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| from the "Dykes to Watch Out For" series, Alison Bechdel |
It may have been invented as a joke, as well as a comment on contemporary cinema, but the Bechdel test is now a respectable metric of film industry's consistent tendency to default to the male. Briefly, the test - if you don't know it - asks Does the film have at least two women, do they communicate with each other, about something other than a man. It's a small test, and there are other things we could compare female vs male characters - number of speaking (or main) characters, % of screen time, % of dialogue, how well developed and visually differentiated are the characters. Big mainstream animations seem to be following the live action pattern - with some exceptions - of creating characters which are only female if their gender is a key issue. Ho Hum.
People are beginning to notice, to research it, and to publish their analyses, which is good...
e.g. www.washingtonpost.com/. But meanwhile, I'm going to do an inventory of male and female roles in my own animations, and apply some of these tests
so, a quick survey of past animations: for comparison
| Films with male protagonists | 13 |
| Films with female protagonists | 16 |
| Protagonists with no (apparent) gender | 3 |
| Films with NO women in | 8 |
| Films with NO men in | 10 |
| Total main characters (female) | 29 |
| Total main characters (male) | 29 |
| Films that wouldn't pass the bechdel test?
if you discount those which have only one character or only characters without identifiable gender | 15 |
| Films that would pass the bechdel test | 5 |
seems there is still work to be done then!
