Queer-coded Villains in Animation & Its Legacy in SPG

A video essay about the queer coding in the 90s animation Super Powerpuff Girl

This project is inspired by two film & media classes I took in college - “Queer/Camp Television” and “Animation”.

The animation class I took in my junior year offered me an immense exposure to both the history and the genre of animation. Later, the Queer/Camp Television class taught me how to analyze the latent queer/camp coding that embeds the mainstream American television series.

As I gradually watched and read more about the queer related resource, I began to realized that a lot of animations that I watched previously also embody a strong sense of campiness and queerness. Thus, I decide to explore and discuss the queer aesthetic with respect to one of my frequently watched children animation – The Powerpuff Girl (1998).

Growing up watching the television series, “him”, the major villains in the series, had always been the nightmare that really sticks to my mind. With flamboyant lipsticks, pointed eyelashes, campy high-heels, and most important red pompom skirt, “Him” stands out from the other characters in the show. As child watching the series, I would just thought “Him” as awkwardly weird but would never categories him as queer (I may not know about the notion of queerness at that small of age).

This project gave me an opportunities to explore the duality of Him’s characters, and at the same time reflect on the systematic bias in which villains are often coded as queer, gay in major studio productions.

In this 11-min video essay, I first shed light on the general background of camp/queer animation, illustrating the backlashes and pullbacks against queer characters’s appearance on screen.

Then I focused on the television series The Powerpuff Girl specifically, using two episodes, “Octil Evil” and “Bubble Vicious” to illustrate “Him”, the badass villain’s fusion of muscularity and femininity and the queerness he exudes throughout the series.

Finally, I expanded the topic further, investigating the history that lead to the legitimation of queer-coded villains, where I explained the social implication behind the villains as social outcast.