Genre is a bookstore problem, not a literary problem. - Rick Moody
I have never believed that the critic is the rival of the poet, but I do believe that criticism is a genre of literature or it does not exist. -
Harold Bloom
The history of cartoon has come along way from early animation like humorous phases of funny faces. As technology has progressed as well as the ever more lenient censorship of cartoons over its history; narrative of the animation medium has become more and more creative and now has many flourished into many different hybrid subgenres.
The conventions of the mature cartoon genre have also expanded of time with technology and cultural change. These animations have gone from a classical family based situation comedy like the Flintstones or early Simpsons episodes, to using intertextual, double coded gags and mocking political humour. Through expansion in technology the shows have been able to keep to date with current event and can show them satirically. The majority have steered away from family based comedy and aimed at a more mature adult audience. The humour is usually toilet humour, foul language, violence, sex etc… Animators are constantly using the fact that they can create anything through animation to their benefit, mocking any thing they feel fit and pushing the boundaries on censorship.
All in all I conclude that the main things separating children’s cartoons and mature cartoons are; the course humour and the depth of the narrative. I wish to continue my blog after the marking, to go further in depth with my current research with out a word count. I would also like to compare a sit-com with an adult cartoon to see how they differ with the physical boundaries of film in place.
Children’s cartoons and adult cartoons have a lot of the same conventions, but what is it that really separates these two sub genres?
To define the differences and similarities between children’s and adult cartoons, I have grouped some cartoons and their conventions to their separate groups. I have found there are some cartoons which fall between the two categories which I believe may be appropriate for both children and adults.
In the 1960's the first family orientated cartoon was created, The Flintstones. The Flintstones was one of the first cartoons to appeal to a family audience. It’s a classic situation comedy and has strong influence in mature cartoons such as Daria, Family Guy, King of the Hill and The Simpsons. Today the Flintstones is marketed more towards children but can still be watched by adults.
'After years of producing primarily cartoons for children (Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound et ala.), this really became the first cartoon show that was geared for adults, though there still is enough to keep children interested'. (Brian Washington, 2003)
The same goes for the Simpsons, the Simpsons is a family orientated mature cartoon, it is shown early evenings after children’s television has finished. The Simpsons is aimed at a family audience and is a little more inappropriate than the Flintstones. The gags in the Simpsons are cleverly made with a double coding which refers to layers of meaning in a joke, which gives a different meaning to different viewers. There are colourful slapstick gags for the younger viewers, were as for the older viewers there are more sophisticated spoken gags and intertextual references to popular culture. I would defiantly class the Simpsons as a mature cartoon.
Here is some Simpsons Slapstick.
Taking into consideration my research all these cartoon subgenres as such, have very similar conventions. The only real difference I found was in the depth of the story, the humour and how appropriate for the age group. A mature cartoon has references of sex, violence, drugs, swearing and other toilet humour. A child’s cartoon will have an easier story to follow, with more basic pun related jokes.
Brian Washington. (2003). The Classic Hanna-Barbera Show. Available: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0053502/. Last accessed 25 May 2010. References
Paul Wells (2002). Animation and America. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. pg 89 - 91. Bernadette Casey, Ben Calvert (2007). Television studies: The Key Concepts . Oxon & New York: Routledge .pg 21 - 23.
In animation there are no physical boundaries of what an animator can create, this in theory gives the animated the freedom to say or do anything without the hassle or expense needs in film, such as actors, paper work, crew etc… In the early period, the ‘difference’ embodied by the animality of Gertie the Dinosaur, Felix the Cat or Mickey Mouse also embraced the freedoms of the medium and its potential meanings and effects. (Paul Wells, 2002, p 23). As characters are illustrated by drawings or other animation, references to actual people can be detached through disclaimer. A great example of this is a disclaimer at the beginning of South Park, although this does not happen in other shows.
But thats not it, one more thing has to be added to the equation… censorship. Nowadays writers for the leading mature comedies are pushing the limits of how far a story can go with out getting censored, sometimes to prove a point and other time I think to try and get themselves censored. Some recent controversy happened with an episode of South Park that depicted the profit Mohammad wearing a bear suit, the episode was not pulled but very highly censored. Here are the creators of South Park expressing their view previous to this uproar.
