Never saw Ice Age 3: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, but since it’s coming to home video soon (I wish I got paid for that plug), it’s time for an apropos update.

Page Schilt has mixed feelings about Ice Age 3. On one hand, it shows animals of heterogeneous gender permuting peacefully. On the other hand, it does its best to reinforce stale stereotypes, particularly masculine tropes. Here’s a bit:

In an attempt to create a compensatory family of his own, Sid appropriates a trio of dinosaur eggs. Now in nurturing mode, he begins referring to himself as “Mommy” and even–unless I’m much mistaken–using feminine pronouns.

All of this, I know, sounds really queer.

But, like so much pop culture, Ice Age 3 simultaneously subverts and reinforces sex and gender norms. All the stuff it’s dredging up from our collective cultural anxiety closet–changing gender roles, the anti-sociality of the nuclear family, alternative communities, homoeroticism–is, I would argue, kept in check by the film’s policing of traditional gender roles.

and

The utopian nature of the collective is emphasized by the subplot about heterosexual romance between two squirrels. The female squirrel, a hot femme fatale, repeatedly uses her sexual wiles to part the male squirrel from his nut (pun intended, I’m sure). After battling it out in SM foreplay for most of the movie, the squirrels briefly succumb to sexual bliss before descending into domestic hell.

It’s a good read, with some links that I’ll probably highlight individually in the future.

Ice Age 3: Can a Queer Utopia be Built on Prehistoric Gender Roles?
> Catena Ex Situ

[Editor's note: This incredible, epic article has been floating around the web for about a year; it's originally from one of the memers at 4chan  (though it is suspected to have actually been written by either Francis Bacon, Mary Anne Evans, or George Eliot). Recently over at deviantART, an individual known only as BellicoseBreakfast took it upon itself to edit and proof the article for improved readability and coherence, and post it on the deviantART forum. For this, we are most grateful. Rather than merely link to a forum, diaphanous and mercurial as feline affection, we have taken the liberty of reposting it below in its lengthy entirety, with a merciful page break.]

Have you ever noticed that the pacing, tone and story development of Pokemon changes after Ash is hit by lightning in the early episodes, how Ash and his world were relatively normal until after the incident?

I have a theory.

The accident with the bike put Ash into a coma. Days later he was found and was hurried to the hospital and treated with heavy medications, which is why Team Rocket became less menacing. The medication took effect and stabilized his coma dreams so that instead of being terrifying, they became idyllic, allowing him to live out his Pokemon master fantasies.

After the beginning episodes, the series is the result of Ash’s subconscious mind fulfilling his desires, as well as attempting to escape reality. Should Ash realize he’s in a coma, he would wake up, but suffer brain damage, so he must take down all of his mental barriers one by one until he can come to grips with who he is and escape his coma (since his mind will not allow him to escape until he’s come to terms with himself).

Further evidence comes from the realization that even though his journeys take him vast distances, he never travels on a bike due to having developed a phobia.

The coma and fantasy explains why he doesn’t change much physically. It also explains the worldwide socialism, as he thought up a safe system of government that would run smoothly and keep the world going, allowing his adventures to work like they do. It also explains how a child can go off on his own into a world full of dangerous and untamed animals, and why town has the same police officer and every Pokemon centre has the exact same nurse. Joy and Jenny he knew from his hometown, and they act as a safety net or anchor, allowing him to feel safe no matter where he goes. Joy and Jenny represent stability. The professors represent Ash’s ideals, which is why Gary became a professor. The fantasy also explains why every time he enters a new region, virtually no one has heard of him, despite his conquests. How could Paul, the rival of the Sinnoh area, not know of someone who has placed in at least the top 16 of all three leagues and has destroyed the Orange League and Battle Frontier?

