After Frozen and Merida, Lego2 promises strong women characters

The Lego line of construction toys have been popular around the world since the 1950’s and with the 2014 Lego movie coming out, it was no surprise that it became one of the highest grossing movies at the US box office and had earned over $468 million worldwide. With a star cast that included Will Farrell, Morgan Freeman, Elizabeth Banks and Liam Neeson, amongst others, the movie was critically acclaimed as well.

One of the only few issues in the movie is its lack of powerful women characters. This has been the case since as long as one can remember, especially with animation films. Young children are highly impressionable and growing up watching only ‘damsel-in-distress’ kind of women characters is something that really needs to change and thankfully, it is.

This August, the Lego toy company released a set of three female scientist figures: a paleontologist, an astronomer, and a chemist to their range of Lego characters. But they recently also faced criticism for launching the predominantly pink Lego Friends range for girls.

Digital Spy>

The Mary Sue reported Phil Lord, one of the makers of the movie, saying, “It’s important to us that the movie plays broadly and that we inspire young women as much as we inspire young men <...> You can feel that the whole movie culture is now starting to wake up to the fact that half the audience are women <...> Frozen is reflective of that – and I think we are all going to find a great flourishing of women film makers and subject matter in the future.”

He added, “There's been a real shortage of in recent years and I think that the near future will be very different.” With both, the audience and critics appreciating the presence of strong female characters in recent animated films like Merida and Frozen, makers are now looking in this direction, and this hopefully would mean better ‘Idols’ for young girls to look up to.