Powerpuff Girls to the Rescue

Blood and teeth fly across the TV screen. The sound of fierce, rapid punches signals some gory off-screen action -- a fist connecting with a jaw, a kick landing in the soft flesh of some unlucky victim.

Our hero emerges and ... she's a 5-year-old girl. With shiny, saucer-plate eyes glaring and a high, scratchy voice full of anger, she floats toward us like some character out of a Keane painting who's bent on revenge against her creators for cursing her with a cuteness that borders on perversity. "Who are you callin' cute?" she squeaks, as she's joined by a redhead and a blonde with similar insectlike features.

These hyper-adorable mutants, seemingly the demonic offspring of Shirley Temple and Japanese anime, are known as the Powerpuff Girls, and their bug-eyed faces and bloated heads can be spotted on everything from dolls to watches to CD cases to mousepads to boxes of cereal. Just four years after "The Powerpuff Girls" first aired on Cartoon Network, the Powerpuff franchise has made $1 billion from retail merchandise, and with "The Powerpuff Girls" movie on the way, the wee trio's popularity is likely to reach even greater heights.

To their loyal fans and amused admirers, these kindergarten rabble-rousers represent something bigger than the next Hello Kitty. For hyper-analytical adults and avid third-wave feminists, they're animated proof that strong female characters can kick ass and take names without compromising their femininity. For children, and those grown-ups weary of gender-centric postulation, the teensy heroines do viewers the favor of skipping or skewering fancy-schmancy politics in the service of good humor.

The show does mark a dramatic departure from boy-centered rough-'em-up cartoons and pink, fluffy girl-centered fare. Yet, striking as these icons of girlhood may be, it could be argued that their popularity may not reflect a dramatic shift in our society's view of gender roles, but rather our inability to stomach female anger unless it's sugarcoated in cuteness and scored with a pervasively chirpy, nonthreatening tone.

Tough heroines are certainly the flavor of the month -- as evidenced by shows like "Alias" and "She Spies" -- but do these shows echo real changes in our culture's concept of gender, or are they just a passing trend? Can female power truly be respected if it's consistently packaged as supernaturally sexy or freakishly cute? When we cheer on a little girl who knocks a villain's teeth out, are we cheering female power, or is it all an inside joke, an exercise in absurdity that plays on existing injustices? Is Lara Croft powerful because she can take you down, or because you'd like her to go down on you?

Craig McCracken, creator of "The Powerpuff Girls," insists that the show's key ingredient is gender blindness: "I don't think of them as girls; I think of them as kids," he says. "We've never said, 'What would a girl do?' It's always, 'What would a kid do?'" This comment rings true, especially when McCracken relates his nascent views on evolving feminism. "There's this new feminism that's coming up that's embracing things that are typically girlish, and not saying, 'Oh, in order to be a feminist you have to denounce all of that pink stuff and baby Ts,'" he says with great sincerity. "You can have all those things and be sexy and be feminine and be typically girlish and still be a feminist. I mean, my girlfriend ["Powerpuff Girls" storyboard artist Lauren Faust] basically taught me a lot of that ..."

It's tough to dislike a guy who humbly credits his girlfriend for his feminist sensibilities. "Her whole frustration is that I did this accidentally," McCracken says of Faust, whom he met after she came to work on the show. "She's always wanted to make this type of show on purpose, and I just kind of stumbled into it. And she's like, 'You have no idea what you've done. This is a great message!' And I'm like, 'I was just having fun. I just thought it was a cool idea.'"