Moving on to the characters closer to him, Ash’s traveling partners are aspects of himself that he can enjoy, but doesn’t like to associate with himself. Brock is Ash’s repressed sexuality. Ash fell into the coma a virgin and needed an outlet for his growing sexual frustrations — since he can never experience sex, Brock must never succeed. But Brock isn’t just a projection of Ash’s sexuality, he is also a projection of Ash’s fatherly instincts. Brock leaves his siblings to journey with Ash because Ash can’t cope with having that much responsibility at his age. Brock’s stay with professor Ivy was an attempt to outright suppress his sexuality. You may notice that James got much more dialogue in this part of the series, as well as getting more touchy-feely with his Pokemon and exposing most of his backstory. Ash didn’t enjoy this much, which is why Brock comes back horrified and refuses to speak about it (Ash’s subconscious was repressing him at the time, so other than a general feeling of dread, he has no idea of what happened). Further evidence of Brock being Ash’s sexuality is that he keeps returning to the series after Ash meets a new girl aspect of himself.

Misty is the first such aspect we encounter. Because she is the first and because she is merely an aspect of Ash are explanations for why Misty plays so prominently in the show but is ultimately unattainable (because he never really knew her before the coma). Since Misty is his initial love interest — if only subconsciously — he needed her to reach a certain level of womanhood. He felt that people could only have relationships after they’ve matured. In practice, though, he finds that he can’t cope with it (lacking the real-world experience) and wants the normal pushy, arrogant Misty he knew, thus not letting her keep Togepi. We can see this arc in the constant berating of his sexuality (Brock), but her eventual mellowing until she had faded into the background. Since Ash was quite attached to her, this was traumatizing and after this experience, anyone around him “threatening” to mature quickly ends up leaving for another, more naive fill-in.

Gary Oak is what Ash wants to be. He is wish fulfillment. He succeeded, and then settled down to a normal life. Ash needs someone to succeed in his world or he won’t be able to validate it and will start questioning why he is where he is. It’s a subconscious trap to keep him from becoming too aware of his situation. His mind must have figured out that awareness of the coma would snap him out of it, but it would cause brain damage, so it took something the boy already loved and built a way out for him with it. However, Ash is too complacent to make a final stand and fight his way out of it, and so cannot escape. This is why he keeps encountering Legendary Pokemon. They’re his mind’s way of showing him he can do great things if he tries, and it’s a way to encourage him to push forwards.

Team Rocket are the qualities of himself that Ash deems “negative” but is coming to terms with. Jesse and James want to appease Giovanni, Ash’s father figure, and Jessie will trick the submissive James into doing her bidding to achieve this. Meowth especially wants to appease him because he remembers the good times with Giovanni. This places Meowth in a category known as Ash’s (corrupted) innocence. This is apparent because Meowth is able to speak. In fact, the whole reason Meowth can speak is so that Ash can eventually accept the aspects of Team Rocket as parts of himself.

Ash has issues with his father, so he put him atop the evil corporation and demonized him. There may be an actual Team Rocket (in the real world) but it’s doubtful that Ash’s father is their leader. Ash likely feels that the split between his parents was partly his fault, but also partly blames his father. The split caused his mother to move out of the city, down to Pallet Town and is one reason why Ash initially embarks upon the journey: to escape the turmoil at home. But the whole organization, including Butch and Cassidy, is symbolic of his inability to escape his father’s machinations.

James is implied homosexuality (which does not necessarily make Ash homosexual) and gullibility, and Jesse is vanity and manipulation. Since Meowth has the potential for rehabilitation, and doesn’t want to be evil, this once again fits in with the conflicting personalities and demonized-self theory. Team Rocket cross-dresses because Ash is exploring his sexuality (a different facet than what Brock represents) and this was a method that allowed his gay/vain side to experiment freely. When he found that it wasn’t something for him, his “free” side stopped playing with it.

Max came with May. He played the ego and she played the id with great aspirations in that “session”. They worked for a little while, but with Ash being a teenager, his sexuality had to come back into play. He kept reinventing himself and eventually wrote new aspects, but his mind slowly brought the old ones back as a crutch to make the transition easier.

Dawn is Ash giving himself a chance to love. Since he already established Misty as someone he’s not likely to go anywhere with, he created a new super female, one that was more like him, and less violent. You may note that while both May and Misty had no tolerance for Brock, Dawn seems to try to shrug it off.

Tracey, the Breeder, was a possible future for Ash that he discarded. This future was one that he sent off to work with the professor (Ash’s ultimate ideal of a father figure) when Tracey disrupted the dynamic Ash had with his other possibilities. With Ash’s mind fighting the coma and Ash viewing this person as a companion, Tracey was quickly replaced with a more threatening rival.

