Girl Stitch!?

 From David: 

I was cleaning in the toy aisle at TJMaxx last Sunday and found a toy set pretty interesting. The toy set has four different versions of stitch and with one notable different. In the toy set it had a female version of stitch. With a little bit of research, I found out her name is Angle, and she is Stitch’s love interest. Looking at this toy set and even the movie she’s in I believe this is the perfect example of the Smurfette principle. 

In the movie stitch’s cousins are all male and she is the only one that is a woman and doesn’t have much of an impact in the movie at all. She doesn’t even have her that much screen time and looks like stitch but pink with eye lashes and a little curvy. She is only in the movie to be a stitches counterpart and love interest with few speaking roles. I’ve read Katt Pollitt’s article about the Smurfette principle, and she brings up how there are kid’s books that have a male protagonist, but their gender is unrelated to the story and serves no purpose. On the other hand, the books she mentioned that had a girl protagonist gave feminist message in their stories. “Some of the best children's books ever written have been about girls -- Madeline, Frances the badger. It's even possible to find stories with funny, feminist messages. "The Paperbag Princess." (She rescues the prince from a dragon, but he's so ungrateful that she decides not to marry him, after all.) But books about girls are a subset in a field that includes a much larger subset of books about boys (12 of the 14 storybooks singled out for praise in last year's Christmas roundup in Newsweek, for instance) and books in which the sex of the child is theoretically unimportant” -Katt Pollitt. 

The toy set I chose for this assignment shows the Smurfette principle because they have so many different kinds of characters in the movie, they could’ve used but intend to use four different versions of stitch and chose angel to make it feel like it’s not a boy or girl toy set but anyone can play with the toy set. Lastly, I color the main Stitchs with a light yellowish color with the opacity turned down and color Angel with a darker shade of brown and turned the opacity down a bit to convey how unimportant she is to the toy set and the movie.