Getting animated

If only the animation world could be purged of all subversive elements. John Patterson identifies the targets for a cartoon witch-hunt

Pity the poor penguins. It wasn't even a year ago that the American religious right, along with their shouty, Tourette-ish brethren at Fox News, decided that the species, then starring in the documentary March Of The Penguins, constituted a standing rebuke to we decadent humans. There they were, poignantly trundling their eggs through ice-blizzard and frigid whiteout, past sundry predators great and small, in the teeth of comically high odds against the eggs ever hatching. Yet, declaimed the righties, the parent penguins' devotion to one another and their determination to hatch that egg, come what may, were the embodiment of Republican family values.

But now the penguins can't get a fair shake from the same crowd. This Friday's animated feature Happy Feet, with its cast of Emperor penguins, features a shrinking icecap and depleted fish stocks, and has therefore been assailed as an animated version of An Inconvenient Truth, poisoning the nation's kids with "a political agenda". The tumult of outrage and uproar on the subject proves mainly that it's been a very slow news week indeed.

The right has invited ridicule in this sphere before. The Rev Jerry Falwell once got his cassock in a cluster about Tinky Winky on the Teletubbies being a tad light in the loafers. The Traditional Values Coalition warned that Shrek 2 was somehow "promoting cross-dressing and transgenderism." And Christian conservative Dr James Dobson, who has a direct line to the President, smeared SpongeBob Squarepants as a nellie for holding hands with his best friend Patrick and watching his favourite TV show "The Adventures Of Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy."

Given that said TV show does, on consideration, sound a wee bit gay, I urge the good pastors of the nativist, snake-handling right to widen their area of examination, amp up the bigotry and get after some of the real deviants who've long dominated the animated universe.

First up: Bugs Bunny, a flagrant naturist, except when he cross-dresses in order to flummox Elmer Fudd (whose querulous voice sounds pretty flaming to the gaydar-deficient righties). And Porky Pig? Have he and his trousers ever been seen in the same room together, Mr Dobson? Better shape up, Porky, people will talk. Foghorn Leghorn - obviously, he's all about the cock. Betty Boop used to lose her frock in the mildest of breezes, that Jezebel. And Mickey Mouse's dog was gay for sure. No, wait, that was Plato, not Pluto.

The toon-pogrom thus complete (with steroid-abuser Popeye also interned), the right can relax in their ideal, freshly-purged cartoon realm, which now only features the Red State/redneck-loving Cars (animated Nascar racing being only marginally less tedious than the real thing) and the Leni Riefenstahl excesses of The Lion King. Next project: evil homosexual live-action movies. Laurel and Hardy - didn't they sleep in the same bed? Stone them! Burn them! Build a bridge out of them!