Contributed by Fawzi.

Did you ever notice that patterns emerge in the fur colors of major protagonist characters of the domestic feline species portrayed in popular, secular, post modern children’s media? Female feline protagonist tend to have white fur, a reoccurring characteristic for the heroines in a significant number of films involving cats, examples include female characters from The Aristocats, Cats Don’t Dance, The Rescuers (she’s a mouse, but the concept still stands). On the other hand, the male feline protagonists have orange fur, examples include male characters from Garfield, Heathcliff, The Aristocats, An American Tail, Cats Don’t Dance, etc. Furthermore, leading males that have dark or cold colors as oppose to the traditional orange fur are sadistically tormented on a regular basis as in the case of the black furred Sylvester (he speaks with a lisp, indicating homosexuality, further “justifying” violence and bodily harm on him) or the blue furred Tom.

The question is: why? As in the case of females the trend of white fur can be explained in terms of color symbolism. White represents purity and virginity, which in itself raises questions as to why would somebody care if the leading female cat is a virgin? A healthy human mind shouldn’t be concerned with the sexual characteristics of an animal. This can be linked to the themes of zoophilia that are apparent in children’s media. The orange color typical in heroic male domestic feline characters has significance, personally I don’t know what it is, (I can’t provide anything more than weak allusions to the Orange Party of the 19th century, which may have something to do with the early American working class on which the nation was built.)

An anomaly in the white female trend would have to be Garfield’s Arlene, she’s pink(which again could be explained in terms of identifying gender with color) the obvious implication of her not having white fur: she’s not a virgin.

Other implications of the white furred female felines in The Aristrocats, the leading female has white fur, indicating virginity, yet she has children with her, what is she? She’s a Virgin Mother! She’s being escorted to some safe paradise by a humble (orange) male, fleeing from an oppressive empire, the references to Roman society (aristocrats, hence the title.) Three children can represent almost anything, the number three is of significance to Christianity: the Trinity, the three Mages, the three Archangels, etc. All this has significance.

This submission is an old one, but was never added to the site.

Contributed by Miguel L.

As recently as Tarzan we see Disney’s new target of ridicule. The baboon tribe was seen instantly as vicious, heartless monsters who attack the helpless in overwhelming swarms. Strangely enough the baboons weren’t even the villains of the movie and showed a steep contrast to the anthropomorphic peace-loving gorillas (which was the founding reason for this whole movie- gotta have some animal, vegtable, or mineral that talks). One would suggest they represent the individuals who’ve left society and banded together to punish those that are civilized. In the end they help the good guys because that’s often the cause for the intellectual- to rile the ignorant masses to do their job- it sums up quite a bit of human history.

A very similar example hails from Disney’s current rival, DreamWorks. In Antz you have the terribly de-humanized termite army (fresh from battling with space marines) who are intended to draw fear and nightmares from the kids. Once again, those bugs aren’t the villains- in fact this time you have blatant political symbolism to fascism battling socialism… but only among the human-faced ants. Why place psychotic termites in the story at all? The gimmick is it’s supposed to show life through the ants POV but this isn’t some parody of sci-fi horror/action. As far as we can tell both arthropods are equals- it’s just that the ants got to look REAL good for no real reason. Unrelatively, I’ve seen plenty of nature documentaries to prove otherwise (ants only invade termite mounds to steal their very bodies for food!). It’s fair to say different species of ants have instinctively fought real battles when they crossed paths. Being the animator, would you have intentionally-humanoid ants fighting in the tradition of Braveheart …or… humanoid ants fighting H.R. Giger’s interpretation of ants? It’s sadism versus hypocrisy.

You can catch more of those cartoon demons -all brainlessly thought up and deserving of death- within the Mongols in Mulan, the entire species of housecats in An American Tail, and various predators in Land Before Time (it’s simple nature that carnivores have to have more intelligence than herbivores in order to survive- where would they come from?). The list really goes on forever. What you may not realize, is this trend of de-humanization has existed long before animated cartoons. In fact, political cartoons and caricatures were the birth of all cartoons to begin with and has been a staple for thousands of years. Any artist will draw a new character or symbol that transpires some of their own bias and ideals into it, sometimes without knowing. The result is simply to draw a certain emotional response from the audience- positive or negative (sometimes it’s done for pure initial deception). So just be armed with the plain old truth that you’re just looking at moving propaganda fed to kids all the time