ONE OF THE most popular children’s movies of the past year or so has been Big Hero 6.

The Disney movie won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature at this year’s Oscars and is beloved by boys and girls alike. (Okay, and some adults.)

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Recently, a mother named Veronica was buying Big Hero 6-themed fabric so she could make pillow cases for her two children.

During her search, she discovered that the only available fabric made a surprising omission - it didn’t include either of the film’s two leading female characters. (For those who have not seen the film, Big Hero 6 features four male characters and two female characters.)

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The fabric was manufactured by Springs Creative and so, Veronica decided to e-mail them asking why they had chosen to leave out the female characters, Honey Lemon and GoGo, from their merchandise. (She shared the exchange with Pigtail Pals & Ballcap Buddies.)

Guess what’s missing from the fabric, not just Honey Lemon, but GoGo too. BOTH of the ONLY female characters, both equally as brilliant and smart and capable as Wasabi and Hiro, are missing. It’s not Big Hero 6 without them.I can’t find a way to contact Disney to right this terrible wrong. As a woman, and an Engineer, I myself find this offensive. Put the Big Hero 6 back together on the same fabric. Even my children do not want the fabric without ALL of the heroes on it.

In response to Veronica’s e-mail, Springs Creative wrote that the primary target audience of Big Hero 6 was boys aged 5-12.

They stated that the female characters were excluded as boys think girls are “yuck”.

Since this is geared toward boys, we chose to focus either on the main characters (in this case Baymax and Hiro), or on just the boy characters.  We have found boys do not want girl characters on their things (eeeww girls! Yuck! Haha).

Both the manufacturer’s response and their decision to erase the characters in the first place has been widely criticised on social media.

Many have pointed out that Big Hero 6 without two of its main characters is no longer Big Hero 6.

Let Toys Be Toys, a campaign that aims to stop companies from promoting certain toys as being suitable for boys and others as only suitable for girls, has described it as “appalling”.

Neither Disney nor Springs Creative has responded to the furore.

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