So if it's long been debated I only bring it up now because of a posting written by film.com blogger Erin Nolan last month. She does a good job broaching the subject and expressing her dissatisfaction; she also links to another post of another writer who goes through the canon film by film to look at how Pixar has presented women thus far.
Now, for a few months now I've been excited by the prospects of Pixar's thirteenth film, the 2011 Christmas release The Bear and the Bow. It's an action-adventure fairy tale story (let's hope it's not overly Shrek-y, for those of us who don't like Shrek) set in Scotland, and it features a heroine named Merida who wants to prove her worth in the world as something other than a princess; it actually appears archery, a presumably male-dominated sport, is her thing. Both of the bloggers I just sited express their displeasure at the fact that if Pixar is going to have a female protagonist they insist on making her a princess and setting her in a mythical land. I can see and respect the rationale for that. The bright side--or at least one among several possible bright sides--is that the film is also going to be Pixar's first directed by a woman, Brenda Chapman, who gave us Dreamwork's Prince of Egypt. I hope this doesn't come off as sexist myself, but I feel that having a woman behind the camera is one of the most important ways to ensure that the women in front of the lens are well represented. (Taking a step back from gender studies to Mormon cinema, a subject I know much more intimately and personally, this certainly has been the case: it could be argued that no film directed by a non-Mormon has ever yet accurately depicted the Mormon experience.) By way of support or contrast, I was obsessed with the publicity material for Disney's Beauty and the Beast when it was first released, and I remember vividly many, many articles lauding how liberated and feminist Belle was, comparing her with the heroines of past princess features; every single one of these articles sited the difference in screenwriter Linda Wolverton and her conscious effort to update and liberate the Disney princess. It's ironic that Belle is now grouped with the others as part of the problem, not the solution. At any rate, here's a portion of the press release announcing The Bear and the Bow, and here's the Wikipedia page for Brenda Chapman. (Caveat: that page describes her as the third woman to ever direct an animated feature, something I have a hard time believing; just flipping through Giannalberto Bendazzi's Cartoons: One hundred years of cinema animation reveals a whole bunch more.)
Finally, I also thought it good to go straight to the horse's mouth, so to speak. I didn't scour the web for statements by Brad Bird or John Lasseter or Edwin Catmull or other Pixar bigwigs about the studio's stance on women, but I did remember reading an interview with Joss Whedon in Mother Jones a few months back that addresses the subject. Whedon, best known for creating the television version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spinoffs, has said that advancing women's roles is his greatest purpose in filmmaking. I suppose it's slightly less known that he also wrote Toy Story, arguably Pixar's most male-dominated film. It's interesting, therefore, to read the few comments he has on that process here (and his perfect knowledge of the irony of it) in the context of all of his other, much more overtly feminist, work.
Here's crossing our fingers for Brenda Chapman and, frankly, everybody else!
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