Pikachu represents Ash’s humanity, hence the episodes where they get separated and Ash wants desperately to find him, even to the point of working with the Rockets (aspects of himself he would never normally associate with) but for some reason cannot. Team Rocket want to steal Pikachu and hand him over to Giovanni. Jesse and James will always oppose Ash because Ash is terrified of the thought of his humanity lying in the hands of his father. However, this is the same reason that he will work with those aspects of himself in order to save his humanity from just becoming flat out lost. Ash couldn’t evolve Pikachu because that would mean challenging his concept of who he was, which was something he wasn’t comfortable with while still working through his original issues.

The narrator is Ash’s higher mind, recapping and explaining the progress he’s made and the tribulations he will face, allowing itself insight into how best to awaken him.

Team Rocket’s methods gradually become more and more ludicrous because Ash is only a child dreaming these things up. That is why Team Rocket’s disguises are always believed. He knows it’s them (at least on a subconscious level), but chooses to ignore it so that he can better himself. In a sense, the Ash who wants to escape is sabotaging the Ash who wants to stay lost in his mind so that there can be more conflict, and hopefully an eventual escape. The escape being a consequence of coming to terms with who he is, as, mentioned previously, Team Rocket are a method for Ash to deal with grounds he’s uncomfortable with tackling on his own.

You may recall that early in the show there were animals and references to animals. For example, the fish in the aquarium of the Cerulean city gym, or that the Pokedex lists Pikachu as “rat-like”. These animals don’t matter to Ash’s psyche so they don’t come into play much. If Ash had loved puppies, everything would be about different breeds of dogs, and a dog fighting circuit, but as the series goes on, you see fewer realistic animals and more Pokemon. This could be a sign of Ash’s mind deteriorating. As he’s in the coma, he’s losing concepts of some animals and machinery and replacing them with Pokemon. It could explain things like electric Pokemon working as power generators; these are signs that his memory of the old world is slipping more and more as time goes by. The Pokemon realm will be idealized continuously the longer he has no stimulus from the real world. Ash may or may not be mentally deteriorating, but he is becoming more accustomed to his fake world’s rules. The wild Pokemon are his rationalizations for the functioning of his created fantasy. It’s the “a wizard did it” syndrome. If he doesn’t know how it works, his mind says Pokemon.

The Pokemon in Ash’s team, however, serve the purpose of displaying his issues and aspects of himself. For example, Charmander represents his sex drive (not his sexuality, like Brock). At first it’s a cute, easy thing to control, but eventually becomes a raging inferno of disobedience since Ash has no real understanding of his sexuality and thus has no way to vent or keep it in check. Bulbasaur was his unwillingness to change, reflected in when it declines to evolve and almost decided to stay behind unless he battled it. Squirtle was his willingness to follow the lead of others, as evidenced by the gang it ran with, even though he ran the gang, they were viewed as one group, and Ash’s subconscious just gave him the strongest one. Butterfree was his crushing loneliness, which he dealt with when he released it to join a flock. His bird types are his recklessness, always willing to sacrifice something at a moment’s notice for the win. When Ash is trading Pokemon, it’s an attempt to push his own problems away on someone else; however, he realizes this and usually trades back fairly quickly.

Not only are Ash’s Pokemon a manifestation of different parts of himself, the Pokemon of other trainers are as well. Koffing and Ekans were symbolic of Team Rocket’s willingness to change, hence their evolutions. Once his mind was able to overcome that roadblock and allow them to change once, it gave him the chance to truly change.

An interesting note is that Pupitar is a rationalization: a Pokemon that a rival caught before he met him. Even Ash would become suspicious if everyone he met had no carry-over from previous places he had been to.

Other trainers are more direct forms of his issues — ones that he must either come to terms with or outright suppress. Gym Leaders are more primary aspects of his personality, with each Pokemon being stronger than the last, to display a level of skill he could be capable of if only he gave into it. In effect, he is doing battle with a part of him that he would rather not have in control. Originally, Ash had the battles, which evolved into team battles and contests. The explanation for this is that his issues became more and more complicated, and the means of dealing with them needed to become more complex. The fact that he uses issues that he has already dominated to win these are signs that he’s growing stronger.

