Film Genre – The conventions of a Mature Cartoon

Film Genre – The conventions of a Mature Cartoon.

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.