The XX Factor: What women really think.

Pixar Will Finally Make Girl Story

Pixar’s making a movie about a girl! The animation company announced its schedule through 2012 and not one, but two of their films will feature females. Harping on Pixar for not having made a movie with a female heroine sooner, especially when I’m still high on Up! (just as Meghan is), feels a little like ragging on Jackson Pollack for not painting straight lines. Still, it’s exciting news.

The first film, Newt, out in 2011, imagines... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)

Boy Story

Wall-E's Oscar win for best animated feature has reminded some bloggers about Pixar's lady problem, or more exactly, its lack-of-ladies problem. In the words of Vast Public Indifference, it's not that Pixar doesn't write female characters so much as present them all as "helpers, love interests, and moral compasses to the male characters whose problems, feelings, and desires drive the narratives." Wall-E's Eve might have been a move in a more girl-powered direction, but the forthcoming Up! doesn't seem to have any women in it at all (though it does look predictably delightful).

Buffy creator Joss Whedon, whose feminist credentials are better than just about any other Hollywood dude's, thinks Pixar got girl trouble too. (Whedon tangent: Anyone watching Dollhouse? Just saw the second episode, in which Eliza Dushku spends an hour running from a crazed lover trying to track her down with a compound bow and arrow, and it's only the memory of Buffy, which is strong in me, that has kept me from a DVR purge.) Here's what he said to Mother Jones about Pixar this past November:

MJ: As a father, what do you think about the fact that Pixar doesn't have a [top-billed] female protagonist yet?

JW: I wrote Toy Story [for Pixar]. And I remember at the time having a crisis in myself because I couldn't figure out Bo Peep. There's no reason why there couldn't be [female Pixar leads]. There is that moment in The Incredibles, when the mom has a pep talk with Violet and Violet stands up like a hero and you can see her other eye for the first time. [My wife] said, "Oh look, they wrote a scene for you."

All About Eve

Pixar’s latest kiddie masterpiece, Wall-E, did some massive damage at the box office on its opening weekend. As A.O. Scott recently noted in a New York Times essay about Kit Kittredge (watch this space for more on that film), Pixar has yet to build a movie around a girl protagonist. But Wall-E does prominently feature a pretty bad-ass lady: Wall-E’s crush object, Eve, a sleekly minimalist commando-bot with an itchy trigger finger. What kind of girl is Eve? One XX Factor-er wondered whether Pixar had intentionally made Eve beautiful but dangerous. The hapless Wall-E “is attracted to her,” she noted, “yet fears she will destroy him or, at the very least, come to his house and mess up his stuff.” Is Eve some kind of femme fatale? (Or, given the fact that she looks like a floor model from a Japanese tech show, is she an electronic dragon lady?) I, for one, found Eve’s wanton destructiveness hilarious, and it occurred to me that she actually evokes a specifically male comic archetype—the powerful brute who can’t control his own strength—which I think makes her even funnier, not to mention a little subversive. In other words, I think she’s more Small Wonder than Angelina Jolie.

Eve also fits into another classic comedy narrative: the chic, competent career woman who falls for a bumbling but sweethearted schlub. Do you think Judd Apatow got a consulting credit for that?

The more I thought about it, though, what Eve reminded me of most was the world’s first Eve—in particular, the vision of her found in John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Like her namesake, robot Eve’s initial design objective is to incubate the first stirrings of life; it’s no coincidence that she’s shaped like an egg. And the biblical Eve was pretty destructive in her own right. (“Oh, honey, about that whole ‘ruining our chances at immortality and losing God’s everlasting favor’ thing: Totally my bad.”) But even more significant in my eyes, both Pixar’s film and Milton’s poem are about the importance of finding a true partner and companion. The famous last image of Paradise Lost shows Adam and Eve standing outside the gates of Eden; as they prepare to begin a brand new life in a brand new world, they take hold of each other’s hands. If you saw Wall-E, you know that it’s pretty much a 100-minute pantomime about a boy robot trying to hold hands with an oblivious girl robot—before they go repopulate the Earth. The good stories never change, I guess.

Also in Slate, read Dana Stevens' review of Wall-E and see what critics are saying about the new Pixar film in Slate V's Summary Judgment.