Imaginary Worlds - Cartoonish Gender

Episode Date: September 2, 2021

Queer representation in children’s cartoons has never been better, but the road to get here has been fraught. I talk with podcaster Dawn H and journalist Sara Century about how the first type of queer representation they saw in cartoons came from Sailor Moon – or at least a highly edited and strangely dubbed English-language version that tried to scrub away all the queer content, somewhat unsuccessfully. And I talk with podcaster Thomas J. West and YouTube essayist Rowan Ellis about the history of queer-coded villains in Disney cartoons, and how the biggest entertainment company in the world still has a lot of catching up to do. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. Our ad partner is Multitude. If you’re interested in advertising on Imaginary Worlds, you can contact them here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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I recently did a call out on social media asking people to give suggestions for topics of future episodes. And a few people mentioned Sailor Moon, the classic anime series from the 90s, because there's a new two-part Sailor Moon movie on Netflix. And a lot of people suggested that I look into the queer content of Sailor Moon and why it was so groundbreaking and controversial. And I said, wait, what? I mean, I remember in the late 90s, when Sailor Moon first came on Cartoon Network, I was studying animation at CalArts,

and these women in my program were painting murals of Sailor Moon all over the walls of the dorms. And it was the first time I had seen the characters with their big eyes, long hair, long legs, and short skirts. And I thought it was like the anime equivalent of the Spice Girls. Fun, empowering, but not subversive or controversial. I was so wrong. Although I think I got that impression because the American and Canadian companies that dubbed the different seasons of Sailor Moon

did everything they could to censor the queer content. But it was still there. Sarah Century is a journalist who wrote about Sailor Moon for the site SyFy. She was in junior high, growing up in a small town in Colorado, when she first saw the show on TV. It was definitely around this time where I was definitely coming into my queerness like at least a little bit. Like it was a long and winding road as it is for so many people. But I was definitely realizing around that time that I was probably not a straight person. So it was definitely

something where it was just like, oh, I'm going to watch Sailor Moon. And then I was like, I love this series. And then I was like, why do I love this series so much? Before we get to that, Sailor Moon originally began as a manga series in 1991 by the artist Naoko Takeuchi. Takeuchi was influenced by the manga that she grew up reading in the 1970s, which is created by a group of female artists that were pioneers in the 70s in writing manga for girls in a field that's historically been dominated by men. The premise of Sailor Moon is that there's a team of teenage girls who can transform into superheroes that wear these sailor uniforms. And besides their

Japanese names, they also have superhero names based on planets like Sailor Venus, Sailor Mars, or Sailor Jupiter. And the jewels and tiaras and wands that are part of their uniforms create magic which can defeat all types of villains. The main character of course is Sailor Moon. Watching the show for the first time, I really appreciated the way the show has a sense of humor about itself. Like it knows that it's silly and it can be silly in the best possible way. Like Sailor Moon's love interest early on is a male superhero called Tuxedo Mask because he wears a tuxedo and a mask. Well done, Sailor Moon. I won't soon forget what happened here tonight. He's right. You did great, Sailor Moon. He's so cute. But the show can also be dramatic and heartwarming when it needs to be. And Sailor Moon was so popular in Japan,

it kicked off a whole genre about girls with magical powers. This was a show for girls that didn't treat girls like they were stupid. Dawn H is the host of the Anime Nostalgia Podcast, and she goes by the letter H online for privacy's sake. Each girl had their own distinct personality and style and look and sound. The main character herself, like Sailor Moon, she was sort of a klutz. She was a crybaby. Sailor Moon, you have to remember that crying isn't going to solve any of your problems. Yeah, maybe not, but I can't help it. She didn't get very good grades. You know, a lot of times she would get teased for, you know,

the things she liked or, you know, just her overall personality flaws. But, you know, the things she liked or, you know, just her overall personality flaws. But, you know, when push came to shove, she was the one who was, you know, saving the galaxy. And that was pretty amazing because in a show like that, in any other context, you would expect the heroine to be like, like Wonder Woman, like, oh, she's perfect and she can never do anything wrong and she's flawless. But in this this show, it was like, oh, well, I can be like a normal person and still be strong and powerful and cool. Like, I think that really resonated with girls at the time. Now, if you're watching the English language version of the show, at first, the queer content was not obvious. In the first season, there was a pair of villains called Kunzite and Zoizite. They were a gay couple in the original Japanese version of the show.

