Cartoons and Kids

[Shinmaru]

After reading El Generico's latest blog post, I got to thinking a bit about this.

I've been watching cartoons for most of my life. I still love quite a few of the cartoons I watched when I was younger, because a lot of them are still capable of appealing to me. To me, the best cartoons are those that can be loved by children and adults alike - stuff like Looney Tunes and The Simpsons are among the better examples of this.

I remember that when I was younger, there was this widespread belief that cartoons were only made with children in mind. As I've grown up, I've seen (and loved) tons of cartoons that appealed to both children and adults: The aforementioned Looney Tunes and The Simpsons, Batman: The Animated Series, Rocko's Modern Life, Ren and Stimpy (to an extent, I guess; you might as well add most of the great Nicktoons to this list), Futurama, Family Guy, etc. I think that just about every cartoon I watch now can successfully appeal to both a younger and 'older' audience.

But there still seems to be this silly belief that cartoons are only made for children. Why do you think this is? Do you think that this belief is still as prevalent now as it was, say, ten, fifteen, or twenty years ago?

I'm not really sure why anyone who actually [i]watches[/i] cartoons would say that many of the cartoons around today are just for kids. It's a stereotype that can be disproved fairly easily, I think. Also, for whatever reason, the label 'cartoon' has this nasty stigma attached to it that just won't seem to go away - hell, when you see the number of anime fans that literally recoil if you even [i]dare[/i] to call any anime a cartoon, then I think that it's pretty evident that the label of 'cartoon' has bad connotations. I'm still at a loss as to why, really.

[Godelsensei]

I think this mostly springs from Disney, along with the fact that people grow up having pretty much all serious media acted out by real people.
Because, when you think about it, shows like Family Guy, South Park, etc... aren't exactly what I'd call serious. They're directed at a non-child audience, but they're for humour.
So people grow up "knowing" that cartoons are light entertainment. And most kids don't give a crap as to whether what they're watching has any kind of insightful or artistic value, so it's kind of natural to follow through with that idea.
Another thing is that most kids' shows involve some kind of magic/space travel/stuff that would be pretty expensive to not have in animation. Kids just tend to like that kind of thing, after all. With cartoons, you can make anything happen without being subject to the cost of special effects, make-up, and whatnot.
Add that to kids not caring about the quality of the animation itself, and it's clearly much easier to create a cartoon show for children than to go through all that business with sets and special effects.

So, since most kids' shows are cartoons, and kids are used to this, movie/show makers just go along with what works best. (I remember, when I was little, I would automatically assume anything that wasn't a cartoon would be highly boring.) Consequentially, most cartoons you see on TV in North America are for kids.

Adults, however, can appreciate "un-fantastic" scenarios and characters, so most live-action shows are directed at adults, because kids simply don't find them interesting and it would be more expensive to make ones they would than to simply animate them.
A show like, say "Friends" (lets forget about the huge cost of celebrity actors for now) has a handful of frequently-used sets: the restaurant with those couches they always sit on, two or three apartments, that tiny length of hallway, and that's pretty much it. The show doesn't really exceed these boundaries, when it comes to sets. And if it does, it's only briefly.
So it becomes easier and more profitable to make live-action shows for adults, who will watch sit-coms, because they can follow a completely dialogue-driven story-line. Most kids would get bored, however, if there was no action in a show at all.

Imagine a live version of, say, "Kim Possible". You'd have a huge range of sets, require a ton of special effects and stunt doubles, makeup, and whatever else. That's a big investment to make in something that might flop.

So, most TV being for adults, and most of shows directed at adults being live-action, aside from a handful of comedies (which also play off the benefits of being able to represent a sci-fi as easily as a sit-com), people just get used to the idea. It becomes hard to break the stereotype, and since everybody's in TV for the money, no matter what they say (same for movies), it is far from prudent to create a cartoon series for adults that is meant to be taken seriously.

And that's pretty much my theory regarding that.


I think more people are becoming more open-minded about cartoons of late, for sure. When you think about it, it was considered remarkably low to be a voice-actor maybe thirty years ago, and now it's something that all the celebrities are doing, no matter how crappy the movie.
With the growing popularity of Japanese cartoons, people are exposed to serious plots and messages through animation. My parents have seen a reasonable portion of the anime movies I own, including both the light-hearted (Totoro) and serious (Grave of the Fireflies), and I know my mom, at least, has developed a greater appreciation of animated works.

(As a side note, Japanese live movies mostly really, really suck, so there's naturally a bigger market for animation there. I mean, hey, there's nothing worse than a low-budget sci-fi or fantasy. If you want proof, watch "Onmyoji". That thing stole two hours of my life, which I could have spent online.)


Crap, that was a long post. o_o

[Manic Webb]

I, for one, am a little tired of defending myself whenever I tell someone that I watch Cartoon Network.

They've been making cartoons that appeal to adults since they've been making cartoons. There are classic black/white Warner Bros. cartoons featuring animals getting drunk in speakeasies, Porky Pig saying "son of a b**ch," and war propaganda. I shouldn't even have to get into Time-Warner's return to cartoon shorts in the 1990s, but I will anyway.