Ash releases his Pokemon because his mind is forcing him to let go of them. The second he raises an overpowered team, a tournament comes up, and after fighting his way through it he has to go to a new land for new challenges. But with an overpowered team, there won’t be any challenges, and no way to motivate him further, so the part of Ash that wants to stay in the coma and keep journeying releases his solved issues so that he can continue and overcome the unresolved ones. This is essentially his mind forcing him to deal with his issues.

Ash’s rivals and the Elite Four are ultimately the strongest part of this cycle. Having Pokemon that are essentially godlike, they represent both what can be attained and what is unattainable. Ash’s rivals are all possible future he envisions for himself (note that they are all older than him). This originated with Oak, someone Ash knew from real life and built up into a sort of god within his mind, but Oak progressed and changed to suit Ash’s vision of himself and his ultimate desire, eventually settling down into a professor role after beating the Elite Four. With Gary Oak in retirement, his mind needed a new rival for him, thus the births of Richie (the good aspect of his rivalry) and Paul.

Paul is his mind’s last ditch efforts to snap him out of this, to force Ash to actually come to terms that this perfect world is not the best option or path to waking up. Paul is Ash’s shadow, one that wants to push on even harder and harder, and the part of him that will stop at nothing to escape this coma world.

Mewtwo is a new form of treatment, done with electric impulses and a machine to knock Ash out of it, taking down every last one of his mental guards (the original Pokemon in the movie). In Ash’s mind, Mewtwo and his clones were (in the real world) the treatment for the mental safeguards that were protecting Ash and keeping him comatose: the Pokemon of his world. The clones were counters to the issues that Ash had thought solved, and so each appeared to Ash as the exact copy of his defense. The clones didn’t play by the rules of Ash’s world, they didn’t use any special Pokemon attacks or moves — they just beat down their counterpart through brute strength. The treatment was working.

There were side effects. The electric jolts were beginning to affect Ash’s nervous system, and if the treatment continued, he would be paralyzed. His mind manifested this in the dreamworld by petrifying him. Were it not for the end of the treatment by Ash’s mother (who knew her son wouldn’t want to live in a world he couldn’t explore), Ash would have remained as stone forever. After this, Ash needed to recover from the damage caused by the electric therapy. In order to reduce the danger Ash’s consciousness felt from it, his subconscious began downplaying the effects of electricity in his world, which is why Pikachu’s electric attacks — once noted for their strength by Team Rocket — no longer have any effect on Ash, other than comic relief.

As we can see, Ash may well have been trapped forever in this world. But like every dream, like everything, there is a beginning and an end. What would happen if Ash never recovered? In his hospital room, we see Delia, obviously distraught, talking to a doctor with a grim look on his face. He’s saying that their insurance is up, and the boy has had no change in brain activity for seven years. That the shock of taking him off life support has a very small chance of awakening him.

She tearfully agrees.

Back in Ash’s world, he has finally defeated the Elite Four, and one by one, the people around him start disappearing. Eventually, everything is black. Pikachu comes dashing towards him, glowing brighter and brighter in the darkness. Eventually he reaches Ash and the two embrace one last time.

Back in the hospital room, his life signs fading, Ash mutters his final words.

I…want to be…the very…best…

He will die, never having known his dream, except as naught but a dream. When he came back to reality, he knew it all for the lie it was, knew it as his imagination. Knowing that his efforts, ambitions and friends were nothing, he will let go.

As he utters his final phrase, he barely opens his eyes and sees the silhouette of his mother, her face hidden by her hands wiping away tears. They make eye contact, and one final realization fills him before he loses all strength.

He sees that his mother was holding out hope that he’d recover all that time. He sees her and finds that her hope had been broken as she’d come to the realization that she’d outlived her only child. He dies knowing that he is loved, but that it means the one person closest and most real to him is utterly crushed.

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Contributed by Rob N., who blogs at evilbobdayjob.tripod.com.

In the eternal struggle of boys against girls, the only hope for survival of intelligent life is for girls to win.

