Last night, “Adventures of Tintin” won the Golden Globe for best animated film. Director Steven Spielberg thanked the studio for taking a chance on an “80 year old comic book series;” he didn’t add a series whose creator believed females didn’t belong in his imaginary world.
Other nominations in the best animation category? Rango, Puss In Boots, Arthur Christmas, and Cars 2. Out of five nominations, four were named for the male star of the movie. This after Disney switched the movie title from “Rapunzel” to “Tangled” to hide its female star. Not a single clip shown in the animated film category during the Golden Globes ceremony featured a female voice.
Best Director win? Martin Scorsese for “Hugo,” yet another kids film titled for its male star.
My agent suggested that I read The Lightning Thief because I’m writing a Middle Grade book and the pacing in this MG series is considered perfect.
The books are exciting page turners. I also adore this series because it’s all about the gods and goddesses from the Greek myths (existing above modern day Manhattan.) I loved the Greek myths as a kid and love them now. I’ve heard the Greek myths described as the narratives of the patriarchy taking over the matriarchy. I don’t know if that’s true, but I can see why the theory exists. There are many strong, cool females in those myths– many more than we have in books or movies that dominate the culture in 2012. The women of the Greek myths are also beautiful and smart and strong– a combination pretty forbidden nowadays. But the men rule. That is true in this series as well.
Our hero is Percy. He is the son of Poseidon, the sea god. Percy, like all heroes, is a half-blood: half god and half human. I like this kid. He’s smart, funny, resourceful, sweet, and humble. He, like many modern day heroes in kidworld, has a smart, strong girl sidekick: Annabeth, daughter of Athena. She helps him along on his quest. There’s quite a lot of talk in this book about “the big three:” Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades. Those are the three most powerful gods whose children are the most powerful heroes. If you read this series with your kids, I suggest discussing with them why the goddesses aren’t allowed to be in the big three and why that’s not fair, beyond their specific roles in the myths.
Besides Annabeth, there are other strong females in this series.
I recommend reading it to your sons and daughters. I’d love to recommend many more companion books where the boys help the girls along on their quests.
My eight year daughter tore through this series and said she liked it better than Harry Potter (but that could’ve been because she was done with HP– she lives in the present.)
We’ve been cycling through the the stomach flu at my house, so I’ve been spending a lot of time reading to bedridden kids. We’re all loving the Ramona series.
The writing is wonderful, the characters are complex and realistic, and the books are funny. Cleary does a great job going into the mind of Ramona: her jealousy over Beezus, her fears about school, her anxiety when her parents fight. Ramona has a great relationship with Howie, and it’s fascinating to read about their adventures together.
These books have no boring or slow parts. My five year old and my eight year old are riveted. Even my two year old is or pretends to be, begging for the Wamona book at bedtime.
If I have one tiny bone to pick: the way the narrator seems to pity Ramona because she has boring brown hair. This comes up several times in the series. I have two blonds and a brunette, and I skip that part when I read. Being a brunette myself, I remember being annoyed by the ubiquitous golden locks of heroines.
I highly recommend these books. Please remember to read them to your sons. Get excited about the book, and they will love it too. A great time to start the series is if you’re talking about kindergarten, because that’s what the first book is all about.
Which new movie do you think this line comes from?
Could it possibly be in an animated film where the intended audience is little girls? Little girls who probably love to pillow fight? Who are probably awesome at it? Yep, it’s in the new “Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted.”
Why would kids need to hear a line making fun of how girls fight? What writer or producer or director could possibly think perpetuating that stereotype would be funny for girls to hear? Or were they, more likely, not thinking about little girls at all?
“Madagascar 3,” by the way, features the same 4 main characters as in 1 and 2. Guess how many are female? One, Gloria the Hippo. She has hardly any lines in this preview. There is a female villain played by Frances McDormand who is featured prominently in the preview. I hope she has a big part in the movie as well.
This frat boy mentality that looms over kids movies has to end. Hollywood, please stop programming sexism to kids. It’s not funny.
After 4 years of marketing research, LEGO has come to the conclusion that girls want LadyFigs, a pink Barbielicious product line for girls, so 5 year-olds can imagine themselves at the café, lounging at the poolwith drinks, brushing their hair in front of a vanity mirror, singing in a club, or shopping with their girlfriends. As LEGO CEO Jorgan Vig Knudstorp puts it, “We want to reach the other 50% of the world’s population.”
