I don’t know how I missed seeing The Incredibles earlier, but it is now my all-time favorite Pixar film. Overall, it is a clever, imaginative, and fun take on the super-hero genre. On top of that, it really shines when it comes to the female characters.

First of all, let me introduce one of my new favorite movie characters: Edna Mode.

Have you ever wondered where super-heroes get those fabulous costumes? Well, wonder no more! ...Read More

Up was a heckuva lot of fun.

It did get a little toothgrinding, though, that Ellie, Carl’s wife, ended up dying before she could have HER adventure, and it was a little too pat that, once he actually looked through her adventure book, he discovered all the pictures she of the two of them together with a message to him “I’ve had my adventure [being with you], now go on and have some of your own!”. As if THAT hadn’t been an ...Read More

Oh, Wall-E. Oh, Wall-E. Pixar’s latest release is a return to the level of environmentally conscious awesome I haven’t seen in animated films since Ferngully or the Pirates of Dark Water.* Basically, the film describes a world where trash has overwhelmed the Earth. Humanity (or at least those who can afford it) flee a planet where the corporation Buy-n-Large has become synomous with the government. BnL leaves a series of little trash compacting bots behind, so that ...Read More

Movies featuring anthropomorphic non-human characters are nearly always rich with questions about “gender” roles, since the assignment of gender onto such characters – especially inanimate ones – is entirely based on the writers’ imaginations, and the features selected to gender something “male” or “female” often reflect assumptions, stereotypes, and conventional gender roles. Pixar’s latest, Wall-E, is a love story between two robots working in an environment following the evacuation and abandonment of Earth under piles and piles of trash, and ...Read More

Hold onto your hats, folks — I found a children’s animated adventure that has nearly as many female main characters as male ones! Possibly more, depending on where you draw the line on which characters are main characters.This film is Kirikou and the Sorceress.

The hero of this fairy tale is Kirikou, a tiny baby boy with miraculous powers. He’s born into an African village where almost all of the men are gone because they’ve been eaten by Karaba the Sorceress. ...Read More

Ice Age is one of the worst children’s films I’ve ever seen in terms of gender portrayal.

In a nutshell, Ice Age is a classic all-male buddy adventure in which a motley group of guys of different prehistoric species bring a (male) baby back to his human clan. The human clan is weirdly also all male except for the baby’s mom, who sacrifices her life in the beginning of the movie in order to set up their great adventure. The lack ...Read More