In the 1980s, though, Western animation houses started to introduce shows featuring primarily female-led casts, where girls with magical powers teamed up to save the day. If an all-female ensemble existed, it’d be in a show like Josie and the Pussycats - more musical, less action-oriented or fantastical. For every Scooby-Doo with its two female leads, there’d be a Johnny Quest, where all the primary characters were boys. However, adventure and action shows primarily featured male protagonists. ![]() There’s a trove of source material out there for Hollywood to draw on: cartoons made about and for girls, with their own lasting legacy.īefore the 1980s, cartoons weren’t necessarily gendered, though shows like Tom and Jerry and The Yogi Bear Show focused on male characters, with the occasional grumpy grandma or lady love interest. ![]() Yet there are so few female-focused genre movies for when those girls are grown.īut where female camaraderie is rare in mainstream movies, it isn’t lacking in genre fiction. We tell young girls they can do anything. It’s strange that such a basic dynamic should somehow be so rare in movies. After the big fight, the women all go get breakfast together and talk about what just happened. That isn’t anything like what Birds of Prey does, by building the relationships between the five protagonists and then paying off that character work with a big tag-team brawl. Those women had never interacted before, and didn’t interact afterward - they were there to pose together, more than work together. Avengers: Endgame shoehorned in a faux-empowerment moment where the Designated Lady Members of their Respective Male-Led Movies teamed up for one scene to save a male lead most of them had never previously met. ![]() It’s even rarer for these characters to come together in groups. Not only do Harley, Canary, Renee Montoya, and Huntress beat up bad guys, they also help each other out in little supportive ways, thank each other for the input, and compliment each other’s sweet moves.Īmerican audiences rarely see female superheroes like this - ones with agency, well-founded relationships with each other, and good reasons to fight. The mid-fight-scene flourish feels like a huge departure from the cyclical tropes that have complicated modern superheroine movies. In the heat of Birds of Prey’s climactic face-off, antiheroine Harley Quinn tosses her temporary teammate Black Canary a hair tie, so Canary can pull her hair out of her eyes and continue to kick ass.
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