As a popular cinematic form, animation has been produced, circulated, and consumed globally for over a century. Animation similarly has a long history of depicting queer representation. While initial analyses of animated queer representation focus on Bugs Bunny’s drag performances (Abel 1995; Griffin 2017[1994]; Sandler 1998; Savoy 1995), some of the earliest animated films ever made—Humorous Phases of Funny Faces (James Stuart Blackton, 1906, USA) and Fantasmagorie (Émile Cohl, 1908, France)—depict queerness, wherein animation aesthetics of instant transformation subvert norms of sexual difference or erase them altogether. Indeed, queerness is implicitly inherent in animation’s form due to its constant fluidity (Cooley et al., 2020). Concurrently, animation is often the most policed within current media industries in terms of queer representation because it is assumed to be solely for children (Mittell 2003). Two 2025 Pixar animation studio productions, for example, recently had queer themes removed (Gajewski 2025). Despite its history of censorship, animation continues to be a vital site for queer representation, with recent animated series such as Steven Universe (Rebecca Sugar, 2013-2019) and She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (ND Stevenson, 2018-2020) attracting critical and awards acclaim for their queer representation. Not only do these animated media contribute to expanding queer representation in the media industries, but their approaches to animation aesthetics also demonstrate how the form of animation itself produces queerness. 

My contention here is that animation’s unique techniques, forms, and practices enable innovative forms of queer expression. These animated forms often disrupt hegemonic approaches to representation in media industries today by producing queer representation that eschews these hegemonic approaches and illustrating their representational limitations. Moreover, animation offers a crucial redress to ongoing issues surrounding representation by offering expansive forms of queer and trans representation that short circuit static, schematic approaches to evaluating representation.

As a case study, we can turn to one of animation history’s most popular characters: SpongeBob SquarePants. SpongeBob’s queerness is both obvious and secret, on the one hand attracting conservative backlash condemning the character as part of the “gay agenda” (BBC News 2005), on the other mysteriously evading informatic capture via a recent database cataloguing queer animated characters in children’s television (White et al 2021). How does such a character, whose queerness is obvious enough for corporations to capitalize on it for pride merch (Meikle 2021), remain excluded from such a wide-ranging database, one that spans from the obvious (Steven Universe) to the obtuse (The Boss Baby television spinoff)? The answer is that said database approaches representation through dominant discourses in both media industries and academia (Martin Jr. 2020), discourses that determine representation through narrative confirmation in the form of narrative elements such as plot, dialogue, and characterization, or authorial confirmation via interviews. SpongeBob’s queerness is not located in the spoken, however, but in the embodied. His queerness is rendered visible primarily through his moving animated body rather than narrative tropes. His body in the SpongeBob SquarePants(Stephen Hillenberg, 1999—present) opening animated sequence, for example, reconfigures and expands to nearly take up the entire frame, demonstrates a propensity for fluidity and movement, qualities inherent to queerness itself (Cooley 2020; Cooley et al. 2020; Jenkins 2023; Ristola 2020). SpongeBob’s embodied queerness, and public inability to capture this, demonstrate the limitations and oversights to constraining queer expression to narrative elements or paratextual determination, ignoring animation’s expressive capacities for queerness.

To further explore the queer expressive capacities of animation, for the next two weeks, In Media Res is hosting “Queer Animation: Past and Present,” a two-week blog post series examining a range of animation to sample the diverse possibilities to queer animation. Our attention to animated media, broadly conceived, is motivated in part to intervene in its neglect within the academy. Animation has long been left out of debates around screen representation; moreover, animation itself has historically been fundamentally underexamined (Buchan 2013; Frank 2019, 1; Furniss 2007, 3-4; Ristola 2017), with “one of the great scandals of film theory” being “the marginalization of animation” (Gunning 2007, 38). This omission is all the more glaring given many scholars theorize animation as the meta-category encompassing all moving image practices, including cinema (Cholodenko 1991, 2014; Gunning 2013; Manovich 2001; Warren-Crow 2014). Moreover, this insight is foundational to analyses of cinema’s unique formal capability to evoke trans knowledge and experience (Steinbock 2019). Animation’s rich theoretical terrain makes the understudied object of animation vital interventions to theories and practices of representation, particularly queer representation.

Across the next two weeks, scholars trace queer expression in animation across histories, techniques, and geographies. We begin with Ester Bley’s historical account surveying animation from the 1920s-30s to examine some of the earliest accounts of queer animated representation. We then turn to Ferdinando Cocco’s analysis of the oeuvre of British animator Barry JC Purves, tracing his explicit commitment to the interrogation of queer desire across his film and television work. Next, Sofía Poggi examines the short Argentinian animated short Luz Diabla (Boffo, Canda, and Plaza, 2025), unpacking how the short situates its queer character within both the horror genre and the culture and history of Argentinian landscape. Finally, Grace Han rounds out the week examining the paradoxical nature of queer (in)visibility in Korean web animation.

Next week continues our exploration of queer animated Asia, starting with Caitlin Casiello’s analysis of Promare (Imaishi Hiroyuki, 2019), tracing how the anime film’s queer reading and reception is shaped by its transnational localization and circulation. Next, Mihaela Mihailova continues the analysis of anime, examining the queer, gender-nonconforming character Tsubaki-chan in the shōnen television series Wind Breaker (CloverWorks, 2024—present). We then transition from anime to video games with Evelyn Ramiel’s analysis of the trans animation aesthetics and game design of NiGHTS Into Dreams (Sonic Team, 1996). Finally, T. R. Merchant-Knudsen rounds out the series analyzing queer phenomenology in the video game Unpacking (Witchbeam, 2021), illustrating a form of queer animation sans embodiment.

