A Wave of Female Creator Driven Cartoons

@post 62, speaking as a woman who has at least a distant dream of creating a new cartoon, .

Well, OK, then (even if I don't agree with all of those examples...) - that reassures me that isn't completely biased, which is what I feel was wrong with this setup at first. Thank you for that.

Even something as surreal as Adventure Time or Regular Show has plenty of relatively mundane character-interactions that are obviously drawn from someone's relatively mundane experiences. Unless something is very Strictly Formula or purely Troperiffic or intertextual, it seems unrealistic to think a creator's experiences won't influence their work.

Someone said that "What matters is the product the creator is turning in, not the creator's gender." That is a false dichotomy. You can consider both to be significant. You can talk about the latter while still thinking the former, the product, is the most important thing.

Generally not in the New Hollywood fashion, though.

There are instances like, say, Mark Evanier of Garfield And Friends creating the Buddy Bears to express his hatred of The Complainer Is Always Wrong, which he was forced to use as a moral too often in the 80s; or the Games Animation staff writing "Reverend Jack" to tell their version of John K.'s firing, which they'd been painted as the bad guy as.

I don't know what that'd fit under, but that's creators getting ideas for the show out of stuff that's happened to them.

A boy who shows more emotional vulnerability and humanity than any other male lead I can think of in any other cartoon. He cries, he likes both cool action stuff and cute pretty stuff, he loves his mother and his friends, he hates people getting hurt, he's not trying to be cool or bad-ass, he's awkward and believable without an ounce of the RADICAL 'TUDE that has, frankly, only modestly and recently stopped polluting cartoon protagonists since it began in the 90's.

That's your problem, then, because to most people it's pretty obvious what it means and why it matters.

Obvious enough that I feel as though you're just being obtuse and stubborn about it.

Oh my lord. I barely know how to respond to this because you misunderstand the issue on SO MANY levels at once.

We aren't talking about shows being ABOUT the creator's personal perspective. We're saying that ALL art and writing is unavoidably influenced by its creator's upbringing and social attitudes, and our society raises men and women to have some slightly different ones on average.

EVERY aspect of an artist's life influences the tone of their work, the style, the emotions of their characters. Whether they spent most of their life rich or poor, happy or sad. Race, gender, sexuality, it's all going to have an influence all on its own.

Do you get the point yet?

Except that women written by men very noticeably trend towards the same handful of sloppy, cliched, token archetypes, and even when they don't, they still have cringeworthy, stereotyped moments.

Even Futurama, so often lauded as a really liberal and progressive series, fell into "women are from venus" writing traps.

You come across as being almost willfully blind to this phenomenon.

We aren't treating women as different animals.

Society and culture are, and have been since the dawn of human history.

It isn't RIGHT, but it happens, and it's going to keep happening for generations even as people fight hard to fix it.

Women are almost unheard of as Hollywood movie writers and directors. They're more likely to have ideas rejected, less likely to be called back for their resumes even when those resumes are identical to a man's (this was systematically tested by Yale university, look it up)...we are living in a culture that takes women less seriously in certain fields, and that is why it feels special every time one of them makes it.

How many times will I have to remind you that Steven Universe is THE VERY FIRST Cartoon Network series created and controlled by a woman?

How can you possibly, possibly know that fact - and it is a fact - and still keep insisting it's an unimportant one?

Why are you so persistently dismissive about this subject?

You read like some curmudgeony old man who just doesn't get these liberal kids these days, and doesn't want to, because you just don't care about what other people do and wish they wouldn't either.

edited 10th Jun '15 12:22:36 AM by scythemantis

Steven Universe is not the first Cartoon Network series created and controlled by a woman. That was My Gym Partners A Monkey, but I suppose that doesn't count because she did it with a man, much like Cow, Mandy and half of the Kids Next Door don't count as female protagonists because they shared that with men too.

Even while trying to refute all this it still falls into the same traps. Your definition of Steven as a more sensitive character than a normal male lead - isn't it a stereotype that women are more sensitive than men?

I think we've actually gone retrograde here. Those admittedly few female creators in the 90s and 2000s were seen as creators, not as a bold progressive new trend.

