out to me after I told her to put her shirt back on.
I'm not going to argue that Studio Ghibli doesn't have men as key roles (but still, amazing how men as directors can still create interesting female characters, something Pixar, with the same situation cannot do), but the staff itself is a mixture of men and women (mostly 18-25). On Porco Roso, most of the key animators were women.
Here's an article on female animators on staff:
http://www.pelleas.net/aniTOP/index.php?title=title_34&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1