But since Zoizite had a ponytail and long eyelashes, which is not unusual for male characters in anime, the company dubbing the show into English hired an actress to do the voice of Zoidzeit and suddenly they were a straight couple. It's hard to find videos of the problematic dubbed version of Sailor Moon from the 90s but there's a new version on Hulu completely redubbed with a male actor playing Zoidzeit

and this is what they sound like in the restored version of the show. You're cruel, Kunzeit. How can you suggest she's more lovely than me? Underneath, she's just an ugly monster. Shh, I'm kidding. Don't let envy ruin your beautiful face. Look at me.

Go away. This rose can't compare with the beauty I see in your face. Thank you, my dear. In later seasons, the same thing happened with a character called Fish Eye, who was clearly a gay male character wearing women's clothes. In the English language dub from the 90s, Fish Eye was given a female voice. But the most infamous example of straight washing happened in the third season. We meet two teenage girls, Michiru and Haruka, also known as Sailor Neptune and Sailor Uranus. They are clearly both girls and very much in love.

So the people who dubbed the show into English had a very interesting idea how to fix that problem. They changed the dialogue. So now Sailor Uranus and Sailor Neptune were cousins. How'd you guys meet then? We're cousins. We grew up together. Even as a kid, Sarah knew that something had changed from the original anime. I mean, I have a lot of cousins, but I don't like hold, hold hands and, like, gaze dreamily into their eyes, like, or, you know, date them, generally. Hey, what is it? Haruka, it'll be all right. No matter what, I'll always

love your hands. When you look at Uranus and Neptune, there is an episode that is completely dedicated to them as a love story. Like that episode is etched into my mind because I always have related so much to Neptune. Neptune is this kind of standoffish, like has her mirror and just kind of is so introspective and dedicated to art and things. So I always found her to be a really compelling character. And I love that character being queer because so often it would just be like, oh, she's just waiting for the right guy or something like that.

So I loved Neptune. I think Neptune is one of the most influential characters on me because I just related to her a lot as a kid. The U.S. was not the only country that struggled with how to handle that storyline. In France, they dubbed sailor Uranus with a male voice when she was wearing her civilian clothes, which kind of worked

because she liked to wear a tie and jacket and she had short hair. But when Uranus transforms into her sailor outfit with a short skirt, they switched the character to a female voice, and they explained that she had always been a girl, but her secret identity was pretending to be a boy, and her cover story was that she was in love with Neptune.

I asked Dawn, what was the context of this relationship in Japan? Why was the show not censored there? In Japan, there was like plausible deniability when it came to the, well, supposedly plausible deniability when it came to, say, Uranus and Neptune being a couple. Stuff like same-sex romance and gender was very much explored in shoujo manga, which would be a girl's comic, basically. And famously in Japan, there is a thing called, well, there's a way of thinking called class S, where it's implied that if a girl has like, lesbian feelings, or even explores like a lesbian relationship that's just practice for you know when she's older and graduates and decides to get married and finds a husband and settles down um but then there are other times where they are like very conservative

about certain things which is why you don't ever see them say like Uranus and Neptune, for example, you never see them kiss or anything. The most you will see them do is maybe hold hands or hold each other, but you will never explicitly see them like kissing in the 90s version because even back then they were like, oh, that would be a little too much. Although some of the queer content in Sailor Moon was trying to push boundaries in Japan. Naoko Takeuchi, the creator, she wasn't really that involved with the anime, actually. Funnily enough, most of the people involved with the 90s anime, the original one, were men. Like famously, Kunihiko Ikuhara, who kind of came on in the second and third seasons, he is very well known for creating anime with a lot of queer characters. And that kind of, Sailor Moon was kind of the start of that.

had that he kind of wanted to do for Sailor Moon, but got rejected, ended up being ideas that he carried on into anime that he would create later. And it's only kind of recently where we have seen in the new Sailor Moon remakes that they're doing, where they allowed some scenes from the original manga that do include women kissing to be finally animated. And in a 2014 reboot of Sailor Moon, Sailor Uranus was identified as being gender fluid or non-binary. But going back to the original series, the most controversial season was the final one, which was cut entirely from the North American run because they couldn't figure out how to change it through dubbing. In the final one, which was cut entirely from the North American run because they couldn't figure out how to change it through dubbing. In the final season there are these characters called Sailor Starlights. They're a team of

super-powered women who pretended to be a boy band. In the original manga, Sailor Moon falls for one of them. But even in Japan, where the TV show had been pushing boundaries, they couldn't get away with having the main character be bisexual. So they came up with their own convoluted solution. The Sailor Starlights were actually men who could turn into women when they needed to fight evil. But that makes it somehow queerer, honestly, because then you have these like gender fluid or trans sort of characters that are just changing gender like magically. Other countries did air the fifth season with their own ideas of how to make it supposedly less queer, like in the Italian dub of Sailor Moon. supposedly less queer, like in the Italian dub of Sailor Moon.

