Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Downfall of American Cartoons...!

Cartoons nowadays are regarded as child's play it is a whole media specifically centered around the exploit of kids! Sure I could accept that if only it had a wholehearted true alternative towards adult cartoons. Now don't get mixed up now by adult cartoons, I don't mean some kind of kinky alternative. Firstly there are some adult cartoons out there like Futurama, Simpsons and Family Guy. The problem with those, good on their own value, they don't stand in the plethora of kids cartoons that fly in the media of today. One of the negative things that happened to cartoons is Walt Disney. Sure he did amazing things for the cartoon era with his art style and drive but still he ruined it's reputation and place an ugly stereotype of cartoons are childish.

First I have to start with a little history. Cartoons at first were specifically designed to a much wider audience I could even go say it was only aimed for adults. Most of its first exposure was set into movies, not into full movies but in trailers! Not the same trailers that we know now that show the upcoming movies, back then when the theater was relatively new, trailers played a more important part into the movie experience. See back then the word trailer meant what in meant in the sense that it trailed after the movie hence the word trail-er(get it?). Compared to now that are in front of the movie forcing you to watch it. Trailers were often animated shorts of 7-15 minutes. The most probable factor of the fall of cartoons is, with the rise of the television they stopped making trailers and left the cartoons in the dust and all the misconceptions started shortly after that.

Walt Disney now built and empire out of childish cartoons in consequences added further to the misconception of the toons. It was really a way of censoring and "protecting" the children from corruption. You might be hesitant to believe the moronic transformation of cartoons but just take a look at Japanese animation (anime) they didn't transform their animation to a childish perspective mainly because they didn't have Walt Disney to corrupt them(Tho, Astro Boy is heavily taken from the Disney art style). Even more proof everything that passes trough american cartoonist are horribly censored like the removal of all semi foul language and any blood. (See 4kids's One Piece or Dragonball(Z))

With the huge success of Walt Disney, everyone wanted in the cashcow that was exploiting children through animation. Which place the cartoon rep even lower. I would like cartoons get back to at least the Tex Avery era, I really do feel like we could appreciate the cleverness of the scenarios of that era and not the more moronic censored cartoons we have today. We can have a genuine and interesting story and scenario without dumming it down for kids, at least I would think/hope so. Maybe I'm just dreaming of something better or always looking for something a genuine and clever like Red Hot Riding Hood, which I think is Tex's best animation and my personal favorite of all time. It doesn't have any gratuitous adult material and puts even a hard statement from the start, that is "we're tired of this! It's already been done before!"

Taken from that statement, I do still look into the new cartoons from something worthy like its a personal quest or something. A perfect example of that is Total Drama Island , a cartoon of a reality tv show, see they take something so abused in the media but add an original twist to it, like Tex Avery back then. Other finds are are the shorts of Doodlez, reminiscing of Duck Amuck (where Daffy argues and has clever situation with the artist in real time). The show is simple the kid (Dood) is often put in scenarios by choice of the artist, clever and funny. Here's one of the shorts, simply look into related videos if you want more.

Here's hoping for a cartoon revolt. No! A cartoon revolution! (Hehe I just had to plug that somewhere, sometime)

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