This is another one I had to spend some time finding sources for, since I really only had a central concept that I kept reworking in my head. Thanks to a few perfect coincidences, though, I think this came together just the way I wanted it to in the end. Behold track 7 of Mouth Silence, titled Sexual Lion King.
This video has some very minor cartoon animal death at the beginning.
Artist Statement:
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SpoilerAnyway, we all know the Heterosexual Cartoon Animal Couple. They're everywhere. They're unavoidable. That's how animals work in real life, right...? Well, if you're here, you probably know that's not right. Gender and sexuality are not static, nor are they binaries, no matter what species you are. Cartoons are a way to explore that, and cartoon animals are even more abstractified. The obligatory heterosexual cartoon animal couple has always both grated on me and captivated me. They put on such a performance of their own genders, their own roles. The designated female animals sporting exaggerated decorations and eyelashes are their own sort of drag to me. And as a lesbian with a weird relationship to gender, I understood these cartoon animals as something more than a man and a woman doing what men and women are expected to do. That's right, folks. I'm saying Lady and the Tramp, Spirit and Rain, Stitch and Angel, Donkey and Dragon, they're all lesbians to me. That's my truth and I'm living it.
Then there's the more obvious non-straight clips. There's the legendary Arthur wedding between Mr. Ratburn and his husband, of course, and Pinky and the Brain are one of those classic "ambiguously gay duos" of cartoon animals, but I also included Snagglepuss, a character who isn't necessarily stated to be gay, but certainly was a role model for plenty of people who saw themselves in him. The clip I found of him slicing up a sausage isn't exactly...subtle...the way I used it, but I thought it was too funny to leave out, especially amongst all the clips of cartoon animals in drag (which I owe tremendous thanks to a single YouTube account for compiling). There's also the clearly-intended-to-be-gay-for-jokes characters from Ice Age, who I placed alongside the clearly-intended-to-be-NOT-gay-for-jokes main characters from Ice age. I could go on about the bizarre heterosexuality of the Ice Age franchise, but this is already my longest artist statement yet, so I'll save it.
I initially planned on having more video footage of real life gay animals, but I wanted this video to focus more on romance than just humpin', so I ended up narrowing it down to two examples I felt exemplified what I was going for the best: a lioness that spontaneously developed a mane and took on normally male lion behaviors, and a pair of albatrosses in a long-term same-sex relationship. There are way more examples in nature of animals not following strict binaries, but those require either more context to understand or are the aforementioned humpin'.