Theirs are not the kind of stories you find in a Disney princess flick, but they're in the spotlight on the blog Rejected Princesses. Each week, former DreamWorks animator Jason Porath adds a new illustration and write-up about a woman who is, as the blog says, "too awesome, awful or offbeat for kids' movies."

"I take women, sort of unsung heroines — usually from history, but a lot from mythology and some from literature — who wouldn't necessarily make the cut for mainstream animated princess movies, and give them that style," Porath tells NPR's Arun Rath. "It's sort of an alternate-reality glimpse into, 'What if they got their moment in the sun?' "

One of his favorite examples is the aforementioned Soviet tank commander, Sergeant Mariya Oktyabrskaya. Porath says Oktyabrskaya's husband was killed by the Nazis, so she sold all of her belongings in order to buy a tank and fight. She named the tank "Fighting Girlfriend." The illustration shows her sitting atop her tank, anthropomorphized in Cars-like fashion, amid a battle.

"It's this weird, incongruous mash-up of history as well as these mainstream animated movies," he says.

I would watch a movie about Sergeant Mariya Oktyabrskaya.

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