Wild, wild women

Who is the least likely candidate for an animated princess movie? That’s the question former DreamWorks animator Jason Porath asked his colleagues over lunch a few years back. Over the hour they kept one-upping each other with increasingly inappropriate heroines. Nabokov’s Lolita came out on top.

Throughout the conversation, Porath kept throwing out the names of obscure warrior women he’d read about on Wikipedia binges. He suggested the female samurai Tomoe Gozeno, Josefina Guerrero, the ‘Leper Spy of the Philippines’, and Mariya Oktyabrskaya, the Soviet widow who sank her life savings into a tank she drove into frontline battle against the Nazis. But none of his colleagues had heard of them and he felt that needed to change.

Back in history class Porath remembered learning about complex ‘male figures running the gamut from Abe Lincoln to Genghis Khan’. But he felt the school-approved list of great women was too ‘safe, censored and short’.