And oh yes, women have been given the chance to be animators, storyboarders, writers and directors in animation. In fact there's quite a lot of them. Lynne Naylor, anyone? Or Sherri Stoner? Or even Arlene Klasky, who ran her own cartoon company? There's actually more women working in animation as writers and directors than in Hollywood films.

So the result in cartoons won't be anything like in New Hollywood. Why should it be? Cartoons are a different medium.

It seems unrealistic to expect different experiences not to carry over into fiction at all. That doesn't mean that here people expect a whole new universe of radically, mind-bogglingly different animated entertainment. I didn't spot any posts in this thread that implied that's what we should look forward to.

With the way people are borderline orgiastic at how progressive this is, you honestly have to wonder...

I find it amazing that back in the day you had a woman running her own animation company and creating series for it and nobody batted an eye, whereas three cartoons created by females are made this decade and we're all screaming from the rooftops at how progressive we're getting.

Wouldn't seeing women creating shows as normal and not a sign of how progressive we're getting be - well, more progressive?

I assure you I'm not.

Who is 'we' anyway?

Your post is pretty vague and hyperbolic.

If people are getting orgiastic, maybe you should chill and leave them to it ;)

I assume "we" would be people in this thread.

And honestly...

I find this hard to argue.

List for me all the cartoons you know of that were created exclusively by a woman, go ahead. Earlier you provided a list of around half a dozen from the last 20-30 years, and many were only co-creations....do you have more?

Do you have a LOT more?

Because if that's still most of them, then there should be no argument that new female-led shows are a very big deal.

For decades there have been NONE on Disney, there were never any on Cartoon Network.

So no, it would not be progressive to pretend it doesn't matter. THAT would be retrograde. We have to acknowledge that there's a gulf and we have to make a big deal of it until that gulf is actually gone.

YES. What the hell did you think my point was? Women are stereotyped as sensitive and men as insensitive. Therefore it is great to see sensitive male characters breaking that cliche.

You just admitted there have been very few of them, and then you don't understand why we're glad to have some more? What is WITH you?

But not as series creators. Very rarely as series creators.

Why are you so desperately struggling to downplay ANY significance of new female-led shows?

All you've basically said in this thread since your first post is that you don't think it's worth celebrating when a female creator gets greenlit for a whole series.

You've been presented with an avalanche of reasons why many, many people would find it noteworthy.

Just because you don't care doesn't mean nobody else should have a reason to. If you think it doesn't matter, you can stick to other topics of discussion that actually interest you rather than shitting on other people's positive sentiments.

edited 10th Jun '15 7:02:09 PM by scythemantis

And yet the points I've made haven't really been addressed.

Going off on a tangent about what it means to be progressive is... irrelevant.

If you disagree with my point of view, explain why. Otherwise I'm not sure what the point of your reply to me is.

Yes, but this is in a show created by a woman - ergo, it still kind of plays in the stereotype. Now, a sensitive male character created by a man, or a tough female character created by a woman... That'd be another story.

Or how about just a bunch of well written characters in general?

If people knew how many talented men in the animation industry have never gotten to create their own shows...well, then the whole gender related crap would disappear. Think back to What A Cartoon, Oh Yeah Cartoons and the Big Pick competition. So many talented people, yet so few shows came out of them..

Also consider so many of the people in charge at the networks, for years, have been female. Geraldine Laybourne, Cyma Zarghami, Betty Cohen... I think CN's current head is a woman. As well as a ton of the producers - Vanessa Coffey, Mary Harrington, Linda Simensky... There's definitely more. I don't see how they're playing into the gender problem.

There is barely any problem with gender in the animation industry. Female creators making their own shows? Sure, I'm all for it. But only so far as they make good creative work, not to be more diverse and crap. Entertainment ought to be a meritocracy, where you only go as far as you do based on whether what you make is good.

edited 10th Jun '15 7:03:33 PM by Aldo930

What he's saying is (I think) that in a really "progressive" world, female-run shows wouldn't be treated as something incredibly amazing because it's just something that happens. There'd be so many of them that it'd be the norm alongside shows created by men.

Also, could you not do the name-calling and insulting people's intelligence? All that's doing is ensuring the thread gets locked at some point or another.

