Ursula is pretty easy to understand, because that’s so 1:1 with Divine and there are direct confirmations.
With Scar one of the supervising animators, Andreas Deja, is openly gay (now, not at the time because it was the 90s) and has spoken about adding campiness and other gay influence to his work.
With other examples it’s a bit more difficult, because to understand it you need to understand how the Hays Code affected the portrayal of queer people on screen. The short version is that queer people weren’t allowed to be overtly portrayed at all, so any characters with queer coded behavior (by 30s to 60s standards) wound up as villains. As this becomes more entrenched in media, these mannerisms became shorthand for villain, so by the time the 90s rolls around the people referencing these tropes might not be familiar with their origin.
For the long version, see the documentary The Celluloid Closet.
https://time.com/6282514/little-mermaid-ursula-drag-queen-divine/
Ursula is pretty easy to understand, because that’s so 1:1 with Divine and there are direct confirmations.
With Scar one of the supervising animators, Andreas Deja, is openly gay (now, not at the time because it was the 90s) and has spoken about adding campiness and other gay influence to his work.
With other examples it’s a bit more difficult, because to understand it you need to understand how the Hays Code affected the portrayal of queer people on screen. The short version is that queer people weren’t allowed to be overtly portrayed at all, so any characters with queer coded behavior (by 30s to 60s standards) wound up as villains. As this becomes more entrenched in media, these mannerisms became shorthand for villain, so by the time the 90s rolls around the people referencing these tropes might not be familiar with their origin.
For the long version, see the documentary The Celluloid Closet.
Thank you!