As representatives of that 50%, we aren’t buying it! Marketers, ad execs, Hollywood and just about everyone else in the media are busy these days insisting that girls are not interested in their products unless they’re pink, cute, or romantic. They’ve come to this conclusion even though they’ve refused to market their products to the girls they are so certain will not like them. Who populates commercials for LEGO? Boys! Where in the toy store can you find original, creative, construction-focused LEGO? The boy aisle! So it’s no wonder LEGO’s market research showed girls want pink, already-assembled toys that don’t do anything. It’s the environment and the message marketers have bombarded girls with for over a decade because, of course, stereotypes make marketing products so much easier. But we remember playing with and loving LEGO when we were little girls.
If you’re not familiar with these new Lego sets, check out this ad. It is not a SNL spoof.
If you haven’t yet signed the petition yet and would like to, please visit Change.org.
Though the petition has received an enormous amount of support, here’s a summary of some responses I’ve gotten in defense of the dumbed-down Lego sets:
Girls don’t have to buy this set; they can buy any set they want. These new sets are just for girls who aren’t buying Lego yet to turn them on to the product.
Lego Friends are aggressively marketed to girls in a 40 million dollar media roll out. All kids see and get influenced by these ridiculous commercials that welcome them to “beautiful Heartlake City” where Stephanie goes to a party at the new cafe to “chill with the girls” or the “beauty shop where Emma gets styled and ready to go.” If Lego wants to attract girls to its product, why doesn’t it aggressively market its other sets to them? Why does Lego show boys on most of its packages, boys in its commercials, boys on its Facebook Welcome page, and sell mostly male figs? Obviously, this is a much bigger issue than just Lego. I recently posted When Hollywood excludes girls, how can Lego market to them? The solution to this sexism marketed to little kids is not for another company to cave into it, turning its once creative toy into Disney princess clones.
The new Legos aren’t as bad as Monster High or Barbie.
Is that the bar we want to measure against? Really? Monster High?
What’s wrong with dolls or “girly” things?
It’s the dominance of this type of toy and how aggressively and relentlessly it’s marketed to girls that is the problem. Girls are taught literally from birth by toys, games, and media aimed at them that first and foremost, what is most important is how they look.
Lego, are you listening to us now? 35,000 customers hope that you are.
When I posted yesterday that The Little Engine That Could would probably not find a publisher in today’s segregated pink/ blue kidworld, I didn’t realize that I wasn’t posting the original art. Apparently, Little Engine has been sent off to a make up artist and a plastic surgeon. She now sports mascara, blush, and a brow lift. Comparatively, she looks kind of like a grandma. Nothing wrong with grandmas, of course, but the Little Engine seems more like a youthful character to me. I suppose a grandmotherly/ motherly hero is more compatible and less threatening to the standard male one.
I’ve gotten hundreds of comments on Tintin at Reel Girl and SFGate, two I find really interesting. One is an interview with Herge I can’t find right now, but when I have time to sort through the comments, I’ll post for you (Or if you come across it, resend!) The one below is kind of fascinating about how extremely male Tintin’s world truly is– the part about Tintin “graduating from housekeeper to a male butler.” Wow. But the point Lucas makes about “going even further” with my argument into exploring heteronormativity in Tintin as more interesting than “Tintin is sexist” is funny to me. That’s not a more interesting argument to me, Lucas.
Hey there –
Yeah, the early Tintin is amazingly racist. (But at the same time, “The Blue Lotus,” despite its structural racism and the racist/colonial project that drove Hergé to do albums in Africa, in India, in South America, in China, etc., actually allowed Hergé to work through his racist bias and produce what has been describe as a – for its time – very culturally-sensitive and even subversive piece of work.)
More importantly, the entire Tintin opus is intensely homosocial: all men and boys. Tintin even “graduates” from his female housekeeper to sharing a male butler with Captain Haddock when they move in together. The entire economy of the books is male-centered enough to become a little queer, actually. A more interesting argument than “Tintin is sexist” might be “Tintin is sexist to the point that it subverts itself, and starts to push heteronormativity into different patterns of gender and sexuality.” You don’t have to make that argument, of course, but it would be more surprising.