We’re talking lasers, aliens, boogers, gobs of earwax flicked off in restaurants, dogfights in space ships, a monster designed as a weapon to destroy worlds, plus shapely dancing girls. Lilo and Stitch has all the elements to win back boys and manly men who would normally avoid everything Disney. Sure, Stitch is cute and fluffy, but he’s also equipped with fangs, claws, spines, nightvision, nicks in his ears from past battles, tongue able to reach inside his own nose. He’s bulletproof, fireproof, lifts objects 3000 times his size and survives getting run over by two trucks. He also knows alien language so vulgar, it causes a robot to puke bolts in the trial scene.

Enjoy it while it lasts, guys, because the rest of the movie is about violent men who fail and women who pick up the pieces.

Lilo and Sith

Exhibit A in the case of violent males who fail: Dr. Jumba Jookiba, greatest scientist in the universe reduced to a common criminal. He’s able to avoid imprisonment only if he helps bring his genetically engineered Doomsday device under control.

Cobra Bubbles is a former CIA agent who became a social worker because, who knows, maybe he wanted a change of pace. Come on, what kind of real man would choose to leave the CIA? He either got booted or went soft.

Captain Gantu is a towering, sharky alien who enjoys slamming his fist on things to get his point across. Good at angry gestures, but he’s a failure when it comes to transporting Stitch to his asteroid exile or capturing Stitch for more than a few minutes at the end.

Agent Pleakley the environmentalist is hardly violent enough or manly enough to deserve male status. He fails to restrain Jumba through most of the movie and fails to bring Stitch back to the Grand Councilwoman. Even dressing like a woman (camouflage to prevent humans from recognizing him as an alien) doesn’t help Pleakley succeed like one.

Stitch manages to create a little havoc, but cuts it short before destroying any large cities. His greatest success comes when he acquiesces to women and rejects his manly instincts.

In the opposite corner, representing successful females, we have the Grand Councilwoman in charge of the Galactic Federation. This alien is not in charge of a nation or a planet or a star system. She runs the entire galaxy. Hillary Rodham Clinton would toss out her Yankees caps in a heartbeat and start wearing Alpha Centauri bloodsport caps if there was any chance the Galactic Council would elect a carpetbagger like her to lead them.

Then there’s big sister Nani. In between housework and chasing Lilo and waiting tables at the luau, Nani manages to fend off an intimidating social worker with the ridiculous covername “Cobra Bubbles.” More likely he’s big, bad Marsellus Wallace straight out of Pulp Fiction, hiding from the law or from rival gangsters, biding his time in Hawaii until it’s safe to go back to Cali. Maybe it’s just the same actor doing the voice, maybe both characters just happen to be bald with a gold hoop earring in each ear. Either way, you have to give Nani credit for standing up to him, and for confronting the aliens who capture her little sister later.

Finally in the case of successful females, we have exhibit Lilo, a lonely little girl who has a hard time making friends with humans (failure), disrupts hula class (failure), argues with her sister (failure), and is able to tame Doomsday personified (success!).

Eventually the major female characters all get their way or reach favorable compromises. Coincidence? No. Women know how to behave.

Child Protective Services from Outer Space

Reviewers and shills for the movie played up the “non-traditional family” featured in Lilo and Stitch, a young woman trying to raise her sister Lilo and hold a job. We’re supposed to give props to the creators for bringing up the topic at all in a children’s movie. Unfortunately if that’s your focus, the moral of this story seems to be that a young, single woman can’t raise a child without help from powerful aliens with advanced technology, or at least one adult male surfer. One of the highest points of the movie comes when Nani’s love interest David tries to cheer them up by taking them surfing. They’re depressed because Stitch just caused a riot on the beach and Nani got turned down for every job she applied to. Yet as soon as David joins them, everyone laughs and giggles and behaves. Instant nuclear family, just add boyfriend.

