Fashion

Toy Story 4 Gets Woke, But "Feminist" Bo Peep Misses The Mark


Well rip off my skirt and call me badass, they’re making another Toy Story film – and the fourth outing in the franchise has had a feminist makeover.

A new promotional image for Toy Story 4 has emerged showing Bo Peep 2.0, bringing up the rear for Sherriff Woody and Buzz Lightyear in her revamped I’ve-been-on-a-soul-searching-quest-and-lost-my-skirt action pose, with a suitably gung-hu outfit to match. Gone is the voluminous polka dot skirt with pink netting details. Gone is the pink bonnet. And now her shepherdess’s crook – previously used to collar passing men in lieu of lambkins – is slung across her back, rendering her a blond, doe-eyed riff on Michelle Yeoh in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Bo Peep plays the shepherdess in distress and Sherriff Woody’s love interest in the original Toy Story.

The trailer reveals that Bo has gone Badass. Last seen on screen in 1999, the porcelain doll, once an adornment to Molly’s bedside lamp and often in need of Woody’s help (in the first Toy Story film, she thanks him for saving her flock, and breathily suggests: “What do you say I get someone else to watch the sheep tonight?”) has been holding her own in the outside world, a casualty of a yard sale that meant she was noticeably absent from Toy Story 3. When Woody, who has long been pining after her, spies her lamp in the window of the junk shop, he pops through the letter box to try to get to her – but is waylaid by a series of evil toys, including creepy 1950s string doll Gabby Gabby. “Aw, Sherriff Woody, always coming to the rescue,” Bo sarcastically comments, having hooked Gabby Gabby with her crook and saved her one-time paramour.

Turns out Bo has been enjoying the world at large. “Bo’s taken control of her own destiny,” said director Josh Cooley, in a press release. “While Woody was watching Andy grow up, Bo gathered dust until she took it upon herself to head out into the world. And when Woody shows up, they can’t believe that they’ve found each other again.” As Bo puts it to Woody when he tries to persuade her to return home to the playroom: “Sometimes change can be good.”

She’s right – and at first glance, the rebranding of Bo Peep as “badass” could be read as a positive move in the direction of sexual equality and female diversity on screen (let’s forget, for the time being, that she’s still wearing a corset). The problem is: it will be less helpful if all that actually happens is that movie studios set up a new binary between the damsel in distress or the action hero. If you want a female cartoon character to enjoy a decent quantity of screen time, have a romantic story line (which the new Toy Story film will feature) and be in any way aspirational, she shouldn’t have to be either be a slim, blond, beautiful princess, in the manner of Frozen, or a slim, blond, beautiful “badass superheroine” (always a heroine, never a hero) in the manner of Bo Peep.

And if you think that getting hot and bothered over the presentation of female characters in mainstream family films is all nonsense – think again. As a 9-year-old who wept at the invitation to a Disney-themed party because I thought I was ”too fat” to go dressed as Princess Jasmine, I can tell you that these things do matter. They mattered to me, and they will matter to all the other non-Hollywood shaped girls (which, let’s face it, is pretty much all girls) looking to cinema for heroes and idols.

What does a truly heroic, inspirational, representative female cartoon character actually look like? I may well want her to be voiced by Annie Potts, who, as well as playing Bo Peep in Toy Story, carved herself onto my heart as Janine in Ghostbusters, otherwise known as the best nasal-voice-sharp-glasses combination ever to reach silver screen. But there are caveats: I would make her funny, quick, charming and all-powerful without being aggressively confrontational. I would make her the Genie from Aladdin, but female. I would make her Nadia from Russian Doll but without the cigarettes and recreational drug use. I want her to have great one-liners, to be ridiculous, to hold all the power, to be funny, to initiate action, to be vulnerable and to be kind. You know the kind of thing. Like an actual woman.

Toy Story 4 is in cinemas from June 21, 2019.





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