My husband and I went to our local movie theater to see Ruby Gillman: Teenage Kraken the other night. Normally a rating in the 60% range on Rotten Tomatoes would put us off, but the trailer looked like fun, and hey, a kraken heroine, which we’ve certainly never seen before, sounded like my jam. So we took a chance — and we ended up leaving the theater a little bitter at having, as my husband put it, “spent our money on mediocrity.” The movie only served to reinforce an unpleasant conclusion I’d come to when the reviews for Ruby Gillman first started to accumulate: that Dreamworks Animation, which seemed to be having a moment with last year’s one-two punch of The Bad Guys and Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, doesn’t even bother to try when their project has a female lead.

Among Dreamworks’ filmography, the following movies center on a female protagonist: Chicken Run (97% RT rating), Monsters vs. Aliens (74%), Home (52%), Trolls (nominally, 75%), The Croods (nominally, 72%), Abominable (82%), Spirit Untamed (48%), and the aforementioned Ruby Gillman (68%). Of this meager number, only Chicken Run and Abominable boast a critical consensus that suggests a substantial degree of effort was put into them, and only one, the delightful Chicken Run, might manage to earn a place among fans’ rankings of the studio’s top-notch output. Yet despite its charms, Chicken Run — perhaps because it’s regarded as more Aardman Animation than Dreamworks Animation — is rarely mentioned in discussions of Dreamworks’ best films, with The Prince of Egypt, the first two Shrek films, the Kung Fu Panda and How to Train Your Dragon trilogies, and now Puss in Boots: The Last Wish coming up a lot. To be fair, the studio has made their share of “mid” films with male leads as well, most notably The Boss Baby (although that film, despite having one of the most cringe-inducing trailers I’ve ever had the misfortune to see, still managed to make money), but with the possible exception of Chicken Run (if we credit it as Dreamworks rather than Aardman), all of the studio’s best movies center on male protagonists.

Why does Dreamworks seemingly refuse to bring their A game when making a movie with a girl as the lead? I wish I knew, but I have a theory that saddens me. It goes back to that old and disheartening notion that while stories centering on boys/men have universal appeal, stories about girls/women appeal only to girls. A story with a male lead, therefore, must please everyone; money is riding on it, and so more time and creative energy must be put into it. But a story with a female lead only has to be “good enough” to please girls, so the studio may adopt the cynical view that girls, having so little material out there for them, will take whatever they’re given. The low box office numbers for Ruby Gillman suggest this approach isn’t working for them.

Something else I’ve noticed as I’ve been pondering my rankings of Best Animated Feature Oscar winners (which I’ll resume in my next post, I promise) is a difference in the roles given to male characters in female-driven projects and the roles given to female characters in male-driven ones. Consider Zootopia and Moana, both nominated for 2016’s Best Animated Feature. Judy Hopps is the former film’s protagonist, but Nick Wilde is almost as important and just as interesting. Likewise, while Moana is a heroine well worth rooting for, male demigod Maui steals the show by being funny and brash in a way she isn’t allowed to be. (He also gets the movie’s best song, “You’re Welcome.”)

Characters like Nick and Maui will “bring the boys in,” giving them someone they’ll enjoy identifying with so they won’t feel the need to step into the shoes of the female lead. Almost every well-known animated movie with a female protagonist features one or more scene-stealing males: Sebastian in The Little Mermaid, Lumiere and Cogsworth in Beauty and the Beast, Mushu in Mulan, Rocky in Chicken Run, Ray and Louis in The Princess and the Frog, Flynn Rider in Tangled, Olaf in Frozen… the list goes on. If characters like these don’t feature heavily, the “wisdom” suggests, then boys won’t show up for the movie, so these roles must be built up, with plenty of visibility in the marketing and plenty of merchandise devoted to them — with the consequence that many an animated heroine isn’t even the most memorable character in her own movie. (Also, in some non-English speaking countries, Tangled was actually titled Rapunzel. In the United States, the movie became Tangled because boys wouldn’t touch The Princess and The Frog.)

Traditionally, no such concerns about big-tent box office have arisen with animated features with male leads; if the protagonist was male, the tent was assumed to be plenty big, and so we saw films like The Sword in the Stone and The Jungle Book, and then, some years later, Brother Bear, in which female characters only exist if a five-minute villain or a three-minute love interest is needed. More recent male-led films have been a bit more inclusive, with one or occasionally two female characters included to fill the role that the Reel Girl blog calls the “Minority Feisty,” the outspoken, hot-tempered, sometimes capable girl who, even when she is at her most badass, never manages to outshine the male hero or steal any scenes. Rarely is the “Minority Feisty” an animated film’s most memorable character. Almost as rarely is she the character with whom the girls in the audience will identify. How many girls want to see themselves in junior harridan Penny (Mr. Peabody and Sherman)? Or imbecile older sister Courtney (ParaNorman)? Or the underdeveloped “Smurfettes” Gloria (the Madagascar franchise), Tooth Fairy (Rise of the Guardians), or Kevin the bird (Up)? It’s assumed that the girls will instead imprint on the more developed male characters, because girls can do that. We’ve been socialized to connect with characters who don’t share our gender — which is, on the whole, a very good thing. It’s just a shame the same isn’t expected of, or conditioned in, boys.

Boys’ presumed inability to relate to female protagonists, along with the view that boys’ stories are universal while girls’ stories are niche, may be a contributing factor in a number of social ills, among them some (though far from all) male authors’ inability to create interesting and complex female characters who feel like real people rather than a mysterious, incomprehensible Other. Yet I hold out hope that things might yet change, that boys rushing to the theaters to see Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse might recognize parts of themselves in Gwen as well as in Miles, Peter, or Hobie. They who die by the story might, in time, live by the story.