...on second thought, keep that up; at this rate the thread's gonna get locked anyway, and from what I'm seeing, the sooner the better.

edited 10th Jun '15 7:04:51 PM by PhysicalStamina

If it were a meritocracy than we WOULD have more shows created by women, since it has been repeatedly demonstrated that network execs actively pass on female creators entirely because they are female creators and they're all about capturing a male "market."

What are you even trying to say here? MORE SHOWS ON TELEVISION ARE MADE BY MEN. THOUSANDS MORE. This DEMONSTRATES a gender-based issue.

I know that's what he's saying, and it's absurd.

Shows made by women AREN'T a norm right now. Therefore, people are happy when shows are made by women. This isn't rocket science.

People *want* it to become the norm you describe and that's why they show extra support for it.

edited 10th Jun '15 7:10:42 PM by scythemantis

I repeat myself too often, but it's kind of ironic that that was pretty much the situation in the less progressive old days. Hell, Arlene Klasky ran her own animation company and nobody was treating this as an example of how progressive things were.

The networks that, as I've pointed out, are often run by women? Aren't both Nick and CN run by women at this point? In fact, there are a ton of female executives at the networks; it's not a He-Man Woman-Haters Club thing over there.

edited 10th Jun '15 7:13:45 PM by Aldo930

Women running those networks doesn't and wouldn't have much impact on the bias I describe. Why would it? Anyone of any gender can reinforce bad trends.

And a series isn't usually just personally greenlit by a network's top CEO or whatever. They're just the one raking in the money.

In the "old days" there wasn't as much precedent to suspect a problem. We swiftly went backwards, since female creator-driven cartoons became almost impossible to find for a solid few generations. Now suddenly there's a few new ones in the span of a couple years. People are happy because the lack has been THAT noticeable and severe.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-et-cm-college-animation-women-20150525-story.html

In just the last five years, the number of women entering animation has demonstrably surged.

Colleges introducing "blind admissions" - where they don't look at the names or gender of prospective students before approving them - have always seen sudden bursts of female students, clearly demonstrating that they had previously suffered the presence of at least a subconscious bias.

edited 10th Jun '15 7:17:27 PM by scythemantis

"A solid few generations"?! There have actually been less female creators in this era than there were in the 90s and 2000s, even!

Nobody thought about it because nobody gave a damn whether the creators were women or not; they just cared if it was good.

edited 10th Jun '15 7:22:53 PM by Aldo930

Yeah, this is what bothers me. A lot of these posts complaining about the thread's topic seem pretty sparse on actual relevant argument or discussion, and more annoyed that the thread exists at all.

And therefore what? Forgive my stupidity, but what do you conclude from this? We shouldn't discuss it?

edited 10th Jun '15 7:27:51 PM by editerguy

We shouldn't treat it like it's women getting the vote.

That's just a blatant strawman.

Well, when a thread starts to devolve into sarcasm, condescension, insults, all-caps, and a general air of self-righteousness, I can't help but feel a Mercy Kill would be nice.

And most of the time the "discussion" about topics like these tends to turn into what I described above, so the ideal would be to discuss it without that happening.

edited 10th Jun '15 7:34:03 PM by PhysicalStamina

I still don't see how promoting shows created by women as this big progressive thing is any more progressive than when we just didn't care about the gender of a creator and let female creators do their thing.

I'm also fairly sure few people know how shows get greenlit in the first place. There's issues, but they're not gender related; there's a bias towards where you studied animation (mainly towards Cal Arts graduates) and who you know.

Thank God this doesn't extend to indie animation.

edited 10th Jun '15 7:35:03 PM by Aldo930

By about a *couple.* And none for almost the last ten years.

That is why people are glad to see some really taking off just now.

Do I need to keep explaining the same thing? You sure keep making the same arguments over and over that nobody else should care about what you personally feel is irrelevant.

That's an outright false statement. People DID care whether a creator was a man or a woman. Women have had their ideas rejected entirely for being women and not for any other merits. Anybody actually in the industry can tell you that, except maybe its most conservative old geezers.

Why would you believe in these other biases, like towards Calarts, but not biases towards gender, which have been deeply ingrained in human thinking for millenia?

edited 10th Jun '15 7:49:46 PM by scythemantis

Where would I be able to find indie animation anyway?