They made it to where the Sailor Starlights had twin sisters. And whenever they needed them, they would call them and they would come and do the fighting. So it wasn't even like, you know, oh, we're men that turn into women. It was like, oh, here, I'm going to call the girls that look exactly like us and they're going to fight. As a kid, Dawn knew that the final season never aired in the U.S., so she got VHS copies of the show in Japanese with English subtitles. And even though Sailor Moon is supposed to be in love with one of the Sailor Starlights only when they're presenting as boys, Dawn got the message. That had a lot of impact on me because I didn't realize at the time, this took me years to figure out myself that like, oh, actually, I think I'm bisexual.

But like at the time, I was just like, oh, I didn't realize like you could like more than just one gender. Like, wow. One of the things that I think is ironic about adults freaking out about queer content in children's cartoons is that first crushes are one of the most common storylines. The girls in Sailor Moon are always swooning over boys. But if it's same sex crushes, no. Because if you're queer, it turns into you're trying to indoctrinate people. Again, Sarah Century. I think that that is such an inherently flawed way of looking at things because obviously, like, as I'm saying, this is stuff where I was

fighting through the subtext. Like, there's, they did everything they could to make this not be what I wanted it to be or what it was, you know. So I think that when people look at it like that and be like, oh, well, kids knowing about sexuality is like, well, kids know about sexuality. Like that's the thing is, is that like kids do learn about this stuff as they go along, regardless of what you tell them. And if a kid is queer, then they're alone, you know? Like, that's kind of the thing with me was, is, like, I felt just completely isolated. So seeing something where, like, I felt so represented by Neptune that it was just, like, I needed this, like, so much. But times are changing. There's actually a lot of U.S. animation now with queer content,

Times are changing. There's actually a lot of US animation now with queer content, like Adventure Time, the new She-Ra, Loud House, and especially Steven Universe, which had a same-sex wedding between two alien characters named Ruby and Sapphire that can magically merge into a single humanoid character. Ruby, do you take this gem to having to hold on this and every other planet in the universe?

I do! And Sapphire, do you- Yes. You didn't let me finish! I'm just very excited. I think that where Steven Universe shines is that it's such a good gender fluid and trans metaphor for a lot of people. There's so much changing, merging, becoming greater because you work with others. There isn't a ton of subtext. Like it's fairly open with pretty much everything. And I think that, you know, we wouldn't have it if we didn't have Sailor Moon

first, you know? One of the new TV shows that has openly queer characters is The Owl House, which is a cartoon on Disney+. But when it comes to Disney feature animation, the global blockbuster films, Disney is still struggling with how to handle queer content and how to handle their own history of queer-coded villains. After the break, we will open the Disney Vault. and crafted with skin conditioning oils. So whether you're going for a run or just running late, do what life throws your way and smell like you didn't.

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perversion. If a filmmaker tried to use queer characters, they had to be villains, and they had to use either subtle references or usually stereotypes of an effeminate older bachelor or a cold domineering spinster. And those villains could also work as foils against heroes and heroines that fit much more traditional gender norms. Rowan Ellis is a cultural critic who does videos about LGBTQ representation. The canon of any kind of art form is very sequential. Everyone is learning from the previous iterations. If you're living through a period where it's still not necessarily particularly acceptable to be queer and you're idolizing these filmmakers who created very queer coded characters and queer coded villains you aren't necessarily going to be

examining like hmm why is it that these villains have these particular attributes you might just replicate it and i think that that leads to the next generation who are like two generations away from the original kind of Hays Code, but they're still replicating it even decades after it's technically been abolished. The gay villain is a trope that Disney relied on a lot, especially with their feature animation.

Although many of their queer coded villains ended up being more popular than the heroes. And sometimes villains are cool. They have cool dress schemes. They have cool one-liners. All the best songs. All of the best songs as well. Absolutely.

