Girls on film: Hollywood's new young female leads
Pixar's new film, Brave, finally features a female lead. With the likes of Twilight and The Hunger Games also doing big box office, is Hollywood starting to wake up to what audiences want?
When Pixar's new animated adventure Brave reaches UK cinemas next week, even grumps like me, who feel the picture falls short of the studio's usual standard, will be cheering in the streets. The cause for celebration is the film's emphasis on the relationship between a young, assertive Scottish princess called Merida and her mother. The idea has long prevailed that a film's potential audience falls in inverse proportion to the main character's oestrogen levels, but this has been discredited by Brave, which has already grossed more than $340m. This year we have also seen the film adaptation of Suzanne Collins's novel The Hunger Games ($683m worldwide), and two popular spins on Snow White (Mirror, Mirror and Snow White and the Huntsman). And there must be at least another few hundred Twilight books lined up on the Hollywood conveyor belt. No longer are complex female characters for the under-18s rarer than hen's teeth.
If I'm attuned acutely to the presence of women in children's entertainment, that's partly a result of having two daughters. Still, I took a dismayingly long time to recognise their need to see themselves represented in the films they watch. At a screening of Star Wars: Attack of the Clones in 2002, my son Barney, who was eight, was spellbound, but my eldest daughter, Rosie, then nine years old, kept trudging off to the toilets. Was it an eating disorder? Dysentery? No – she was bored by this boys' own adventure set a long time ago in a galaxy far, far inferior to ours in its equality legislation. At 19, Rosie now has a special predilection for movie drag queens. Given time, and the necessary research grant, I'm certain I could prove this to be the result of a dearth of female role models in her early cinematic diet.
Conventional wisdom has it that a story with predominantly male characters (from Harry Potter to Diary of a Wimpy Kid) will appeal to everyone, whereas a female equivalent will be as off-putting to most young boys as a game of kiss-chase. That's why Disney panicked over its film Rapunzel, switching the title to Tangled late in the day and retooling it to include more boy-friendly elements. It's why the hero of the same studio's Chicken Little was changed from female to male at great expense during production.
Even a hit like the West End musical Matilda will at some point have caused its marketing people to gnash their teeth and ask: "But will the boys come to see it?"
The signs are that children's films are coming round to the idea of strong female heroes, even if Studio Ghibli still remains a wondrous anomaly. "I think the old rules have been overturned," says Cressida Cowell, author of the How to Train Your Dragon series. "Girls need to be reminded not to kowtow to the boys too much. But there have been so many good female characters for girls in cinema – Lyra in The Golden Compass, Katniss in The Hunger Games, Hit-Girl in Kick-Ass. It's not that girls need to see other girls on screen in order to enjoy something. But you feel a bit cross when a cool female character isn't represented. As a young reader, I did wonder why there couldn't be a Jane Bond."
Of course, the sparkly pink world of Disney princesses is an important part of the imaginative universe, and always will be, but what's changing now in movies is choice. A wider range of alternatives can only make young audiences more discerning and demanding.
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