See, the next Pixar project — after TS3 and Newt — is The Bear And The Bow — the company's first flick about a girl. Guess what? She's a princess. (While The Cowgirl character in Toy Story was a hit, she's definitely not the "star" of the franchise.)

Holmes continues:

I have nothing against princesses. I have nothing against movies with princesses. But don't the Disney princesses pretty much have us covered? If we had to wait for your thirteenth movie for you to make one with a girl at the center, couldn't you have chosen something — something — for her to be that could compete with plucky robots and adventurous space toys?

Agreed. As a child I loved fairy tales, but also loved stories about girls who went somewhere: Dorothy to Oz; Alice to Wonderland; Eloise to Paris and Moscow. I wanted to be lots of things — photographer; archaeologist, filmmaker; gymnast; microbiologist — never princess. Isn't it funny how Coraline could do well at the box office without a castle, pink gown or tiara? (And now Coraline: The Musical is being staged.)

We already know that Disney is pretty committed to the Princess franchise. A blogger at Packaging Girlhood writes of The Princess And The Frog:

Another Disney princess movie. Yawn. Hard to get too excited because we know when it comes to gender, Disney has the imagination of a toadstool… We already know Disney is hopeless, but maybe Pixar can give us what we want. While we wait - and it could be a very, very long wait — we'll take a reader's advice on the NPR site and go back to the best in good old 2-D animation: Studio Ghibli's haunting, imaginative, original films like Howl's Moving Castle, My Neighbor Totoro, and Spirited Away. All female driven with nary a princess in sight."

Dreamworks, the studio known for making jabs at Disney in flicks like Shrek, usually relies on male leads (Bee Movie, Kung Fu Panda) but throws female characters into the mix in ensemble casts (Madagascar, Monsters Vs. Aliens.)

Why is it that most animated films fail to present strong female characters? In December, the BBC presented a list of "subversive animated female heroines" which included Betty Boop (?!). Wonder Woman has been done, and she can't be expected to carry female-driven animated flicks all by herself.

Maybe the animators looking for good stories should turn to sci-fi? This list of heroines from science fiction includes great characters like Ripley from Alien; Buffy from Buffy The Vampire Slayer (is that sci-fi?); Starbuck from Battlestar Galactica; Dana Scully from The X-Files; Sarah Connor from Terminator and, okay, one princess — Leia, from Star Wars. All make decent Halloween costumes, and none of them are waiting for their prince to come.

Dear Pixar, From All The Girls With Band-Aids On Their Knees [NPR]
Rate-a-Trailer: Toy Story 3 Enters Rebuilding Phase [E!]
Disney's First Black Princess [Packing Girlhood]
'Sexy' Sigourney Weaver Is First Lady Of Sci-Fi [Independent]
Better the Mother You Know Than the Other One [NY Times]
Musical "Coraline" Even Stranger Than The Book [Hollywood Reporter]
Earlier: Women And Cartoons: Beyond Breast Size

• Madonna is making moves in Malawi: This picture at the link shows 4-year-old Mercy, the girl she's trying to adopt, holding hands with possible new sister Lourdes. [Daily Mail]