Like a lot of people feel like a real affinity to that, but it feels to me like an affinity that is being kind of projected with context onto them rather than something that was being deliberately set up by filmmakers to be like, oh, yes, we are going to create some queer villains that people will empathize with and that they will have an affinity to. I think it very much is like a lot, unfortunately, of queer representation, something that queer people sort of project onto these characters rather than something that was like a genuine attempt at relating to them. Thomas West co-hosts the podcast Queen of the Bees. I think that on some level, I always recognized the queerness. I was actually talking to a friend about this very subject, and I was telling them that when I was growing up,

I was always I always wanted to be Ursula or Maleficent or, you know, Scar. So I think that subconsciously I recognized that there was something queer, that something about their queerness called to me and gave me pleasure as a young viewer. You're so weird. You have no idea. So...

In terms of queer-coded villains, I'd always heard about Scar, Jafar, Radcliffe from Pocahontas. Mine, boys, mine everyontas. Mine, boys. Mine every mountain and dig, boys. But Thomas mentioned characters I hadn't even thought about, like Medusa from The Rescuers. Why did you let her escape?

What is your alibi this time, Netwit? Her animosity towards children is just one example. You know, the hairstyle, the way she emasculates her assistant snoops is cruella too you think i think so i mean certainly like nowadays i think we can read her that way so yeah i think that there's something about her also that i would appeal to to queer viewers in part just because she's so invested in fashion that she's just so again emasculating like there i think that gay men in particular are drawn to those kind of dominant female personalities.

And I think that that would help explain why she also would fit into that queer coding. My only true love, darling, I live for furs. I worship furs. To be fair, other franchises have used queer coded villainsoded villains, from Batman to the Powerpuff Girls. Take your claws off the professor! What's he ever done to you? Oh, it's not what he's done to me! But Disney is in a unique position.

They are so deeply tied to their old IP, but those stories have outlived their cultural moments by decades. For example, kids are still watching Sleeping Beauty and 101 Dalmatians. Maleficent and Cruella Merchandise are sold at Walmart and on Amazon, but those movies came out in 1959 and 1961. To put that in perspective, two of the biggest movie stars back then were Rock Hudson and Montgomery Clift, who are known now as cautionary tales of the damage that homophobia can have on closeted actors. That's how long ago those Disney movies came out.

And there's so much stylistic continuity between Disney films. The animators are always looking to the past for inspiration. Like in the 2012 movie Wreck-It Ralph, the villain is like a throwback to the Hays Code. No, I'm King Candy. I see you're a fan of pink. Salmon, salmon, that's obviously salmon. What are you doing here? Or in the case of Ursula, the villain in The Little Mermaid, the animators actually looked at the drag queen Divine for inspiration. It's not like a connection that's only in the minds of people reading too much into this. Like this is very much an inspiration that's been talked about openly. Well, Angel Fish, the solution to your problem is simple.

The only way to get what you want is to become a human yourself. In the upcoming live-action remake of The Little Mermaid, Ursula is going to be played by Melissa McCarthy. So it seems like they're going to go in a different direction with the character. But Disney has found itself again in a difficult position. They seem to be aware of the criticism of their films, but they're having trouble imagining villains that are not queer coded. And I think that's partially what explains why the villains of the new remakes don't actually

land with a great deal of potency. Like, you know, if you think about Jafar from the new Aladdin. Steal an apple and you're a thief. Steal a kingdom and you're a statesman. He's just not that interesting. They've robbed him of all the sort of overly mannered delivery that made the original Jafar such an iconic villain.

In the same way that they took all the things that made Scar so interesting. Because instead of being a theatrical Claudius from Hamlet, he becomes this sort of a menacing half-starved lion from a nature documentary. When I'm king, I'll have to give you orders, tell you what to do. How weird is that? You've no idea. That's not exactly what we go to a Disney movie to see. Like it just robs it of sort of that sort of dark magic that I think was always attendant.

Like it just robs it of sort of that sort of dark magic that I think was always attendant. And Rowan says when Disney tries to take a step forward, it can feel like two steps back. And I think it is in this this element of them not wanting, I guess, potentially not wanting to get it wrong, not wanting. So they they have had the first gay Disney character about 17 times at this point. Like there's been so many, you know, someone's pointed out like, oh, I think there might be a lesbian couple in the background of this one Pixar movie. Or, oh, I think this character's meant to be gay. They didn't say the word gay, but it seems like they're meant to be gay. And so you kind of have this weird in-between stage at this point where they're kind of wanting to kind of claim the benefits of saying that they have representation without actually putting it in the movie or losing any ticket sales from more conservative audiences.

