kit kittredge Tagged Articles at Cinematical

If you have a girl between the ages of 4 and 12 in your life, chances are pretty good you've heard of American Girl. The wildly successful franchise has spawned a whole series of high-end dolls, doll clothes, doll furniture and accessories, books, cookbooks ... and, of course, movies. American Girls are enormously popular with both girls and parents seeking a wholesome alternative to the freakishly-thin Barbie doll image or the hooker-in-training look of those wretched Bratz dolls. As an added bonus, they encourage girls to learn a little history, without even realizing it .

The whole thing with American Girl is that each of the dolls comes from a different time period: there's Kristen, an immigrant girl from Sweden; Felicity, an American Revolution girl whose father is a Patriot, while her best friend's father is a Loyalist; Samantha, being raised by her wealthy grandmother in the 1920s, when women's suffrage and class difference were big issues; Molly, a girl whose father, a doctor, is off serving in the Second World War; Addy, who escapes slavery with her mother to search for her father and brother, and so on. Each doll has her own set of books: there's the intro book, the birthday book, the book where so-and-so learns a lesson, the Christmas book, and even a line of mystery books.

With Kit Kittredge: An American Girl finally opening in limited release on Wednesday, it seemed like a good time to take a look at other films girls in the same age demographic might also enjoy. As a mother of three daughters, I like to seek out films that have strong female characters. So many of the roles for females in Hollywood either fall into blatant stereotypes or position young girls and women as existing on this planet primarily for the pleasures of the male half of the species, and I don't want my girls growing up believing the images of women they're exposed to through the media. Of course, everything in life doesn't have to have a political agenda -- what fun would that be? So some of these are just films my own daughters very much enjoy, that the girl in your life might like also.

Here are seven great films for fans of American Girl books and movies ... let me know what others I've missed that you like; with only seven slots to work with, I had to leave out a lot of films I otherwise would have included ...

Before we get the sequel to and the potential copiers of Sex and the City, we're in for a summer of comparative marketing. Already we've seen a new trailer for The Women, which arrived well-timed on the heels of the Sex in the City box office reports. Now, thanks to some insightful reporting from the New York Times, we find out that Kit Kittredge: An American Girl is just like Sex and the City, only its for little girls. Like the recent hit movie, Kit Kittredge comes with a built-in audience thanks to the successful American Girl property, which consists of dolls, books and TV movies. Also, yes, it's mainly for females. Oh, and it's a Picturehouse release, meaning its pretty much being released by the same studio (New Line, now a division of Warner Bros.) that brought us Sex and the City.

Interestingly enough, The Women is also Picturehouse, and this summer's other big female-geared movie, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2, is Warner Bros. Hopefully another article can point out that the sequel is just like Sex and the City, only for teen girls. Then all we'd need is for Warner Bros. to make my desired big-screen Golden Girls movie (with original cast, of course), because it'd be just like Sex and the City, only for older girls. Unfortunately the series was produced by Disney, who'd likely hold on to the film rights.