• Oprah faces yet another scandal involving her Leadership Academy for Girls in South Africa; seven students allegedly engaged in "inappropriate behaviors." [Socialite Life]
• This report says that even though girls at Oprah's school were expelled, this is not a sex scandal. [MSNBC]
• Lisa Ling's sister Laura and another journalist being detained in North Korea are headed for a trial on the basis of "already confirmed suspicions," which doesn't sound good. [People]
• Bridget Moynahan is furious with Gisele Bundchen for telling Vanity Fair she loved Tom Brady's son like he was her own. Someone close to Bridget says: "If Gisele loved Bridget's child like he was '100 percent her own,' then she would not talk about him in the press. Discretion and respect are not either of Gisele or Tom's virtues, as was evidenced even when the child was still unborn and they publicly flaunted their relationship without any discretion whatsoever." [Page Six]
• Kate Moss is supposedly in New York to open the new TopShop here and OMGCLOTHESOMG. [Daily Mail]
• Shocker: Britney's Candie's ads have been Photoshopped! Won't someone think of the children? [Daily Mail]
• Josh Holly, the dude who hacked into Miley Cyrus' email and had his apartment raided by the FBI back in October is still being investigated. Special Agent Scott Augenbaum says: "We're still working on it. He hasn't been arrested." Guess what Holly has been doing in the meantime? Hacking celeb MySpace accounts and spamming their "friends." [E!]
• Speaking of Miley, she looks ever so uncomfortable on the May cover of Glamour. [Just Jared]
• Stephen Colbert is warning NASA to name a new wing of the international space station after him or he will "seize power as space's evil tyrant overlord." [CNN]
• Holy crap yay! Taye Diggs and Idina Menzel are expecting their first baby! [Socialite Life]
• Singer Natalie Cole is in desperate need of a kidney; she went on Larry King last night to talk about it and dozens of emails came in, with offers from people saying they would get tested to see whether their kidney could be donated. Sometimes TV redeems itself. [CNN]
• In this photograph, Robert Pattinson looks like a folkie singer with long hair and a guitar. Scarier than a vampire? [E!]
• Kelly Rowland has left Columbia Records, the label she's been with since her Destiny's Child days. Good luck out there! [E!]
• American Idol's emo musical theater rocker, Adam Lambert, has a fan in Neil Patrick Harris: The How I Met Your Mother Star was in the audience last night and says, "No male in this competition has sung so well. He really hit those notes." [E!]
• A TV station in Panama City, FL decided that Osbournes: Reloaded was "not keeping with community standards" and declined to air the show after American Idol. [E!]
• A sneak peek at the new Sherlock Holmes flick: "Leave it to Robert Downey Jr. to turn Sherlock Holmes into a wisecracking action hero who ends up handcuffed naked to a bed." [Yahoo News via AP]
• Rachel McAdams says filming the Sherlock Holmes movie was "cold and dirty." "The 1800s were kind of dirty, I realized. I didn't think about that before." [Mirror]
• Gavin Rossdale and Gwen Stefani will never collaborate musically: "We come from such band mentalities that it's something we've really done well to avoid," Gavin says. [Mirror]
• Dreamworks animated flicks like Kung Fu Panda and Monsters Vs. Aliens will be shown on FX, thanks to a deal between the channel and the distributor. [USA Today]
• Star Jones says her mind and body are not in sync: I'm still 300 lbs. in my head some days," she told Oprah. [People]
• Wanda Sykes and the Fox network are finalizing a deal for a Saturday late-night show. Bring it! [Yahoo News via Reuters]
• Some Slumdog Millionaire DVDs were released without the "making of" feature and "deleted scenes," which were advertised on the box. Buyers are bitching to Amazon about it; Amazon is blaming Fox. [Deadline Hollywood]
• Pedro, a film about the HIV positive Real World castmember Pedro Zamora, premieres tonight on MTV and LOGO. [LA Times]
• The Seattle home where Jimi Hendrix grew up has been destroyed; preservation efforts failed. [Mirror]
• Liam Neeson has completed Chloe, the film he was working on when his wife Natasha Richardson died. [CBS News]
• R.I.P Andy Hallet, who played the demon Lorne on Angel. [Yahoo News via AP]
• Blind item: "Which Academy Award winner, who constantly denies his philandering ways, was outed after sleeping with a publicist who blabbed to everyone?" [Gatecrasher]
• "I'm going to get smashed after doing this." — Ed Westwick, at the Dressed To Kilt show, before which he apparently stripped down to his underwear in a corner to change into his kilt. [Gatecrasher]
• "I break down a couple of times a week, at least. It gets overwhelming. Sometimes I think that I can't take this anymore. I just want to live a normal life. Olivia [Palermo] kind of mothers me and looks at me as a pet project…I'm not some country bumpkin. I'm from Los Angeles." — Whitney Port on The City. [Page Six]
• "If women look like her, that would be the perfect world. She doesn't need to change anything. Who likes stick skinny girls? Where's the flavor? Whoever likes those stick skinny girls never had sex before in their life." — Dancing With The Stars' "star" Gilles Marini, on people talking about Cheryl Burke's weight gain. [E!]
• "I want my dogs to be in my wedding, I am so serious." — Jennifer Hudson. [Mirror]
• "Girls are scary. Large groups of girls scare the (crap) out of me." — Kristen Stewart. [USA Today]
• I haven't read the books, but I saw the movie… I thought the movie was really bad." — Whitney Port, on Twilight. [Perez]

Directed by Rob Letterman and Conrad Vernon, the film tells the story of Susan (Reese Witherspoon), a Californian bride who gets hit in the head by a meteor on the day she's supposed to marry her self-important fiance, Derek (Paul Rudd). Susan grows 50 feet tall and the military takes her to a detention center for monsters. While there she meets B.O.B. (Seth Rogen), a gelatinous blue blob; Dr. Cockroach (Hugh Laurie), who is half-insect, half-mad scientist; and Missing Link (Will Arnett), the part fish, part human. When the evil alien Galaxhar (Rainn Wilson) threatens Earth, General W.R. Monger (Kiefer Sutherland) convinces the President (Stephen Colbert) that the monsters should be released, as they are the only ones who can save the planet from cartoon doom.

