Our culture as a whole has long imagined girls as more or less the opposite of boys. Girls are dear little things who play with dolls while waiting to grow up into loving wives and mothers. Even when they're protagonists and not merely supporting characters, most of them have to be pretty, kind, and generally well-behaved as models of permissible girl behavior. Shirley Temple, the quintessential "little girl" of Hollywood, wins everyone over with her dimpled sweetness, and even Alice and Dorothy are depicted as very "proper" girls in most of their film and TV adaptations (when their girlhood is not erased entirely by making them teenagers or even adults). There are exceptions, of course, like the Little House on the Prairie books and TV series, but celebrated girl-centered stories are harder to come by than stories about boys, and stories about groups of young girls (not marriageable young women) are even rarer.
Annie dispenses with all of those well-worn stereotypes about who and what girls are, replacing the usual sugar and spice with Depression era spunk. It's both a girl's version of Oliver Twist and a prepubescent take on Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), with a scrappy crew of orphan girls trying to survive by their wits, camaraderie, and sheer stubbornness. Imagine the delight my little sister and I experienced seeing these dirty, grumpy, combative girls playing tricks on Miss Hannigan (Carol Burnett) and fighting amongst themselves just like we often did, much to our mother's dismay. We were girls who played outside, got dirty, tore our clothes, and only brushed our hair under duress. Annie and her friends provided a rare chance to see girls who looked and acted like us on the big screen, and we loved them for it. It helped that they weren't preternaturally cute or beautiful, like so many of the little and big girls Hollywood showcases. Mop wig aside, Aileen Quinn's Annie seemed like a kid we'd like to know, even if we felt disappointed that she had to be rescued by adults in the final act. We were hoping she'd kick Tim Curry's Rooster right off the top of the train bridge and send him screaming to his death, but at least she tore up the ill-gotten check and made her initial escape all by herself, while her friends persevered in their race to uncover the villains' deception.
In the decades since Annie, Hollywood movies have made some progress in telling stories about girls, especially in films like Matilda (1996), but Japan's Hiyao Miyazaki has done far better with My Neighbor Totoro (1988), Kiki's Delivery Service (1989), Spirited Away (2001), and Howl's Moving Castle (2004), just to name a few of the Studio Ghibli movies to center the experiences of young girls as interesting and not idealized characters. Women film reviewers, however, are still well aware of the dearth of great movies about young girls, as Anya Jaremko-Greenwold opines in the 2016 Atlantic essay, "Why Hollywood Doesn't Tell More Stories for - and About - Girls." Given that Hollywood still doesn't make many movies like Annie, I'm glad that today's little girls can see the 1982 version in spite of its dated elements. Maybe, at this very moment, some stubborn little girl with tangled pigtails and a dirty face is watching the movie on Netflix as the orphans sing "It's the Hard Knock Life" and delighting in the vision of girls who look and act like her.
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"My Life at the Movies" (2011)
"High School Movies, Then and Now" (2018)
