My friend Gloria and I were chatting late last night about The Incredibles and how she saw Edna Mode as a "flamboyantly gay man." It became a long discussion about the idea of gender in animation and how there is a disjunct between image and voice in a character, and how it is easily exploited because of style and exaggeration in the medium of animation that is not so effective in live-action film or theatre.
An excerpt from a posting in her LJ:
Edna the "character" is a female, based on the famous Hollywood costume designer (and a favorite of Hitchcock's) named Edith Head.
Edna the "voice" is male, done by Brad Bird himself (the director of The Incredibles) after auditioning several actresses and not finding any satisfactory voices to caricature Edith's outlandish personality.
FYI, Brad Bird is not gay. ;)
That being said, gender crossovers are nothing new for animation. Mel Blanc often voiced female characters in the Looney Tunes, and one could almost count on Bugs Bunny or Elmer Fudd to crossdress every other cartoon or so. Ranma switches between male and female with a splash of water. Nancy Cartwright is the voice of Bart Simpson, Christine Cavanaugh was the voice of Chucky on the Rugrats.
The stylization and exaggeration of cartooning and animation give rise to the suspension of disbelief, thereby making it easy to mix genders and even species. This is because visual cues are more powerful than audible cues; a drawing of a woman is more convincing of the gender than the voice behind it. And because animation has no basis in reality, it is more effective than, say, a theatre production where people wear masks.
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