Now That Pixar’s Discovered Girls, It Can’t Get Enough Of Them

I was glad to hear that Pixar was letting a girl have an adventure in Brave, its first movie with a female protagonist. But I think their next project with a girl as a main character might be even more important: their teased movie set inside the human mind is going to be inside a girl’s brain and “is about her emotions as characters.” First, it’s just really nice that Pixar isn’t assuming that the default brain is a guy’s, which is honestly what I would have expected, given both their track record of having more male heroes and the assumption in the industry as a whole that the default perspective is male. Second, while I don’t like the Twilight books or movies, I agree that there’s a bunch of under-explored pop culture territory to get inside women’s heads, not just their closets. Girls have competing priorities, social anxieties, and joys even when they’re very young. A movie that gets at and honors that complexity, rather than giving this representative girl one emotion and one object of desire, is important.