Ho Yay / One Stormy Night

• Wow. To clarify: the movie is about a very close relationship between a wolf and a goat. It has such a gigantic gay overtone to it that the constant talk about "friendship" seems really tacked on just so the adult audiences don't start fretting about things - particularly in the points where the two scream for each other at times of danger/uncertainty or when the wolf has a mental breakdown over having been born as a wolf instead of a goat. Both of them are more than willing to risk their lives and abandon their old lives and all their friends and family to stay solely with each other, and while this is somewhat understandable for Gabu to do, Mei has no such excuse. Mei completely loses the will to live once he gets separated from Gabu and nearly dies because of it. Views are divided about whether or not it was intended as a subtextual Queer Romance, but this divide is almost entirely along the lines of people who saw the movie first vs. people who had been reading the children's books for years before. The books since 1994 had (without comment) been intentionally keeping Mei's gender ambiguous, and most readers quietly assumed that Mei was female, and that Mei and Gabu were a heterosexual romance. The film completely erased this ambiguity, and not only was Mei revealed as unmistakably male, but the creator revealed that he'd always originally envisioned Mei as male — his gender just wasn't all that critical to the story either way. As a result, most fans are entirely comfortable with Mei and Gabu in a Queer Romance, with most of the opposition to this notion coming from more recent viewers of the film who might find it less appropriate to accept a Queer Romance since they hadn't already long since because fans of their epic love.
• The scene where Gabu drools over Mei's butt is ostensibly a carnivore wanting to eat his prey but comes off as very homoerotic instead. This effect transmutes the carnivorous imagery and hunger themes in the rest of the film into symbols of sexual tension and perhaps lust. This has unfortunate implications for the Recycled: The Series when Gabu is tormented by the temptation of being surrounded by 3 flocks of kids. It doesn't help that earlier a conversation some older does have about wolves brings the notion of hunger connotating sexual attraction into the show's diegesis.