On The Looney Tunes Show, as voiced by Kristen Wiig, she was a scattershot toon with an obsessive streak who got to be just as weird and over-the-top as the guys. Even Lola Bunny’s been through her fair share of reinventions on TV. The Netflix reboot of She-Ra faced the same inane forced anger over her redesign, which prized strength and comfort over fan-service, and ended up expanding her story into a beautiful, queer-friendly story of empathy in the face of seeming doom. Steven Universe has an array of striking, deftly layered female characters of varying shapes and forms. The boys get cool costumes and jokes and conflicts, and the girl gets a tank top and wolf whistles. You get Smurfette and that’s it, and because she’s the only woman, she only gets to be defined as such. We get one female character and she’s there to be gawked at by the male ensemble. ![]() The problem is that it feels like that was all we got for decades. The issue isn’t about whether a female character can or cannot express some sort of sensuality. ![]() In that context, scenes in Space Jam where the camera moves up and down Lola’s legs and bare midriff like a bug-eyed wolf from a Tex Avery cartoon feel dishearteningly inevitable.ĭiscussions over issues like this end up being hijacked with whataboutism arguments over sexuality being bad, which feels like missing the forest for the trees. Consider how many cartoons you watched growing up where the female bird or mink or even alien had heaving cleavage, just in case we forgot their gender. Every warrior woman has boob contoured armor that’s both impractical and sexualized (and historically inaccurate!) Even the animals aren't safe. The costumes were always skimpy or eye-burningly pink. Lola Bunny isn’t just the token lady, a female Bugs who he can get together with in the end: she’s “sexy.” Many a woman can regale their friends with tales of how their toys, their cartoons, and all the things sold to them as kids positioned women almost exclusively as objects of beauty. Sometimes, they barely even give her a redesign beyond slapping some lipstick and a pretty bow on her head (hello, Ms. And, of course, there is Smurfette, the only female Smurf whose entire character can be summed up as "woman." Pop culture loves itself a token woman in a group of dudes whose only job is to be the girl, and usually a love interest. Muppet Babies gave Scooter a female version called Skeeter. She-Ra was created to be a version of He-Man that appealed to girls. Alvin and the Chipmunks have the Chipettes. Consider how Minnie Mouse is just Mickey with a bow and higher pitched voice. Characters like this are rampant throughout Western animation. She doesn't get much of a personality beyond that in the movie. In Space Jam, she's basically the lady Bugs Bunny who is sexy and not much else. Lola is a distaff counterpart, meaning that she is a female character who exists almost exclusively as a gender-flipped version of a male character. She is but one instance of a dense lineage of female characters who exist entirely to be clones of the male leads or stock love interests. Really, what the Lola Bunny noise has highlighted is the long and limited history of gender representation in children’s media. ![]() That’s not a terrible argument but it feels like having it over a character made for kids who otherwise had no other defining characteristics is somewhat misguided. A lot of people cried foul over robbing a character of sexual traits, implying that to be sexy or liberated in that way is bad. The current cultural climate thrives on forced controversy and fuelling this notion that Hollywood is some sort of oversensitive brainwashing force trying to force politics into art. Who would be bothered by that? Well, this is the internet, and it turns out a lot of people had very strong feelings about the midriff and cleavage of a cartoon rabbit.Ī lot of the anger was bad-faith nonsense over the evil feminist social justice warriors once again destroying good men’s childhoods, and it’s hardly worth paying attention to. A family film in 2021 can improve on its predecessor by not having one of its few female characters be reduced to fetish fuel. That all seems pretty sensible and uncontroversial. For us, it was, let's ground her athletic prowess, her leadership skills, and make her as full a character as the others." ![]() Lee, the director, told Entertainment Weekly that he felt it was "important to reflect the authenticity of strong, capable female characters" and that they "we reworked a lot of things, not only her look, like making sure she had an appropriate length on her shorts and was feminine without being objectified, but gave her a real voice. The first images of the film revealed a new, less sexualized design for Lola Bunny, a character who was first introduced to the Looney Tunes canon through Space Jam. And yet there are way too many people freaking out over the design of a female rabbit.
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