Wonder Woman (2009)

Lauren Montgomery's 2009 animated feature arrives with a pedigree that predates the current era's casting spreadsheets: Gail Simone on the script, a woman in the director's chair, and an island of warrior women voiced almost entirely by women. Diana is sculpted from sand and given life by her mother's blood, defies Hippolyta to win a contest in disguise, then beheads a god. The bones of a feminist text are present and load-bearing. They are also inherited. This is the character's 1940s architecture, not a modern initiative, and the film wears it the way a museum wears a diadem.

The picture is an action adventure first. Ares escapes, harpies descend, Washington burns, and a nuclear missile streaks toward Themyscira. Between the beheadings, someone occasionally stops to explain what it all means. A dying Persephone informs Hippolyta that isolation has denied the Amazons love and family. Hippolyta hands her daughter a mission of communication between men and women. Steve Trevor drinks too much and makes a pass. These are the sermons, brief and mostly hormonal, and they land with a thud before the next fight. Nobody in the audience mistakes this for a lecture, which is the film's saving grace.

The rest of the cultural ledger sits empty. No racial consciousness, no climate anxiety, no critique of capital, no body politics, no queer content, no neurodivergent reading, no revisionist history, since Greek myth and a comic book owe nothing to the historical record. The casting is female and capable, which is not the same as a diversity program, and Rosario Dawson among the Amazons changes very little. The remainder is a brisk, violent, well-liked cartoon about a woman who saves the world and then kisses a pilot. In 2009, that was simply the premise. It still works.