Hanging over the struggling family comprised of two sisters is the threat of authorities breaking them up. Stitch’s experience is a primer to show us what could happen to Lilo. When parents raise a child carelessly, for example teaching it to destroy large cities, then authorities take away the child. The Galactic Federation acts like Galactic Child Protective Services and takes Stitch away to be exiled on an asteroid. After watching the trial and Stitch’s escape, we know what’s at stake for Lilo if authorities disapprove of her sister’s parenting skills. Lilo will be banished from her sister to live with a foster family, maybe on a deserted asteroid.

Lilo and Sartre

For a long time after the title characters are introduced, Stitch behaves like a conniving hero straight out of a screwball romantic comedy. He fakes a relationship with Lilo because she’s useful to him, a human shield to prevent Jumba from blasting him. Gradually Stitch develops genuine feelings for her. There’s no romance, but call it a screwball friendship.

A picture book triggers Stitch’s transformation from self-absorbed monster to friend. He glances at boring books on Lilo’s shelf and tosses them aside until he finds one that shocks him into reconsidering his life: The Ugly Duckling.

Stitch skips the part of the story that everybody knows and lands on a section he can relate to. On one page, the duckling wanders alone in the woods shouting, “I’m lost.” On the facing page we see the Swan family happily recovering their misdiagnosed “duckling.” Stitch identifies with the ugly duckling so strongly, he uses it as a guidebook, trying to reenact the end of the story. He takes the picture book deep into the woods on a vision quest to call his true family. Stitch speaks the magic words that worked for the ugly duckling, “I’m lost.” He waits all night for his real family to find him and make him feel wanted.

Ironically his closest original family does find him at that point, his creator Jumba, the father who was jailed for doing such a monumentally bad job of parenting. Jumba says that Stitch has no family and he’ll never feel like he belongs. He should come home quietly and let Jumba take him apart.

What do you do if your creator gives you a purpose that seems absurd? The same thing that Jean-Paul Sartre said to do if you can’t find or believe in a creator at all: you design your own purpose. Stitch has already seen glimpses of what a functioning family is like. He had to endure a whole montage of Lilo squirting water at him as if he was a bad dog, trying to teach him how to behave, sharing snocones, surfing, hanging out at the luau where Nani works. Belonging to a family makes more sense to Stitch at this point than destroying cities or allowing himself to be snuffed out as punishment for the sins of his creator.

Stitch rejects Jumba’s violent way of life. A failure as a manly Doomsday machine, Stitch starts to succeed when his goals turn girly, focusing on family.

Lilo Versus Stitch

If they’ve been raised traditionally, boys manufacture chaos and girls strive for order. No one says, “Girls will be girls” to excuse them when they break rules.

Girls are badgered to specialize in relationships and family. Even the most loose-knit relationship requires some compromise now and then. Families have hierarchy and rules built into them. That’s why Lilo tries to bring order to her messy world from the first moment she comes on screen. She arrives to her hula class late and drips water on the stage, causing the other dancers to slip. By her way of thinking it was quite necessary. Lilo explains that she has to feed peanut butter sandwiches to a certain fish every few days, but all they had at home was tuna, which would be wrong to feed to a fish, so she had to take time to buy peanut butter so she could feed the fish, and that’s why she was wet and late. Why does she need to feed the fish? Because he can predict the weather.

Okay, that part doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it shows how Lilo sees patterns in everything. Even if she’s wrong about the fish’s secret knowledge, the subject of weather prediction fits with Lilo’s concern of finding order in chaos.

Lilo’s other obsession is taking pictures of people on the beach and taping their photos on the wall of her room. She keeps a snapshot of her family under her pillow and demands that her alien pet/friend Stitch must never touch it. Staring up at her wall of pictures, she says mournfully, “Everybody leaves.” Lilo takes pictures to remember everyone, because parents can die in car wrecks and tourists only stay a short time before going home. Given how much she values that photo of her parents, it might also mean that she takes pictures of strangers as a way of incorporating them into her family. They might not know it, but they will always be part of her photo family, properly organized instead of random strangers bouncing in and out of her life.

Lilo often brings up the Hawaiian word “O’hana” that her late father taught her. Instead of the simplistic translation of “family,” he explained that “O’hana means nobody gets left behind or forgotten.” By repeating and emphasizing that idea, Lilo shows Stitch there’s something better than chaos.

