The Smurfette Principle

[mothwing]

I don't have a very high degree of literacy when it comes to animated media, but this video I found via the Hathor Legacy still made interesting points with regards to prototypical (usually male) characters in animated media and their female token counterpart(s). Tread carefully, it does have issues.

Comments

[krakelwok.livejournal.com]

TGWTG can be very awful because his 'gimmick' seems to be screeching a lot. Zero Punctuation is really funny, although sometimes I get the impression Yahtzee riffs on details just for the sake of riffing. Of all the gimmick reviewers, I like James Rolfe best - and not just the Angry Video Game Nerd things he does. Most of his movie reviews are entertaining, presented in a way that's informative, pleasant to follow and he doesn't try to cram in gags wherever possible.

Anyway, animation - the late 70s and early to mid-80s were perhaps the most terrible animation era of them all. Most programs talked about in that video are from that time. Feature animation was in decline and TV animation was completely in the hands of business people focusing only on marketable brands and low production values. The artistic aspect was almost destroyed because the entire process got streamlined: generic designs, limited, mechanical animation and outsourcing. Consequently, the writing was insipid pandering to uncritical children to get to their parents' money through merchandise. The 90s got a little better when creator-driven cartoons started to become popular again but that didn't save us from shows like Pokémon, one of the greatest cross-media money-making schemes of all time.

Overall animation is a male-centric business, there is no beating around the bush on that issue. In our Cologne studio, the women work in administration and post-production, we have no full-time female animators. They are rare even in the big studios, although there are some noteworthy female art directors and story artists.
In that respect things are getting a little better but it's a slow process. There are more female students coming out of traditional animation colleges like CalArts or Sheridan, a development that might lead to their increased filling of supervising animation positions once the current student generation takes over the industry. Still, it is a battle that can't be won only in numbers. Animation is an art form and like all art forms there is a strong ego component involved. Female animators will have to assert themselves if they wish to control the content.

[mothwing.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, he is screechy, and his way of talking in that "I made a funny, everybody laugh!"-way really ticks me off, too. I've just given James Rolfe a shot, and enjoyed the movie reviews so far, especially his sobriety.

Animation - really, I think the late seventies and eighties were a difficult area for TV and movies all around, considering how many trashy TV shows hail from those two decades. Still, I see what you mean with streamlining and lack of originality. Although personally, I do wonder whether precisely that genericness of the designs made many series from back in the day my favourites (non-Western, but I'm thinking of Nippon Animation's World Masterpiece Theatre series in specific here - although that's still going, of course).

From what male-centricism, sounds much like I'd have expected it to be on the level of creation, but even on that there are several distinct issues concerning women and/in the media:
- There are often only very few women in creative positions.
- There are few people creating things for a general audience focusing on women.
- There are few people creating things specifically for a female audiences.
- There are few people creating things focusing on women for a female audience.

And that's not even taking intersecting demographies and their issues into consideration, but I guess it becomes clear that most of these issues won't be fixed by simply having more female artists - apart from #1, that is. It doesn't automatically take care of the other things because women don't only do stuff that features women for women once they control the content.