Are we seeing female leads in cartoons being portayed more positively?

M

Mythos (In the dog house)

New member
There are always females in just about every cartoon, but do you think female leads are being portrayed more positively than in the past?

We're seeing quite a number of shows with all-female leads, or a female lead, rather than the usual token girl.

Likewise the superhero cartoons usually have female leads in them, even if there are also others who fall in the Lois Lane category.

What do you think about the portrayal of women in children's cartoons?
 
Well, we are seeing more active female leads in cartoons nowadays. No longer are they just love interests or sideliners, they actually get in there and get involved with the main conflict. Many times, they're also shown to be much more reserved or smarter than their male counterparts.

In light of the rejection of The Modifyers though, they're still not getting the same amount of spotlight as males are due to marketability, and that's pretty disappointing.
 
Can you name some examples?

Based on what I've been seeing, American kidvid producers seem to be steering away from female leads, not towards them. The Mighty B! is the only recent example of an American animated series starring a girl, and that show didn't perform well.

The Big Three animation channels (Cartoon Network, Disney and Nick) are clearly favoring boy-centric shows right now. In fact, a recently auditioned cartoon for Nick, The Modifyers, was allegedly rejected because it's protagonist was female. Similarly, Craig McCracken claims that one reason why his wife Lauren Faust's project Milky Way and the Galaxy Girls has yet to receive a TV show is because currently the kids' networks aren't interested in shows tailored for girls.

Sure, many of today's cartoons feature female characters, but many of them have minor supporting roles or they're just one face in the crowd, secondary appendages to boy characters. Chowder and Flapjack, for example, each have some female regulars, but the main characters, the ones who get the lion's share of the laughs and stories, are male. The upcoming Adventure Time likewise features a girl or 2 in the cast, but its' headlining stars are both guys.

Things are indeed better for female characters now than they were in the 40's or the 60's or the 70's, but I wouldn't say that the gender barriers have been broken yet. When we start getting some Phineas and Ferb or Chowder or Flapjack or Ben 10 or Generator Rex type shows starring girls, in which the leads are females and not just the sisters or the mother figures or the crushes or the sidekicks who dole out friendship speeches, then I'll say the playing field has become level.
 
One could easily say that's the most common stereotype out there. Very rarely will you find a female character who is flawed, or heaven forbid, lazy, dumb, reckless, or stupid. Some might argue it's a positive stereotype for girls to admire and grow to be like, and maybe it is to a certain extent, but it's hardly a realistic set of character traits. Ben Tennyson and Danny Fenton can mess up and goof around with their powers and learn from their mistakes, but Gwen Tennyson and Sam Manson have to be their foils and have a no-nonsense attitude and always bail them out of their messes. Seems like there's very few leading female character who are reckless, slow, or have to learn from their mistakes. I highly doubt we'll get anything like a female in the Ron Stoppable role (the only one I can think of off the top of my head is the teenage version of Pepper Potts in the new Iron Man cartoon, which is ironic considering she's that 'flawless female' stereotype in all of her other incarnations'.

If we saw more shows with female leads, then we might get more varying types, but most of the time the only reason females are on a show to begin with are to fill a minority quota or stereotype, and they tend to be written accordingly. I wasn't fan of Mighty B, but I appreciated that it tried to have a female lead in a wacky slapstick setting. That sort of thing is still taboo as the rejection of 'The Modifyers' has shown us.
 
What about the Ben 10 ep Gwen 10 where Gwen got the Omnitrix instead of Ben and she goofs off with it and Ben basically calls her out on being a hypocrite on telling him not to goof off all those times?
 
She did but at the same time she new how to use the Omnitrix alot more than Ben, of course it was a what if episode since the one where they switch bodies she was having some trouble, even gave Ben credit on how he was using the watch.
 
Very true. Matt Groening (who is certainly guilty of this when it comes to The Simpsons) picked up on this when he was creating the characters for Futurama, and therefore created Amy; a dumb, clumzy female character whom could get involved in the sort of slapstick humor usually reserved for male characters.
 
