Remembering (though I often forget) that Pixar is a subsidiary of Disney…
From NPR:
Dear Pixar, From All The Girls With Band-Aids On Their Knees
by Linda Holmes
Dear Pixar,
This is not an angry letter. It is especially not an angry letter about Up, which I adored. I could have sat in the theater and watched it two more times in a row. I cried, but I also laughed so hard in places that it wore me out.
So I’m not complaining; I’m asking. I’m asking because I think so highly of you.
Please make a movie about a girl who is not a princess.
Of the ten movies you’ve released so far, ten of them have central characters who are boys or men, or who are anthropomorphized animals or robots or bugs who are voiced by and imagined as boys or men. These movies feature women and girls to varying degrees — The Incredibles, in particular — but the story is never “a girl and the things that happen to her,” the way it’s “a boy and what happens to him.”
I want so much for girls to have a movie like Up that is about someone they can dress up as for Halloween, as Anika Noni Rose said about starring as the voice in The Princess And The Frog. Not a girl who’s a side dish, but a girl who’s the big draw.
And I’d really, really like it not to be a princess.