These blog posts are not exhaustive of queer animation, but rather serve as a starting point, demonstrating the range of queer animation past in present. With a diversity of media forms, key auteurs, geographic contexts, and more, this blog post series gestures to the emerging, exuberant field of queer animation studies.  

References

Abel, Sam. 1995. “The Rabbit in Drag: Camp and Gender Construction in the American Animated Cartoon.” Journal of Popular Culture(Bowling Green, Ohio, United States) 29 (3): 183–202.

BBC News. 2005. US Right Attacks SpongeBob Video. January 20. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4190699.stm.

Blackton, James Stuart, dir. 1906. Humorous Phases of Funny Faces. Vitagraph Company of America.

Buchan, Suzanne. 2013. “Introduction: Pervasive Animation.” In Pervasive Animation, edited by Suzanne Buchan. Routledge.

Cholodenko, Alan. 1991. “Introduction.” In The Illusion of Life: Essays on Animation, edited by Alan Cholodenko. Sydney: Power Publications. http://archive.org/details/illusionoflifees0000unse.

Cholodenko, Alan. 2014. “‘First Principles’ of Animation.” In Animating Film Theory, edited by Karen Redrobe. Duke University Press. https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/9781478091950-008/html.

Cohl, Émile, dir. 1908. Fantasmagorie. Société des Etablissements L. Gaumont. 

Cooley, Kevin. 2020. “Drawing Queerness Forward: Fusion, Futurity, and Steven Universe.” In Representation in Steven Universe, edited by Leah Richards and John Ziegler. Palgrave. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31881-9_3.

Cooley, Kevin, Edmond “Edo” Ernest Dit Alban, and Jacqueline Ristola. 2020. “Queer Animation, The Motion of Illusion: A Primer for the Study of Queer Animated Images.” Synoptique: An Online Journal of Film and Moving Image Studies 9 (1): 1–7. https://doi.org/10.17613/fhyj-k739. 

Frank, Hannah. 2019. Frame by Frame: A Materialist Aesthetics of Animated Cartoons. University of California Press. 

Furniss, Maureen. 2007. Art in Motion: Animation Aesthetics. Revised ed. J. Libbey Publ.

Gajewski, Ryan. 2025. “Inside ‘Elio’s’ ‘Catastrophic’ Path: America Ferrera’s Exit, Director Change and Erasure of Queer Themes.” The Hollywood Reporter, June 30. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/elio-pixar-america-ferrera-director-queer-2-1236301860/.

Griffin, Sean. 2017[1994]. “Pronoun Trouble: The ‘Queerness’ of Animation.” In Spectatorship: Shifting Theories of Gender, Sexuality, and Media. University of Texas Press. https://doi.org/10.7560/313497-013. 

Gunning, Tom. 2013. “The Transforming Image: The Roots of Animation in Metamorphosis and Motion.” In Pervasive Animation, edited by Suzanne Buchan. Routledge.

Gunning, Tom. 2007. “Moving Away from the Index: Cinema and the Impression of Reality.” Differences 18 (1): 29–52.https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-2006-022. 

Hillenburg, Stephen, dir. [series creator]. 1999-present. SpongeBob SquarePants. Nickelodeon. 

Jenkins, Abigail. 2023. “‘Unsticking’ Kid Cosmic: Lifting the Burden of Gendered Certainty in Children’s TV.” Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture 8 (3): 281–95. https://doi.org/10.1386/qsmpc_00106_1.

Manovich, Lev. 2001. The Language of New Media. MIT Press. 

Martin Jr., Alfred L. 2020. “For Scholars … When Studying the Queer of Color Image Alone Isn’t Enough.” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 17 (1): 69–74. https://doi.org/10.1080/14791420.2020.1723797. 

 

Meikle, Kyle. 2021. “The Nature of SpongeBob’s Gayness.” Fantasy/Animation, February 26. https://www.fantasy-animation.org/current-posts/the-nature-of-spongebobs-gayness.

Mittell, Jason. 2003. “The Great Saturday Morning Exile: Scheduling Cartoons on Television’s Periphery in the 1960s.” In Prime Time Animation: Television Animation and American Culture, edited by Carol A. Stabile and Mark Harrison. Routledge.

Ristola, Jacqueline. 2017. “Realist Film Theory and Flowers of Evil: Exploring the Philosophical Possibilities of Rotoscoped Animation.” Animation Studies 12 (December). https://doi.org/10.17613/M6VV9X.

Ristola, Jacqueline. 2020. “Globalizing Fandoms: Envisioning Queer Futures from Kunihiko Ikuhara to Rebecca Sugar.” In Representation in Steven Universe, edited by Leah Richards and John Ziegler. Palgrave. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31881-9_5.

Sandler, Kevin S. 1998. “Gendered Evasion: Bugs Bunny in Drag.” In Reading the Rabbit: Explorations in Warner Bros. Animation, edited by Kevin S. Sandler. Rutgers University Press.

Savoy, Eric. 1995. “The Signifying Rabbit.” Narrative 3 (2): 188–209.

Steinbock, Eliza. 2019. Shimmering Images: Trans Cinema, Embodiment, and the Aesthetics of Change. Duke University Press.

Stevenson, ND, dir. [showrunner]. 2018-2020. She-Ra and the Princesses of Power. Netflix.

Sugar, Rebecca, dir. [showrunner]. 2013-2019. Steven Universe. Cartoon Network. 

Warren-Crow, Heather. 2014. Girlhood and the Plastic Image. Interfaces, Studies in Visual Culture. Dartmouth College Press.

White, Abbey, Kalai Chik, Joi-Marie McKenzie, et al. 2021. “259 LGBTQ Characters in Cartoons That Bust the Myth That Kids Can’t Handle Inclusion.” BUSINESS INSIDER, June 10. https://www.insider.com/lgbtq-cartoon-characters-kids-database-2021-06.