Rating Redheads #4: Katie Mitchell

 The next subject of this blog is a more recent addition to the redhead catalogue: Katie Mitchell, from Sony's The Mitchells vs the Machines.

Katie is a character I really would have vibed with if I were still in high school. She's a spunky aspiring filmmaker with a "lol random" sense of humor and chronic Nobody Gets Me syndrome. Which hey, might have been true. The film doesn't show any of Katie's friends before getting to college, so maybe she had zero friends in high school, but I digress.
Katie has one brother and two parents, none of which have red hair. The main conflict of the film is the progressive, redheaded Katie not getting along with or understanding her bearded traditional father, and suddenly I'm getting The Little Mermaid flashbacks. Not that that's a bad thing.

So, how does she rank?

1) Accuracy to the redhead experience: 3/5
Like 70% of the redheads I'll be reviewing, and probably 100% of the recent ones, Katie is an outsider. Her main driving force in the film is getting out of her small town and going to college, where she's connected with people who understand her. However, also like the other redhead characters, Katie's red hair does not factor into her marginalization; her hair color is never even mentioned in the film.
However, I like that her hair is darker in hue: being redheaded is a spectrum, and we love our auburn gingers here.
It makes sense that neither of her parents are redheads because the MC1R gene is recessive. (The author of the blog, a ginger, is the daughter of two brunettes.) This was actually refreshing to me, as most cartoons feel the need to give a redheaded character at least one redheaded parent to "justify" their hair color.

2) How Katie's gingerness is used in the film: 2/5
The Mitchells Vs the Machines is a heavily color-coded film, and red is KATIE'S COLOR. Her hair is red, her sweater she wears through the whole movie is red, her phone is red. In contrast, her mother is pink, her brother blue, and her father yellow.
To be honest, it would have been more interesting to me if Katie were not a natural redhead, but dyed her hair. Many creative and fringe teenagers dye their hair, and it would have been her way of declaring herself different from her parents without going too far "afield" with an unnatural hair color (says someone who's dyed their hair green multiple times). Katie's dyed red hair could symbolize her growing up, becoming someone different than her father expected from the flashbacks of her brunette childhood. But that's just my opinion.

3) Stereotypes used: -0.5
Katie isn't a perfect example of the "special" trope, but part of the stereotype is the ever-popular "not like other kids" sentiment, so I'm taking off half a point for that.

Final Score: 4.5/10

Though Katie Mitchell's relationship with her red hair isn't discussed in the film, I can believe it affected her growing up, and I can see a lot of redheaded teenagers today relating to her.