An ever becoming more frequent convention is using intertextual references in adult cartoons. This may be caused by a few reasons; the writers have run out of fresh ideas or, as technology has progressed it is enabling animations and cartoons to be created more efficiently and easily. Bernadette Casey and Ben Calvert quote that;
‘The Simpsons play fully deconstructs itself in a knowing and highly self-referential manner as well drawing on a wide range of popular cultural references as a source for its humour’. (Bernadette Casey, Ben Calvert , 2007 , pg 21)
This enables the animator to keep up to date with current social goings-on in the world. 80’s and 90’s animations like The Simpsons, Bevis and Butt Head and South Park etc… didn’t tend to use intertextuality as much as they are used today, instead stuck to a more creative un referenced narrative storylines. With this technology advance cartoons can be more cutting edge and can satire a political view or event just after it happens. In 2006 the ‘Crocodile Hunter’ Steve Irwin died of a tragic accident, less than a week later he appeared in South Park in a joke, season 10 episode 11.
Here is an example of intertextuality in Family Guy, a Jurassic Park reference.
Adult cartoons look at American culture and can be very political and occasionally have political views and issues embedded in the story. The Simpsons is great example, here are a few political topics it has addressed: environmental issues, immigration, gay marriage, election campaigns, alcohol and drug abuse and many more. >Follow this link to a video on political humour in the cartoon American Dad!
In the next blog i will compare childrens cartoons and mature cartoons.
Filmography
Jurassic Park - (1993) - Steven Spielberg
Family guy, Tales of a Third Grade Nothing - (2008) - Jerry Langford
References Paul Wells (2002). Animation and America. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. pg 23. Bernadette Casey, Ben Calvert (2007). Television studies: The Key Concepts . Oxon & New York: Routledge .pg 21. Online References
Apart from the obvious fact, a cartoon has to be an animation of some type nowadays. I felt the best way to research would be to watch mature cartoons and pull out common conventions within them and then back them up with research. Mature cartoons are situation comedies which are generally made to be watched on TV, and so tend to be 20 – 30 minutes long to allow room for commercial breaks and to be easily fitted into the block of broadcasting time.
Mature cartoons have a self containing classical narrative structure in each episode. The set up, which funnily enough sets up the story in mature cartoons, it is often caused by an event unrelated to the main story which triggers another to happen. The development or body is where the plot thickens; this is the main section of the cartoon and contains the most action. The end or resolution, where everything is resolved back to normal and on occasions better than normal. A common convention in any cartoons but mainly mature cartoon is; the conclusive ending to round up the events and topic of the episode, a learning out come for the characters and/or the audience. This is most obviously shown in the cartoon South Park although still a less blatant convention in the other mature cartoons.
What I mean by self containing is i.e. if a character dies in an episode the character will appear in the next episode, a prime example is Kenny from South Park, in the early series Kenny would die in every episode and return in the next. This also is the same for other events; non character related i.e. the town being destroyed in the Mecha Streisand episode of South Park. On the rare occasion that a character is getting written out they will kill them off, or they will leave in more of a dramatic way than a character just dieing, an example of this is Modd Flanders who dies to be written out of ‘The Simpsons’. This allows episode to be played any time and anywhere and rids episode to episode story continuity errors.
They tend to follow life of families and groups in suburban areas. I presume this is because the majority of the viewers live in suburban areas and can easily relate with the character and events which occur in the episodes. With there being more than one main character; the cartoon can see the story from more than one point of view, and can sometimes have a separate story line for different character within each episode.
In my next blog I will delve into what I would say is the most important conventions of mature cartoon genre; intertextuality, politically and touch on the freedom of expression through animation.
References
Kaylee Walters. (2008). Mature Cartoons. Available: http://kayleewalters.com/portfolio/Personal/MediaCritProp.pdf. Last accessed 24 May 2010.
Cartoon: The original meaning was in fine art, where cartoon meant a preparatory drawing for a piece of art, such as a painting or tapestry. The modern meaning refers to both humorous illustrations in print and animated films.
The first animation to appear on film was by a newspaper cartoonist called J. Stuart Blackton on the 6th of April 1906. The film 'Humorous phases of funny faces' was animated on a chalk board; the film seemed to have no real narrative. It was not seen as a cartoon in the traditional sense but still complies with today’s convention as a hand drawn image.