Exactly. When we start getting shows starring girls who get to be stars in their own right and aren't just foils, rivals, crushes, teachers or guardians to boy characters, and who are portrayed as imperfect, flawed, vain, impulsive, stubborn, reckless, silly, zany, obsessive or weird, and get to indulge in the same kind of wacky slapstick and off-the-wall situations that male characters get to indulge in, then we will have made some progress.
 
I think one show that does show this type of progress would be The Powerpuff Girls. Not just that they were the stars of the show, but the fact that on occasion they have flaws and certainly made mistakes. And from these mistakes, they learned a valuable lesson and showed some character development. One example would be in "Bubblevicious", when Bubbles, deemed the sweetest of the girls, goes hardcore, snubs her sisters, and then gets captured by Mojo Jojo before getting free and pummeled the crap out of him. Afterward, she realized she went overboard and apologized to the others for her recklessness. In another short, "A Very Special Blossom", Blossom herself actually commits a crime in getting the Professor a gift for Father's Day. She attempts to cover it up by framing Mojo, but is caught in her web of lies and eventually confessed and was justly punished for the crime. Also, in "Moral Decay", Buttercup shows some major greed when Bubbles gets money for her lost teeth (a la the Tooth Fairy), leading her to knock out the teeth of several villains so she can collect some money of her own. Eventually, everyone got wise to her scheme and let her have it big time in what was more of an amusing lesson. And all the girls learned a lesson in "Equal Fights" when a female villain uses her own gender to get the better of them, as they wouldn't stop her crime spree until Miss Bellum and Ms. Keane were able to set them straight and took a lesson from historical figure Susan B. Anthony to finally put the villain in her proper place--in jail, that is!
 
Well, the Disney Channel pretty much revolves entirely around appealing to preteen girls, so that covers that... as for PPG, this was in the days before CN became obsessed with the male tween demographic over everything else.
 
Well, one good example of this type of character is XJ-9 from My Life as a Teenage Robot. I'm kind of surprised no one has mentioned her yet. She was often a whining, shallow, self-centered brat, frequently content to let aliens invade or monsters rampage so long as she could get a date or go to a party.

She constantly blew off responsibilities and made mistakes. She would screw up and need to be rescued by her friends. She tended to obsess over things (boys, fashion, etc.) until they took over her life.

So, basically, she had just as many flaws and problems as male protagonists usually get. She's the only character of this type I can come up with, though.
 
I disagree. I think a lot of female characters, in both animation and live action TV, are portrayed as being just as stupid and incompetent as males. It used to be that only men were really portrayed as screw-ups and it's nice to see that's no longer the case.
 
Jenny was a good character, however. She was willing to take responsbility and even share a good laugh at the end of an episode. I mean, come on, she's a robot that's been kept inside for nearly all of her life. A robot. She was like a combination of The PowerPuff Girls, tough like Buttercup, understanding with more underdog characters and, when needed, a born leader like Blossom.

We even feel sorry for her when she gets banged up and downtrodden... Well, I do anyway. She's suppose to be a savior and sometimes she can't save anyone. That's... a pretty big bummer. :sweat:
 
I really like the way Candace is handled in Phineas and Ferb. She's got flaws, and is anything but the politically-correct perfect female. But she's got lots of good qualities, and she and her brothers care about each other and help each other out. She's one of the reason I like the cartoon so much.
 
WITCH is one of my favorites because it was a full fantasy universe that just happened to be predominately female. So you had the variety of characterization I think female characters still don't get in the action genre, on account of lower numbers and the "Emma Peel" archetype. I mean, I look at Kim Possible and it seems to me that she didn't have a character arc the way Ron did.
 
I know Phineas and Ferb has a lot of fans on this board, and while I myself don't dislike it, the show's never been able to pull me in as a fan. One reason for that is because the girl characters in it fall into such fill-in-the-female-quota archetypes. Candace is indeed an example of a flawed yet likable character, but when all is said and done, she's still just 'the sister', and Isabella is nothing more than the 'girl next door with a crush on the main character' archetype encountered so often on kids' shows. I'd enjoy P&F more if one (or both) of the title kids who concocted the crazy summer schemes was a girl, 'cause that would be different and original, but I realize that the show was conceived for boy appeal.
 
Back
Top