I’m not saying she’s using a wink and a come-hither look to keep Stitch under her thumb, but a different kind of feminine “wicked wiles” as Grumpy calls it in that other Disney movie. The battle of the sexes can also be about family and relationships in general. In the classic Greek play Lysistrata, women who are sick of war stage a protest in a government building and refuse to have sex with their husbands until they stop the war. There they go again, men creating chaos, women demanding order. It’s not just the act of sex that women control and extend to men, but their example as the embodiment of family and order. How can families stay together if their members and resources are being wasted in some distant conquest? If men care about their children or family or consistently getting booty, then they have to give up their dalliances with chaos and come to order.

Lilo has something valuable to trade with Stitch if he’s willing to give up his destructive nature. Imagine the two of them singing a playground song that you might hear on any given day between a competing boy and girl:

Stitch sings: “I can do anything you can do, better!“

Lilo: “Only if you destroy all things good in the process.”

Stitch: “Right. So?”

Lilo: “Try a bite of this O’hana. It’s a fruit that I got off the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and Love and Loss.”

Stitch: [Gobbles it up, recognizes his emptiness.] “More!”

Lilo: “The only way you can ever have it again is to leave the Garden of Manly Men. Families require order and you can’t keep them together if you run around creating chaos in every aspect of your life. You must get in touch with your inner Alan Alda, your inner Oprah, your inner girl!”

Stitch: “This?”

Lilo: “No, that’s outer! None of those dangly things that you keep poking out and then retracting. Inner!”

Lilo puts her hand on his heart, morphs into Jennifer Connelly from A Beautiful Mind and says, “I need to believe that something extraordinary is possible.”

You get the picture. Men have to sacrifice their wild nature in order to stay rooted in relationships. Women act as gatekeepers of the knowledge that families and order are good things, because men certainly wouldn’t know enough about it to learn it from each other. So Lilo offers her knowledge of O’hana and Stitch gives up intergalactic conquest so he can be part of the O’hana.

The Only Hope

Boys are violent. Men are violent. Hulk smash. If their skills at destroying things and places and people become better and better, then the ultimate success is to destroy everything — the world, the universe, themselves. Who wants that kind of success? Succeeding as a man in the terms we’ve been given means failing to survive.

Women succeed throughout the movie because they are traditionally stuck with the job of raising families. They come to understand order and embody order. They can help men succeed by helping them move away from chaos, move away from wild masculinity, move toward family and order.

Notice that Stitch was not captured by the Galactic Federation forces in the end. He escaped from them repeatedly and finally gave himself up because it seemed best for the people he cared about. Their violent defensive tactics could not have stopped him from destroying the universe. Only Lilo’s efforts at changing his mind and changing his identity saved the universe.

You can tell that identity is important to Stitch and the others because in the final confrontation between all the aliens and humans, the Grand Councilwoman calls our little blue hero by the original name that Jumba gave him, “Experiment 6-2-6.” He interrupts the argument to correct her: “My name Stitch.” The name that Lilo gave him. Hoping for some redeeming quality in the monster so she won’t have to banish him, the Grand Councilwoman asks with feeling, “Who are you?”

Stitch’s reply almost sounds like he’s ignoring her. “This is my family,” he says. “I found it all on my own. It’s little and broken, but still good.”

Yeah, get a tissue. Finished? He might as well have said, “My family is my identity.” The other junk about his family is a projection of how he feels about himself: “I found myself all on my own. I’m little and broken, but still good.”

