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“The LEGO Movie was my favorite movie of 2014, but it strikes me that the main character was male, because I feel like in our current culture, he HAD to be. The whole point of Emmett is that he’s the most boring average person in the world. It’s impossible to imagine a female character playing that role, because according to our pop culture, if she’s female she’s already SOMEthing, because she’s not male. The baseline is male. The average person is male. You can see this all over but it’s weirdly prevalent in children’s entertainment. Why are almost all of the muppets dudes, except for Miss Piggy, who’s a parody of femininity? Why do all of the Despicable Me minions, genderless blobs, have boy names? I love the story (which I read on Wikipedia) that when the director of The Brave Little Toaster cast a woman to play the toaster, one of the guys on the crew was so mad he stormed out of the room. Because he thought the toaster was a man. A TOASTER. The character is a toaster. I try to think about that when writing new characters— is there anything inherently gendered about what this character is doing? Or is it a toaster?”

like nothing can be underrated anymore. it HAS to be a success. cartoons have to either be spongebob level successes with immediate marketing or they're shelved a season or two in.

a huge problem across artistic industries right now is that we're losing the mid-list. It used to be normal for a publishing house (or a move studio!) to have their small projects, their mid-size projects, and their HUGE projects, with the understanding that the HUGE projects were going to help pay for the mid-size and small projects, which would give those works and creators time to find/build their audiences. But we're seeing this toxic wave towards the disappearance of the mid-list for exactly this reason—the ONLY things that exist are small, because they fail to break out, or HUGE, because they manage to break out. And Very few projects are ever going to become HUGE in any industry!!! That's not how sales or people or artistic movements work!!!