Kottke pointed this thesis out to us earlier in the week, and we can’t seem to stop debating it with friends: should it trouble us that Pixar doesn’t seem to have any good women characters? The blog that Kottke linked to, while a few months old, makes a still-relevant argument: from Toy Story to Ratatouille and Finding Nemo to A Bug’s Life, there are simply no strong female leads that stand out. But we think this is just a superficial reading of the films, and a too-easy feminist critique that misses out on the more complex gender relations in Pixar works.

We immediately thought of Eve, who, even though she is not the film’s namesake, is the epitome of the strong feminist woman. She puts her career above her love life, and teams up with Wall-E to save the world before she even has time to notice she’s in love with him. Sure, at first glance it may seem like she’s another example of the girl only being the “love interest,” but that’s ignoring all the other aspects of her character. For Pixar to have a gender “problem,” it would have to systematically place women in subservient roles and make the male superior — something which none of the films actually do. … Read More