On Female Characters

I was thinking about character design choice and that my character is a female. While the film is about a character experiencing growth I have thought about it specifically towards Fia being a girl, and what roles she faces (or doesn't even know of) in post-civilization. I have often used male characters because there is a neutrality that comes with a male role, particularly with sexuality and emotion. I have been addressing female characters more since I went into animation, while before I had avoided them because it feels too easy for them to sway into a stereotype and I just didn't want to deal with that. I feel like it is important for me to use a female character in my grad film now in expressing something personal to me.

I have been looking at some characters which are interesting to me in film and animation because they perform in a way natural to their individual nature. Whether they act in a way that might be separated into feminine or masculine roles becomes secondary to their personality and environment - for example, when I watched Nausicaa in my animation history screening, she is introduced with the role of an explorer/hunter, and on returning to her village she helps repair a windmill. The way her character is portrayed is not as a butch one, though, she is still very much feminine - she is shown to be driven by a logic that stems from her environment. She lives in a small rural village, so it seems natural that she is hard working. She is a princess in a small community, so she has developed personal connections with the townspeople. Etc.

I saw an argument recently on the character of Mattie Ross in the Coen brothers adaptation of True Grit not being a feminist character. The argument was in that Mattie tries too hard to fulfill a traditionally masculine role, and this does not fulfill a feminist role because she should portray more feminine characteristics. I found I disagreed with this argument because Mattie, like Nausicaa, is a product of her environment, in this case the gritty west. How she acts only seems natural to the time and place she has been raised in.

I have been thinking about how Fia is driven as a character and how she is portraying female characters. I want to focus on her actions having a lot of logic and reasoning behind them. In the prequel piece I am working on, I want it to represent her personality and hopefully bring some dimension to her.