Make other plans, little ladies.

Disney Will Stop Making Princess Movies Because Boys Think They're Icky, by Tim Grierson, Yahoo! Movies.

On Wednesday, Disney will be releasing "Tangled," the studio's 50th animated film. You might think that this would be cause for celebration, but from recent stories in the Los Angeles Times and New York Times, it appears that Disney Animation is in the midst of a major freak-out/reinvention. The main takeaway from these articles was that Pixar guru (and Disney Animation bigwig) John Lasseter is in the midst of reviving Disney's slumping non-Pixar animation projects. Oh, and he's done making movies about fairy tales and princesses.

"They may come back later because someone has a fresh take on it," Lasseter's Disney Animation co-chief Ed Catmull told the L.A. Times, "but we don't have any other musicals or fairy tales lined up." One reason is because the studio is fearful of alienating young boys, who supposedly won't see something like last year's "The Princess and the Frog." The other reason, frighteningly, is that young girls consider themselves too cool to want to be princesses.

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Lasseter insists that these changes at Disney are all for the good and that people should give him and his team time to work their wonders. But still it's hard not to be completely depressed by these developments. It's not that we're clamoring for a slew of new "princess movies," but it seems like Disney Animation is now trying to chase trends rather than focusing on just making good movies.

Great idea, Mr. Lasseter. Eliminate the types of franchises that built the Disney brand for almost a century, including a multi-million dollar phenomenon that jettisoned your competitors to make as many knockoffs as possible.

Are boys really that valuable that you need to forsake your core audience in a desperate attempt to attract male attention? Boys and male characters are already overrepresented in children's media (you can read the ongoing research at the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media). They don't need another media empire pandering to them, especially not at the expense of girls however controversial Disney Princess stories may be.

For more discussion:

Disney Swears off Princesses, by Melissa Silverstein, Women and Hollywood.

It's the End of the Disney Princess Fairy Tale, But It Ain't Happily Ever After, by Suzanne Reisman, BlogHer.


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Coming Soon

Will Hollywood ever make a 'Virginity Hit' about teenage girls? by Karen Valby, EW.com.

The low-budget, everyboy comedy The Virginity Hit, about a group of high school horndogs trying to help their buddy lose his virginity, hit select theaters this weekend. (In my hometown Austin, it was playing at just one megaplex at 9:30.) The Will Ferrell/Adam McKay-produced dweebathon is the latest installment to the canon of films about sweaty white boys on a quest to get laid. American Pie, Porky’s, Weird Science, Superbad, Sixteen Candles… The list is long, stuffed with awkward boys and uncomfortable erections and frantic high fives. As in the case of The Virginity Hit, there are always a bevy of unusually attractive girls on the story’s margins. The titular virgin in The Virginity Hit, unknown Matt Bennett, is the recognizably awkward center of his circle of harmless dips*#t friends. Of course his girlfriend is smoking hot, as are all the other girls who inexplicably hang around this pimply crew. In one ridiculous scene the girls don bikinis and smush their boobs against windows at a car wash fundraiser to get porn star Sunny Leone to sleep with Matt. Such generous, comely friends. Come on girls! Don’t you have soccer practice or something? Raise funds for your junior year abroad instead! Male screenwriters are marvelous revisionist thinkers.

So here’s some questions I asked myself in between scenes of bong hits and frat parties. Can anyone out there imagine a similar movie in which a crew of good-natured, dumpy girls obsess unapologetically about sex? Where the object of their desire is not some princess fantasy of first kiss or a prom date or a wedding ring—but rather the uncomplicated thrill of experience.

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Would you want to see a similar movie like this for high school or college girls?

Yes I would. In fact, I would write that movie. Getting it made would be another story.

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Because boys need even more attention.

Disney to target boys with rebranded cable channel, by Dawn C. Chmielewski at LA Times.

The entertainment giant plans to relaunch Toon Disney as Disney XD [on Friday, February 13, at 12 midnight], which will be aimed at boys ages 6 to 14.

. . . the Disney Channel has struggled for years to find the right programming formula to lure boys, who tend to gravitate to Viacom’s Nickelodeon and Time Warner’s Cartoon Network – that is, when they’re not spending time playing video games. The Disney Channel’s popular live-action shows, from its early tween phenomenon, “Lizzie McGuire,” through its current pop-culture sensation, “Hannah Montana,” mainly attract girls. Efforts to bring in more boys, through male-led series such as “Even Stevens” or “The Suite Life of Zack and Cody,” still haven’t succeeded enough to close the gender gap between female and male viewers. Animation, traditionally a draw for boys, has been a struggle for Disney Channel, although its newest series, “Phineas and Ferb,” appears to be building a strong male following. But so far, the network has failed to produce a blockbuster to compete with Nickelodeon’s “SpongeBob SquarePants;” or match the guy-centric focus of Cartoon Network, which one ad-buyer described as the “ESPN” of animation.

"You’re fighting the brand perception, the very, very strong brand equity that’s been in the marketplace for many, many years," Kahn said of the Disney Channel. "It would almost require a completely separate effort to reach tween boys, with a completely different name somehow associated with the Disney property, to reach these tween males."

None of this is news to Ross, who, with his executive team, spent more than a year with focus groups pondering the eternal verities: “What do boys want?”

The answer, perhaps not surprisingly, is that boys want it all. "What we heard, loud and clear, is they expect from Disney this broad array," Ross said, with programs running the gamut from animation to action-adventure to comedy. "They expect from Disney the whole thing, including movies." In short, tween boys are looking for more than a show or two wedged in the midst of the musical theater-inspired programs that have come to define the Disney Channel. They want, Disney says, a channel they can call their own.

"They want a place, essentially a headquarters for them where their favorite content exists, that has this broad array of shapes and sizes and tenors and complexities, and treats them with the respect that Disney Channel treats all kids, and the girls are fanatical about," Ross said.

So tiny girls get The Disney Channel, with many shows whose casts are actually more than 50% male. And tiny boys get Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network and Disney XD, with shows whose casts are almost 100% male. Yes we can! If we are tiny and white and male!

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