I got this comment on my Tintin post from Neal:
Funny, my wife, daughters, son and parents didn’t notice this absence. They saw a film they enjoyed. As a reader of the original series I can tell that you’ll be disheartened to learn that this absence continues. Stop badgering Spielberg about this. You should be congratulating Kathleen Kennedy who is one of the producers and a long time collaborator of Spielbergs.
If Neal went to a film where the three main characters were female, all the heroes and all the villains were also female, do you think he might notice?
Sexism is so ingrained, people use it to defend sexism. Wow.
It seem so simple, yet is almost impossible in the film industry. How hard is it to make films with central female characters??? More of us need to realize that the men who run the industry, Peter Jackson, John Lasseter, etc. ARE inherently sexist. Their products prove it. And they leave young girls admiring men and becoming divided against their own sex. This is extrememly distasteful to me.
I’m going to the theaters to see Ghibli’s “Arrietty” this February, and then I’m calling it quits for the American film industry for the year 2012. Unless things change.
Hi Kenneth,
It sucks! and yes, how hard is it? These people call themselves creative yet they stick in the same old limited stereotypes.
MM
Congratulate her for what? Existing? Helping make the kind of movies that perpetuate the difficulty for people who resemble herself to be accepted in her industry, particularly in creative roles?
No change without badgering. Yay for badgering! Let’s all keep badgering until things are done differently.
Perhaps it is time we started paying more attention to, and exposing others to, foreign films and animation with strong female characters. Hayao Miyazaki comes to mind of course but there are plenty of other works out there.
Yeah, cos I bet that Spielberg dude is just freaked out by your ‘badgering’. And there is a woman involved in the whole thing; a single, solitary woman that the kids watching can’t actually see, but you should still be grateful, little woman-person.
Honestly, this stuff is completely freaking me out at the minute as – as usual – there’s not a single film about that I want my daughter to see. Tin Tin? Hugo? Alvin and the flirty girly Chipmunk sidekicks? No, no and no. It’s driving me crazy.
I’m blown away a grown man would order you to stop doing something, and that he’d categorize it as badgering, a term most often applied to female behavior.
My brother loved Tin Tin books, I enjoyed them, but certainly felt a degree of separation from them. Someone recently gave my son, age six, a Tin Tin book. My daughter, age eight, was entertained but not electrified. She’ll choose a book over a film any day, it’s very clear to me why.