Lack of female leads in animated films, says writer

Dory at least was pretty major. Easily stole the show in most of her scenes and no love interest.

The Incredibles focused on Mr. Incredible, but it worked best as an ensemble cast.

Disney's females are always pretty bland (Lilo being the exception), but most of their males are pretty stereotypical too. Character development was never a strong point for them.

Now, anime is also made mostly by males, but there's plenty of female characters in anime. Yes, there are moe stereotypes which would be equivalent to Disney princesses, but for every one of those you also have a Motoko, Paprika, or San who kicks ass and often ends up saving the male characters.
 
[sarcasm]Yeah, there's the hallmark of objective research for ya! Forrmulate a premise based on your own preconceived notions, then dismiss as irrelevant every piece of data that makes hash of your theory. And while we're at it, just limit your field of research to one small area the requires the least amount of data-digging so you don't run the risk of having your cherished paradigms challenged.[/sarcasm]

The creationists and 9/11 conspiracy nuts called. They want their tactics back.

Maybe the reason why she dismisses the Disney heroines is because most of them don't slavishly adhere to contemporary feminist values. To judge the protagonist of a fictional story according to your own value system is an exercise is close-mindedness. If you judged real people that way, you would be criticized as a racist, sexist, homophobe, anti-immigrant (oops, don't know why that slipped out), so why should someone get a validity pass for saying some fictional character's value system is "wrong" because it's not in line with 21st Century left-wing neo-feminist thought?



But bean-counting for the sake of anecdotal evidence is never healthy, since it often reveals the bean-counter as a hypocrite when the tally doesn't go her way. When I got involved if SF fandom back in the late '70's, there was a small but very noisy entourage of young, female fans who regularly denounced every male SF writer they judged as "sexist", based on his work rather than of any actual knowledge of the man himself. E.E."Doc" Smith was one of their favorite whipping boys based entirely on the premise of his Lensman novels that only males could Lensmen. Now, almost thirty years later, every one of those no-longer young women who is still in fandom worships at the altar of Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Do you think any of them has a problem with Whedon's insistence that only women could be Slayers? I wonder what happened to all that fiery egalitarian spirit when the tables got turned.
 
She does have a valid point, but things are better than they used to be. We've grown from having swooning, melodramatic secondary character love interests to having sassy, self-confident...secondary character love interests. It's an arc. Things don't change overnight.

I have to say I have some personal beef with Disney princesses, due to the predictable fate of my ex-marriage. My ex-wife grew up on Disney princess movies and was so indoctrinated into the idea of 'tru wurve' that when she reached adulthood she grappled onto the first tall, dark, handsome stranger that came along via the internet. Whereas if she had been more exposed to strong, independent female archetypes she might have judged the situation more objectively and realised that her tall, dark, handsome stranger was actually an incompetent self-absorbed leech who was not only much shorter than she thought but also a thoughtless cad who thinks nothing of other peoples' feelings and talks openly about about his ex-marriages on public web forums about cartoon shows with complete strangers *slaps self*. We wouldn't be divorcees and we'd both have 2 years of our lives back.

I believe there was a study that indicated that females who watched Disney movies more often growing up were also more likely to stay in abusive relationships. Having had first-hand experience of this I'm rather inclined to agree. That's what 'tru wurve' does to people. It makes them think that there's one special person in all the world that has magical wurve stuff clinging to them in an invisible sparkly cloud meant specially for them and them only. This deluded idea didn't even exist until the 19th century, and it's long past time it was banished to the dustbin of history.

I tend to have strong, multi-faceted, non-romantic-interest females as the main characters of my stories, not necessarily because of a perceived 'gender imbalance' but simply because they're just more interesting to write than smartarsy, brawny men.

And I second the comment that 'feminist' isn't a dirty word. It's a principle of gender equality, not of claiming 'women are better than men'. I consider myself a feminist and I am very definitely male. It's important to remember that the principle of gender equality is a comparatively very recent phenomenon that has had its work cut out for it ever since it emerged in the early 20th century. There are still glass ceilings in many professions and gender equality is still considered blasphemous in many parts of the world. There are still battles to be fought and this just so happens to be one of them.
 
Japanese animation is even worse when it comes to stereotyping females, mostly due to sexism over there. Female characters in boy shows here don't fall under the "useless side character" role like they often do in stuff like Naruto or Dragonball Z.

As for the girl-lead-in-animation thing, I think it's because people seem to think "girl main character = girl show" (like the people who call WITCH and Kim Possible girly without having seen them), and girl animation doesn't sell, so less movie makers will star a female as the main cast of an animated movie.
 
You're only focusing on the shonen genre, though. I mean, shojo is about as big as shonen is in Japan, and usually that genre focuses on female characters (not counting shonen-ai). Plus, a lot of adult-oriented anime fleshes out the females a bit more (like in Ghost in the Shell, anything done by Satoshi Kon, Bubblegum Crisis, even Evangelion despite all the fanservice, etc.), and Miyazaki's work is about as feminist as you can get.

Besides, the article was focused on feature animation, not TV productions. Since feature animation in America for the longest time has been mainly the realm of Disney, anything Disney does has a more significant effect than, say, something done by Akira Toriyama, because Toriyama's playing field has CLAMP to even things out.
 
Shounen is a lot more popular than shoujo is, according to all the popularity and ratings lists I've seen. And I don't think those titles should be used since the women are either naked or half-naked a lot of the time. Fanservice sort of contradict the whole "empowered women" angle.

A lot of Disney's films do have female leads, though. I'm sure the woman in that article would complain about Motoko being naked/pantsless a lot, or Mima being an adult star, because they're not portrayed as 100% perfect and superior to men like a lot of these articles are really trying to say. Short of all media becoming like those sitcoms where the wife is all-knowing and perfect while the husband is dopey and gets into trouble, these types of articles wont quit.
 
They may be nude a lot, but at least they have developed personalities, which is pretty much what I want from characters. Most Disney females don't even rise up to that level. Mulan came pretty damn close, but the fact that Disney felt the need to replace the tragic ending of the original story with a "girl gets married, everyone's happy" ending does feed the argument that Disney has trouble breaking its pre-assigned roles for women.
 
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