• Here’s a theory you might have missed behind “Casper the Friendly Ghost”.  It goes that Casper is symbolism of homosexuality and the struggle for gays in society.  Casper is a boy ghost or male who constantly seeks the company of other boys or other males.  The boys seem to think Casper is a nice fellow and find nothing wrong with his company. After a short while of cute playing, the friendship is ruined when grown ups, who represent the more “traditional” views of society, intervene. More than frowning on such relationships, they fear it terribly and steal the innocent boy and run away from poor Casper, who is left to seek out the next relationship.
  -Contributed by Dave R.
• In Tex Avery’s “King Size Canary,” a cat and canary compete by “growing” larger with the use a vitamin serum; the bigger one has the edge on the other.  It goes back and forth with no resolution other than running out of serum as they stand on a basketball sized earth.  This is all a metaphor for the US vs. USSR nuclear arms race!
  -Contributed by Dave R.
• There has been a great deal of speculation regarding the fact that Smurfette is the only female Smurf in the entire village. People automatically assume that Smurfette is responsible for the propagation of the entire Smurf population. This is an erroneous assumption, because this theory postulates that Smurfs reproduce sexually. I offer forth the idea that Smurfs reproduce asexually, much like amoebas. I believe that when a Smurf takes off his little white hat, the hat grows a new Smurf, and the old Smurf grows a new hat. In the case of Smurfette, well, there is at least one obviously homosexual Smurf in the village (that being Vanity), so why not two? I submit the idea that Smurfette is simply a cross-dressing male Smurf, and there are no real females in the village. No real female acts that over-the-top feminine. I have converted many unbelievers to this theory, based on the simple logic that it puts forth.
  -Contributed by Natalie.
• For me, the show that brought the whole anthropomorphic vs. realistic animals debate home for me was none other than The Get Along Gang. It struck me as weird to begin with; you stick a moose on his hind legs and he looses something fundamental about being a moose. And Montgomery has antlers, which brings up the issue of whether they could be considered a weapon in his society. But the episode that sealed it was the one in which the Gang ends up in a snowy town where they must search for an escaped elephant. A non-anthropomorphic elephant. From the zoo! I always thought that if you’re going to create a world of humanoid animals, you might as well go all out and populate your zoo with humans.
  -Contributed by Farnie6.

Contributed by Tracy D.

I’m agreeing with the general flow of the conversation about Bugs and his penchant for frilly little things from Victoria’s Secret. But I think a lot of posters try to equate him to modern standards of sexuality. Remember, Bugs was one of the biggest box-office draws of the late 30′s, 40′s, & 50′s who was grounded in the great vaudevillian tradition. An obviously male star donning female garb and then confounding the boobs and society was a guaranteed laugh-getter. Bugs’ genius (and star vanity) is that he must take on the  complete persona of what ever he’s trying to be. (the first Method actor?) So, he can’t just slap on a skirt to distract Elmer for a second or two, he’s gotta be Carmen Miranda with a bowl of fruit on his head, or one of the Andrews sisters, or Brynhildr of the flowing braids. I think his closest contemporary was the actor Danny Kaye (who also spawned many rumours about his sexuality). To both of them there is a bit of New-Yorker-sons-of-immigrants brassiness combined with a whole-hearted willingness to take a character to its most absurd extreme.

Contributed by “Szann”

It disturbed me as a child to witness Bugs Bunny’s preference for women’s underwear. When I bring this up in my classroom students are often oblivious to the fact that though they’ve been watching Bugs forever they never realized he was a cross dresser with a particular fancy for lipstick and lacy women’s underthings.

Contributed by Sean C.

Your take on Bugs’ cross dressing was very negative. Bugs didn’t like to cross dress. He did it because it was life or death. Think about it: he was usually being chased by that redneck Elmer Fudd. I mean, Elmer Fudd: typical redneck, stupid, uneducated (the speech impediment says it all), brought up in the back woods tradition of superiority through the killing of poor defenseless woodland creatures, and because bugs dressed up in womens clothing it threw that dumb redneck off. I mean, put yourself in Bugs’ shoes, he is being chased through the woods by this lunatic shooting at him, his adrenaline is pumping and he has to think on his feet. Bugs quickly throws on women’s clothing and stupid Elmer is thrown off guard. Bugs was a genius and was secure in his sexuality. As for Bugs kissing that just keeps those homophobes away. It bought him time. But after he kissed those guys, Sam, Fudd, and the rest, they never stopped chasing him indicating that they are gay bashers. If a male rabbit kissed me I would definitely leave him be and go kill Foghorn Leghorn, who is the epitome of redneck white trash. Slack-jawed down south accent, never mind the redneck calling everyone “boy,” picking on the dog cause he was half black and white, picking on Henry Hawke because he was brown, always picking on Eggbert the nerd kid because he believed in science and was not a Southern Baptist. Foghorn hated Eggbert because he was different.

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