Here’s me, moonlighting with a guest post over on Alan Baxter’s blog about lazy character development and sexism in animated kids’ movies.

Alan is a writer of dark spec fic and horror, including two novels, Realmshift and Magesign, as well as the extraordinarily useful writers’ resource Write the fight right (he’s a kung-fu instructor, too.) He’s got enough accolades and short stories published to give anyone an inferiority complex, so when he asked me to write up an email rant into a guest post, I was too scared to say no.

Just jokes. But it did give me the opportunity to have a whinge about something that has bothered me for years, especially when my 10 year old daughter asked me last year why there weren’t any cool movies about girls. (I think by ‘cool’ she meant ‘with fighting in’.)

I admit, I was so incensed by Pixar trumpeting the fact that they’d finally (after 17 years) made a movie with a–gasp!–girl in the lead role, I was all set to be completely exasperated by Brave. 

But I wasn’t.

I loved it.

Still, an evening’s worth of research using Wikipedia revealed that I was not imagining it…if the sex ratio of the human race (OK, lets go with the idea that action figures, toy dinosaurs, rats, mythical entities and monsters of all descriptions constitute, at least temporarily, citizens of the human race) was anywhere near what it appears to be on the basis of a quick census of Pixar & Dreamworks’ characters…we don’t need to be worried about global warming, folks. We’re well on our way to extinction.

And after two posts and a guest post in one week, I need a Bex and a lie down.