From now on, DreamWorks Animation says it is only going to movies designed for 3-D. Monsters vs. Aliens is supposed to prove that the format can work as a story telling device rather than just a gimmick during Super Bowl commercials. With its stereotypical themes of outcasts saving the day and a bit of girl empowerment, it's not clear that they succeeded. While the critics found the jokes moderately amusing and most of the voice acting solid, when the film is viewed in 2-D, without anything being hurled at the screen, the story unoriginal. Below, we size up what the critics are saying about Monsters vs. Aliens.

Slate

Not to let any unnecessary ideology creep into a review of a fun animated movie, but let's get this out of the way up front: Monsters vs. Aliens is a film for children with a female lead. She is not the love interest, or the helpmate, or the mom. Nor is she a princess, or princesslike. She does not marry a prince or a prince-manqué. She does not marry at all. She tries to get married, but she is struck by a meteor on her wedding day (typical!), which transforms her into an unmarriageable, world-saving, 49-foot-11-inch superfreak and-thank you, O bountiful movie gods-a Strong Female Protagonist. (Or, as my more skeptical viewing companion put it, "a strong female protagonist who just happens to be ultra-skinny with big boobs and a pneumatic butt, and who sometimes wears a catsuit." Touché.)

The Los Angeles Times

The dialogue has its share of the sly grown-up/cultural references that have become de rigueur for DreamWorks projects, designed to make sure the adults in the audience don't fidget, but there aren't enough of them to push this into full-fledged comedy mode. Which means it's up to the action/thriller elements to power the film, and they are never quite bold enough.

So it comes down to the story and the voice actors to carry the day, and they have their moments — particularly the monster crew led by a feisty Witherspoon, who brings some of the edgy-fun of her Election mean-girl to Susan as she grows stronger.

Baltimore Sun

The best running gag comes when BOB falls in love with a Jell-O mold. The mold has more shape and structure than anything else about the movie. Rogen gives a textbook demonstration of the unlikely power a juicy voice performance can provide to a gelatinous mass. Yet, amazingly, in a cast that also includes Stephen Colbert as a reputation-conscious president and Kiefer Sutherland as a monster-wrangling general (with the joke name W.R. Monger), no one else stands out or steps up the way Rogen does.

The Boston Globe

The bright, enthusiastic performances from Rogen, Witherspoon, Laurie, et al., put Monsters vs. Aliens over, not the dialogue that trundles along a well-worn family movie rut. Rudd displays none of his sneaky charm as the fiance - turns out you need to see this actor to get the joke - and the same goes for Stephen Colbert as the US president, who's drawn much funnier than he sounds, like a Mort Drucker caricature in a vintage '60s Mad magazine. In general, though, the animation isn't terribly impressive if you take away the 3-D; the monsters are fetchingly bizarre, but all the women look like Bratz dolls.

Reel Views

Monsters vs. Aliens, one of the 2009 big movies designed to highlight where 3D could transport audiences, is an example of technology run amok. With a slight, light screenplay that required five credited writers, the film tells an unimaginative story about an alien invasion of Earth that is foiled by "monsters." Of course, they're not really monsters. They're just misunderstood. But since they're in the 3D, we're too busy watching whizzing comet fragments fly out of the screen to care about things like plot or character development. It's a good thing, too, because anyone on the lookout for those elements may be a little disappointed.

NPR

Here, directors Rob Letterman and Conrad Vernon push so hard for three-dimensionality - and they're so reliant on it - that they basically have their animators putting sightlines before storylines; they set up practically every scene so that something in it can be sent careening at your head. After a while, you can see the setups happening - and once you do, the careening gets predictable. Which gets old, really fast.

The A. V. Club

On some level, the latest DreamWorks CGI project isn't a movie so much as a gag-delivery system wrapped in special effects. The story is crammed with incident, yet completely trifling; there are a ton of personalities, but no real characters. It zips along at hyperspeed, alternating jokes, explosions, and videogame-ready action segments, but never comes to rest long enough to make an impression. It's available in some markets in 3D, but regardless of presentation, it's strictly two-dimensional.