One of the key exceptions to the rule of Tintin’s masculine universe is Bianca Castafiore. Catherine Clément gives a wonderful reading of Castafiore in her famous and important feminist text “Opera, or the Undoing of Women.” In the comics, Castafiore is portrayed as an almost entirely negative figure. Her signature aria, which she performs at every opportunity, is presented as shrill and unpleasant; Captain Haddock, in particular, is constantly pained by her singing.
It’s a shame you were in the bathroom during the Castafiore scene in Spielberg’s movie. That’s where you get to see the adaptation really, well, adapting. The new film actually portrays Castafiore as a magnetic, powerful, and happy woman – not a “beautiful” one, not a “thin” one, not even an accessible one, but as a talented woman whose voice (and the film gives itself fully over to her aria, allowing Renée Fleming to sing without interruption) charms and enchants all who hear it. It’s quite a turn-around from the albums, and portrays her character as something that, according to the sexist logic surrounding the diva, should not exist – an ambitious, successful, and self-defined woman.
Without any consideration of this scene, your argument about the movie and its relationship to its source-text is undeveloped. You don’t have to agree with me, but it’s worth thinking about a moment like this because it would make your overall argument more complex and powerful. There’s also a worthwhile recent volume on the political/social implications of Tintin published last year (“Tintin aux pays des philosophes”), which includes several surprising essays about race and gender in Tintin. This all by way of suggestion, if you would like to make your arguments about this subject more nuanced or compelling.
Last night, I read The Little Engine That Could to my two-year-old daughter, and I wondered: Would this spectacular story (about a determined engine who overcomes all odds to save the day) even find a publisher today?
Strike one: The Little Engine is female. If this book were published now, the marketing department would consider it “just for girls.” Everyone knows that boys won’t listen to stories about female heroes. Parents can’t do a thing about it, either. Boys are just born that way. Girls, on the other hand, don’t mind if bedtime stories (or Hollywood movies) don’t include them at all. Go figure.
Strike two: The Little Engine is a train. Everyone knows it’s boys who like trains. Even girls won’t be interested in this story.
Need further proof that The Little Engine That Could was written by a radical lesbian who refers to parents as “breeders”? Here you go. Strike three: The Little Engine is blue. Blue. How subversive can you get?
Reel Girl rates The Little Engine That Could ***GGG*** for triple girlpower. If you don’t own this timeless classic, proceed immediately to the bookstore and buy it for your son or daughter today. If it’s on your bookshelf, read it to the family tonight.
I am reposting with art for those who argue “Tintin in the Congo” is not racist. Also, one more time: the point is that the lack of female roles in the Tintin movie’s cast is consistent with most of the movies made for kids today. Girls have gone missing in kids’ movies and that means that both genders learn that boys are more important than girls. Parents, this is not okay. If you can’t see it, you can’t be it.
Commenters are defending the Tintin movie, writing that creator Herge’s sexism was simply a product of his times.
Margot, you are aware that Hergé wrote most of his comic books (including the three on which the film is based) before WWII, at a time when women in his home country of Belgium as in many others didn’t even have the right to vote? Of course his work reflects the prejudices of that era, not only towards women but towards just about everyone who wasn’t a white Christian male (the most egregious example being Tintin in the Congo)!
Would Steven Spielberg adapt Herge’s racist views (“of his times”) expressed in Tintin in the Congoto make a movie in 2012 and market that movie to kids?
Of course not. No one would see it. People would be horrified. Herge’s racist views are universally recognized as the aberration that they are. Why is Herge’s “dated” sexism celebrated in a loyal adaptation from one of our most acclaimed directors?
There are two answers, both are true. The first one is that in 2012 sexism is, in many ways, just as accepted and “normal” as it was in 1932. Women are humiliated and degraded all the time, but while racism is seen as a political issue, sexism is still seen as a “cultural” one.
The second, less controversial explanation is that in Herge’s comics, he directly degrades and humiliates Africans whereas his sexism mostly manifests as an omission. His racism is worse. Herge believes women have no place in his imaginary world. Is that offensive? Is it even sexist?
It’s an annihilation.
What is remarkable about this annihilation, and what I was writing about, is that it’s consistent with the casts of most animated movies made today.A story originally created by an artist who spoke openly of how he didn’t think females should be included in his imaginary world is almost indistinguishable from the majority of films made for kids right now. Steven Spielberg probably didn’t even notice.
What does that say about how important we think girls are?
