Cartoons for Girls, 2007 & 2010
Back in 1994, I was looking at getting into the TV cartoon business with my comic book Grease Monkey as a vehicle. I would get there two years later, but the first steps hadn’t happened yet. At this point, I was still learning about the TV cartoon business, and I heard about a class at UCLA that might help. It was about licensing and marketing for film and television, taught by an agent in the biz. The class was open to anyone who could pay the fee, so I took a gamble.
I learned a lot there, but the thing that stuck with me the most was what I learned about marketing TV shows to young boys and girls. Back in the 90s, cartoons were driven by toy licensing; that’s where most of the funding came from. I thought Grease Monkey would have equal appeal to both boys and girls due to its gender mix, but the orthodoxy surrounding toy licensing had erected a brick wall against it.
The agreed-upon policy was this: the pattern for boys was aspirational role play and the pattern for girls was fashion and hair play.
This was the “wisdom” that fueled the marketing of toys, which had a direct feedback loop on what kind of cartoons you could make. Boys’ cartoons ran on one policy, girls’ cartoons ran on another with an impenetrable wall between them. As the father of a young daughter (5 at the time) it felt like a conspiracy to limit her life options. And I wasn’t going to be part of that system.
In 1995, I hooked up with a different agent (the Hollywood rep for Kitchen Sink Press) and we got a pitch together for Grease Monkey that was shopped around to all the major studios. I remember one pitch in particular, directed at a female producer, where I articulated the above and expressed a strong desire to disrupt it. She replied by quoting the policy. Despite agreeing with me in concept, she answered to male executives, and this was their way of doing business. “Girls don’t buy action figures” was the proclamation that kept that studio from getting into the Grease Monkey business.
Fortunately, not every studio exec was so mired in the swamp. And the business model eventually shifted. But it took more than another decade. The two projects I’m presenting here will show you how far down the path we were by the year 2010.
Clik Stars, 2007
Spark City World was an immersive online environment for teenage girls that ran from 2007 to 2017, offering games, a virtual neighborhood, and the ability to make friends. It was an early version of what is now referred to as a “cozy game.” It was operated by a Canadian company called Fuel Technologies as part of Allgirlarcade.com.
Prior to the launch, I was doing occasional freelance work for a fresh new studio called Wildbrain that specialized in Flash Animation, a technique that moved 2D characters around like puppets. Wildbrain was fun to work with, and every project was different from every other project. When the makers of Spark City World decided to add an original cartoon to the mix, they hired Wildbrain to produce it. (Wildbrain may have been involved in the game itself, but my memory is sketchy on that point.)
The cartoon would focus on three teenage girl characters called the Clik Stars who lived in Spark City. Their jam was “friendship, achieving goals, sportsmanship, fashion, shopping, and doing the right thing.” The plot for this 3-minute adventure was a competition to scavenge and assemble a fashionable outfit from found objects. As far as I know, it was the only cartoon produced for Spark City World.
Click here to see my storyboard. Watch the finished cartoon below.
Barbie Fashionistas, 2010
Some time after Clik Stars, Wildbrain became a production partner with Mattel. This lined them up to produce the first Monster High cartoon, which I was hired to storyboard in 2009. The following year, they stepped up to the grand dame of girls toys herself. The job now was to produce a web series called Barbie Fashionistas, which was pretty much what it sounds like.
Five “webisodes” were made, each about 5 minutes long, which were released in English, French, Spanish, and possibly other languages. It was essentially a fancy ad campaign for the Fashionista toy line that turned the dolls into characters.
I storyboarded episode 2, titled Life’s a Beach. In this one, the six Barbie girls are invited to a movie premiere, and they have just 15 minutes to scavenge and assemble fashionable outfits from found objects.
Click here to see my storyboard (with candid commentary). Watch the finished cartoon below.
All righty, then.
What are the odds that I would get storyboarding assignments from Wildbrain for two girls’ cartoons (three if you count Monster High) in the space of three years? Pretty high, actually. When a studio gets known for a certain category of output, they land more projects in that category. That’s not all Wildbrain did, but they were known for it.
What are the odds that those two cartoons made for girls would have EXACTLY THE SAME PLOT? Apparently also pretty high, based on my previous experience. “Fashion and hair play” was still the policy over a decade later. For the record, I’ve got nothing against fashion or the creativity that goes into it. It’s been part of our culture since way before I got here, and will go on long after I depart. If someone aspires to enter that world, they’ll get no opposition from me.
But if you were a young girl who consumed these cartoons, the message was pretty clear: this is the lane you belong in. No matter what lip service the characters may pay to other lanes, this is what we expect of you, because there’s no way in hell a boy would do these things. That’s what you get from generational bigotry and a failure of imagination.
I’m VERY grateful that animation has grown beyond cartoons like these in the time since I contributed to them. If they were being made today, the scavenger hunt to create something out of found objects would take place in other lanes entirely. This form of puzzle solving can be applied to research, mechanics, cooking, modelmaking, sports, art, and many other means of expression that have nothing to do with gender. And only a grotesquely regressive mind would write it off as “woke” in a world where anime girls have been handling spaceships and giant robots since the 70s.
My end analysis, based on what I related above, tells me that we’ve come a long way. I’m happy about that. But it would have been nice if we got here a decade or two earlier. Maybe that brick wall wouldn’t have been there for Grease Monkey to slam into.