They still can't break out of the model that queer is somehow anti-family or anti-family friendly. So rather they've now jettisoned like queer negativity. So they don't give us queer villains anymore, but they haven't yet given us queer representation that's positive either. So we're really being left out on both ends. So we don't even have the subversive pleasures of the previous era, but we don't have anything else either. I'm sort of waiting for Disney to just accept that it's okay to give queer people representation and go with that. Or I wish they would just paint us as villains and at least we can take subversive pleasure in that avenue. For example, in the original Beauty and the Beast, the villain Gaston was not queer-coded,

but a lot of people thought that his sidekick, LeFou, was. So in the live-action remake of Beauty and the Beast, the director promised a, quote, exclusively gay moment for LeFou, which turned out to be three seconds of him dancing with a man in a ballroom scene. Now, Disney did stick by that scene when they got flack from other countries who wanted

the scene cut. But when The Rise of Skywalker came out, they did buckle under pressure and cut a very brief scene of a lesbian couple kissing to get the movie into foreign markets. Now, the upcoming Marvel movie, The Eternals, is supposed to have an openly gay character, but Marvel has a little bit more independence and leeway. Ironically, by being so cautious, Disney has gone back to queer coding, like with the character of Namari,

who is the antagonist from Raya and the Last Dragon. We had a very strange situation where we had a sort of reformed villain character who was so obviously queer to so many people watching it, that so many people for almost all the movie were like, this is going to get gay, right? Like this is so, this seems so obviously like these two girls are going to get together. Like she has an undercut, like she's the most quintessential lesbian haircut you could possibly imagine. And it's this very clear, like enemies, like friends to enemies to girlfriends, sort of classic romance plot storyline.

Hey there, princess undercut. Fancy meeting you here. You and the dragon gem pieces are coming with me. My sword here says we're not. Kelly Marie Tran, who did the voice of Raya, said that she played the character as if she had romantic feelings for Namari. But a lot of viewers might not know that

unless they read her interview. A similar thing happened with the Nickelodeon series The Legend of Korra, where a lesbian relationship was hinted at and had to be confirmed by the showrunners after it was over. But if the actors or filmmakers don't confirm the fan theories, it can feel like gaslighting or queer baiting, or as people sometimes say to Thomas, Aren't you just reading into this? That's the most common sort of accusation of academics and

former academics and people who read and interpret and analyze films. But it's like, yes, but that's part of the joy of watching movies and on television and reading books is like there's always so much richness to the text. And if you just go the surface level, then why bother? Like that's part of the joy of of culture is the sheer like the myriad multiplicitous readings that any text offers up. What's so frustrating to Rowan is that if queer identity is not handled well in children's media, kids are going to look elsewhere for answers. When she was a kid and she was questioning her sexuality, there was nothing for her to watch on British television except Queer as Folk, which is a great drama, but... It's very, it's like, it's very much for adults.

There's a lot of like very explicit sex scenes and kind of topics that are kind of for people who are older. And I just know that like so many young people are watching it because they were like, well, this is the only thing I can find to watch that that I know is gay because I've like it's called queer as folk so I kind of got the memo but because they didn't have this like nice you know Disney movie that they could watch like even one Disney movie they could watch and still don't just to the point where I'm like I really hope that it it that every time I do interviews like this that they become super outdated very quickly is my genuine hope because I really hope that it's like someone will listen to it and be like but we just had three gay main characters

last year what are they talking about when people discover this podcast they do like to binge on the back catalog and I'll sometimes hear from listeners who will say I should do an update on an old episode because things have changed. So let me know, future listeners, in 2023 or 2025. Is this episode out of date? Or does it feel evergreen? That is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Don H., Sarah Century, Thomas West, and Rowan Ellis. By the way, if you'd like to hear more about the impact of the Hays Code on American animation

or American movies, check out my episode from last year, Betty Boop and the Hays Code. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. You can like the show on Facebook. I tweet at emolinski and Imagine World's pod. If you really like the show, please leave a review wherever you get your podcasts or do a shout out on social media. That always helps people discover imaginary worlds.

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