Entertainment Weekly:

In the brightly drawn sequel, as technically smooth as we've come to expect from the DreamWorks cartoon factory, all four use their time in Africa — the land of their ancestors! — as an opportunity for personal growth, only to wind up more or less the way they always were.

What, you were expecting a cutting-edge twist, maybe something about a lonely postapocalyptic robot? Wrong part of the animated kingdom, my friends. Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa is pretty tame, but it knows how to keep its own turf tidy.

The New York Times:

It’s unsurprising that Alex’s mane registers as more realistic than any of his words or emotions, but it’s also a bummer. “Escape 2 Africa” is good enough in patches to make its distracting star turns, storybook clichés and stereotypes harder to take than they would be in a less enjoyable movie. Casting Mr. Stiller and Mr. Schwimmer may sear their brands onto under-age cerebral cortices but does nothing for the movie. And, really, did the hippo (voiced by will.i.am from the Black Eyed Peas) who courts Gloria with a low rumble and a suggestive shimmy have to sound like Barry White rather than, say, Marc Anthony or Justin Timberlake? I laughed, but honestly, if this country can vote colorblind surely its movie studios can animate colorblind too. (Can’t they?)

USA Today:

Though it doesn't add anything new to the genre, Madagascar 2 is amusing animated fare.

And with few current movies aimed at very young audiences, this menagerie offers more potential for humor and visual panache than, say, a movie about Chihuahuas.

Chicago Sun-Times:

It doesn't look like that plane is gonna make it. That doesn't mean across the Atlantic from Africa. It means across Africa to the Atlantic. Do they (or their audience) realize Madagascar is east of Africa, in the Indian Ocean? How I know, I had a friend from Madagascar once. Beat me at chess. Some people are probably wondering about the title "Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa," because they think the animals escaped 2 Africa in the first place. Now shouldn't they be escaping 4rom Africa? So they take off, and (spoiler?) crash in Africa. Now they are faced with exactly the same dilemma as in the first film: Can wild animals survive in the wild?

The Hollywood Reporter:

The pleasant but far-from-pioneering crew of the cheerful 2005 DreamWorks animated film "Madagascar" reunite for "Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa" to similar results. Essentially this sequel has settled down into a sitcom: Each of its major zoo-raised animals has a comical issue that must get resolved before the credits roll. The film, like its predecessor, is aimed mostly at children and should score a direct hit.

Variety:

"Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa" is the rare animated sequel that reps a notable improvement on its predecessor in every department. Lively and quite funny without being obnoxious, this follow-up smoothly mixes the original's New York Zoo escapees with a number of engaging new characters they encounter upon crossing from Madagascar to the mother continent. With the first film's creative team intact, this DreamWorks Animation franchise has been well tended to, meaning it's reasonable to assume a repeat of the earlier outing's $533 million worldwide haul (an unusually large percentage of which came from overseas).

Philadelphia Inquirer:

With its stylized menagerie resembling plush creatures on a Toys R Us shelf, M2 surely will appeal to undemanding viewers age 6 and younger.

Yet unlike Pixar films, this busy and noisy film has too-generic a story and too-undistinguished a look to offer much for those kids' older siblings and their parents.

The Austin Chronicle:

Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa extends what Madagascar did best: fill up the screen with computer-generated visual novelty. The slapstick humor remains, as does the slack plotting. Introducing only a few new characters that are unfortunately unmemorable, this sequel is likewise a decent diversion that's not much worth talking about afterward.

The Los Angeles Times:

I took my kid and three of his pals to an Imax screening, and while I could've done without the film's martial arts slapstick involving the cranky old outer-borough lady on safari, in a role expanded from her Grand Central Station cameo in the first picture, well, if there's one thing parenthood teaches anybody in this country, it's that boys rarely fail to laugh at someone gettin' it in the 'nads from a senior citizen.

Reviews from our second-grade posse: "Really liked it." "Four million stars." "Five million stars."

Newsday ('Kidsday' Reporters):

The movie was hysterical, especially the scenes with the old lady and the penguins. One of our favorite parts was when the old lady beats up an evil lion named Makunga. Another funny scene is when Gloria, the Hippo, dances.

We give the movie 4 1/2 smiles!

The Toronto Star:

The movie even looks better than the original, approaching photo-realism in its jungle imagery. For better or worse, the music is every bit as corny as before: "Born Free" is still the theme tune and Barry Manilow and Boston is on the penguins' eight-track player – but what do you expect from those bird brains?

The highest praise I can give Madagascar 2 is to say that it reminds me of the antics of another animal, the one called Monty Python.

'Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa' opens today in wide release.