Dreamgenitals

The trailer for Dreamworks’ next massively cross-promoted film, Monsters Vs. Aliens, was just released. Way back in the nineties, Dreamworks – along with Pixar, the other studio pumping out the most influential and profitable children’s narratives of our time – realized that people were too difficult to digitally animate, so they started making films about non-people. Cars, trolls, monsters, fish, robots, etc. These characters, in spite of lacking genitals in real life, are voiced by familiar celebrities that have genitals, such that the viewing public considers the characters to be either girls or boys. Nothing unusual there.

Studios don’t like making expensive live-action films about female protagonists because their focus group participants tell them that they won’t make as much money as Ironman and Harry Potter. Warner Brothers production president, Jeff Robinov, notably said this summer, “We are no longer doing movies with women in the lead.” We can’t really blame a business for refusing to produce what they see as a risky product for mainstream release. However, when it comes to ensemble films made up of robots and goo monsters, it makes sense to ask why less than 20% percent of these main characters are female.

Monsters Vs. Aliens features a cast of one villain (an alien dude) and the five monsters that the US government recruits to fight it. The monsters are a fish-man, a mad scientist cockroach, an indestructible blob (Seth Rogen!), a large fluff insect, and a girl that’s been jumbo-sized to fifty stories tall. The fluff insect has no voice, but is referred to as male, probably because it’s large. All of the other monsters, except for the giantess, are male. The children that are going to be seeing this film, though, will be equally male and female.
When the film is released next March, Taco Bell and Mattel will have their next kids’ meals and action figures all thought-out for them. And kids will play with the toys and dream up little stories about whatever goo monsters do in Imaginationland. I find it disturbing, though, that the consumer public has no problem with their children being told that both boys and girls should learn to identify with male characters as standard characters. We’re not talking about Disney princesses; these are literally goo monsters.

Kudos to Seth Rogen, though, for expanding his audience.