In the 1990s, Time-Warner brought about a huge comeback for 7-minute shorts. On one front, Warner Bros was making [i]Tiny Toon Adventures, Animaniacs, Freakazoid[/i], and [i]Tom & Jerry Kids[/i]. On the other front, Hanna Barbera (now known as Cartoon Network Studios) was making [i]Two Stupid Dogs, Dexter's Laboratory[/i], and [i]What A Cartoon Show[/i]. If you look back at any of these shows, you'll see a balance of slap-stick humor for kids, and topical verbal humor for adults. I can't count how many times Buster and Babs Bunny (no relation) made fun of Tim Burton. And Freakazoid's shot at Sharon Stone's horrible acting? Even recently, Duck Dodgers made a crack about owning a pair of cheap immitation Manolo Blahniks, and mistaking dark matter (the substance found inside of an old, collapsed star) with the insides of Elizabeth Taylor.

And I'm rambling...

Cartoons are made by adults. Because of that, many writers tend to make cartoons that would not only appeal to children, but stuff they themselves would be entertained by.

Then there's the boom of cartoons targetted at adults only. Cartoon Network's Adult Swim block makes that pretty evident, as have ever cartoon ever shown on Comedy Central. Shows like [i]Family Guy[/i] and [i]Drawn Together[/i] are definitely shows that weren't made for kids. Anyone who sees them would know that.

I think the reason cartoons have become so widely associated with children's programming is because of the slump they hit a few decades ago. Throughout the 70s (and a good portion of the 60s), cartoons went downhill. Aside from Hanna Barbera, no one was animating a thing. Even Disney was in the toilet. When the 80s came about, many companies found that they could make a huge profit if they made cartoons for kids, and created a large line of tie-in merchandise for the kids to buy. The toys were bringing in all of the real money, and everyone pretty much started associating cartoons with toys. Toys go hand-in-hand with kids, so cartoons did as well.

[Semjaza]

[quote name='Godelsensei']I think this mostly springs from Disney, along with the fact that people grow up having pretty much all serious media acted out by real people.[/quote]

I don't understand what you mean by this. Certainly Disney has things aimed squarely at kids, but for the most part their classic stuff is directly targetting all ages. I think anyone can appreciate some of their better films. The shorts are a different story, so I don't know. Yet the Mickey Mouse in today's shows is certainly different than the one of decades past.

I guess they're part of the reason, but not really any moreso than other studios throughout the decades. I think older Disney shorts appealed to older audiences moreso than what people think of now (same with Looney Tunes)... but everything is skewed nowadays. I do agree with your overall idea though. It makes sense to me.

Series are just easiest to market towards kids, I think. Children have time to watch TV almost any hour of the day. Adults tend to watch things during primetime and it's pretty difficult to find any network willing to bet on an animated show in that slot. I guess at some point people decide that they don't want to watch what they watched when they were younger, whether it was good or not.

There's really a lot of interesting, small-time animation studios out there that put out some really great, compelling work. Unfortunately, most people are very unlikely to see them because they're not really put out for general consumption. Even channels that were willing to take a chance on weird, original animation (such as Nickelodeon back in the day) wound up surprised at what they got. Its why Ren and Stimpy was so heavily edited years back and why Nickelodeon had so many issues with Invader Zim more recently.

It's unfortunate because I think it puts Western cartoons in a very bad position. While there are exceptions (largely thanks to Adult Swim), most of the animation here is in a "can't win no matter what they do" type of situation. It's very hard to expand something when everyone expects it to be a certain way to begin with; it's even more difficult when everyone expects that way to involve marketing to children.

By the time a show comes about that is designed for the adult spectrum, I find that it is usually insanely exaggerated or violent. Maybe because it's so hard to get a network to pick these things up that the creators wind up just voicing all their frustrations by making something so ridiculous? I don't know. I think it would be nice if Western animation had more work that was in the middle of the spectrum that took itself more seriously. It's either ridiculous and for kids or ridiculous and for adults. There's very little middle ground

[Kamuro]

people definitely shouldn't have to defend themselves for watching something like cartoon network, I love to watch shows like family guy and south park, they're funny, so who cares if its a cartoon? and even if the cartoon is directed towards adults or an older age group, whats wrong with having some fun once in awhile and watching some cartoons? the world is serious enough already, and without a little laughter, people would go crazy

[Gavin]

[SIZE=1]I definitely have to agree with Manic on this one, any time I get the chance I enjoy watching some on the younger generation cartoon from when I was growing up, stuff like Johnny Bravo and Looney Toons is funny whatever age you are. And it's definitely true when he says that because cartoon are made by adults there's going to be stuff in them to appeal to different age-groups. I remember watching some cartoon a while back [I can't remember what exactly], and a comment that might seem innocuous to a child had be roaring in laughter because of the different meaning an adult would take from it.

Cartoons have always been a timeless form of entertainment, not only for a nostalgia point of view, as people would remember seeing a cartoon back when they were younger and still laugh at it. But they're also timeless because the jokes are still funny, and even if the pun wasn't supposed to be about a nowaday situation, they can still apply. I mean how many people could just imagine Bugs Bunny or Daffy Duck dressing up as some famous person and doing a bit of impressionism like they've done for the last 40 years. Heck I'd pay to see Yosemite Sam do a Dubya impression with some of the other Looney?s doing other World Leaders.[/SIZE]