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’. He remembered Queen Elizabeth I, Amelia Earhart, Marie Curie and Rosa Parks. Suddenly this ‘random white guy from Kentucky’ was filled with a feminist evangelism on behalf of ‘the compromised ones, the uncomfortable ones, the rejected ones’.

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Rod Liddle

Sack the judges

So Porath left DreamWorks and launched the glorious Rejected Princesses blog, celebrating the wild lives of ‘history’s boldest heroines, hellions and heretics’. Each woman was given a witty illustrative makeover, modern animation style. Mariya Oktyabrskaya’s tank (which she told Stalin to christen ‘Fighting Girlfriend’ and clambered out of to repair in mid-battle) has a face just like one of the characters in Pixar’s Cars.

Now the blog’s a book, aimed at ‘any girl who ever felt she didn’t fit in’ and featuring the extraordinary adventures of 100 women — both real and mythological — from all corners of the globe.

There’s a lot of tough stuff and Porath refuses to sugar-coat it.