The film considered the first fully animated cartoon ever made was by a French artist called Émile Cohl, and was called "Fantasmagorie”. The film contained 700 drawings and ran for about two minutes. The images where then made negative to give chalk board look similar to Blackton. This cartoon contained scenes that seemed to include a basic narrative structure for the characters.
In 1914, Winsor McCay produced a cartoon which is considered to have the first true character animation ‘Gertie the Dinosaur’. The cartoon was the first to show a character that seemed to have its own personality and portrait emotions.
The first feature length cartoon was said to have been released in 1917 by an Argentinean cartoonist called Quirino Cristiani, the film 'El Apóstol' contained 58,000 hand drawn frames, and supposedly had characters with similar aspects to ‘Gertie the Dinosaur’ whom had recognisable personality and characteristics. The film also had a satire narrative structure, with President Hipólito Yrigoyen ascending to the heavens to use Jupiter's thunderbolts to cleanse Buenos Aires of immorality and corruption. The result is a burnt city. This film is now a lost film. (Wikipedia) Another feature films that followed the similar conventions were ; Adventures of Prince Achmed and directed by German Lotte Reiniger and French/Hungarian Berthold Bartosch.
Silent cartoon ran along side its cousin, the Silent film. One of my favourite shorts of this period is the 'Felix the cat episode ‘Felix Dopes it out' (1924). It is similar to the slapstick/ situation comedy of Charlie Chaplin, were the characters emotions is played by over the top expressions, with rediculous plot lines.
A decade later in 1928 came the Golden Age of U.S. animation; this is the period when sound was introduced, although the first cartoon to use synchronized sound was Max Fleischer's 'My Old Kentucky Home' in 1926. The films were usually shorts of 5-10 minutes and shown before feature films in American movie theatres. These brought around the birth of such well known characters as; Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Bugs Bunny, Popeye and so on. Feature length animation with sound also started in this period, most notably with Walt Disney's first films: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Pinocchio, Fantasia etc… In the 1960’s theatrical animation started dropping in interest as the medium of television animation became more popular.
Feature length animations films seemed to have the same conventions as any film genre, for instance snow white and the seven dwarfs is a fantasy/ fairy tale, the only difference is, is that it is animated.
The shorts that I have watched seem to have similar conventions to any of the cartoons nowadays, they seem to be sit-com orientated and/or use the fact they have no creative boundaries well.
Now that you hopefully understand more about the history of the cartoon genre. In my next blog i will be exploring the conventions of the cartoon genre from the arrival of cartoons on television, to present day mature cartoons.
Filmography
Humorous phases of funny faces-1906 - J. Stuart Blackton
Felix the Cat - Felix Dopes It Out - 1924- Otto Messmer & Pat Sullivan
Fantasmagorie - 1908 - Émile Cohl
References
Barrier, J. Michael (1999). Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age. New York: Oxford University Press
“Twenty years ago Americans viewed shows like The Jetsons and Scooby Doo as some of the top rated cartoons on television. At that point animated shows were rarely on anytime other than Saturday morning and tended to be directed solely at kids.” (Kaylee Walters)
In this series of blogs I will explore the mature cartoon genre. Firstly I will study the history of the cartoon genre to get a better understanding of the development of the genre. I will then look more in depth on how the genre has changed with the times from early children’s television cartoons such as Scooby Doo and The Flintstones, to mature cartoons of today such as; Family guy ,The Simpsons and South Park etc…
Mature cartoons appeal to a wide audience ranging from teenagers to adults, as a lot of the jokes are structured well and have double meanings, so if a viewer doesn’t understand the reference, it may still be funny. I will also look into the similarities and differences between children’s cartoons and mature cartoons, to see how or what separates the two genres.
Finally I will look at the actual conventions of this genre as it stands today. It has become very intertextual, political, and with new ever progressing technology, creating these animations is becoming more efficient. Now an animation show can be made in a week and has become very cutting edge and up to date.
References Kaylee Walters. (2008). Mature Cartoons. Available: http://kayleewalters.com/portfolio/Personal/MediaCritProp.pdf. Last accessed 20 March 2010.
