cartoons,...

...i like them better than pretty much anything else i could watch.

I also really like reading comics.

My reasons are pretty simple. First and foremost, I remain pretty childish. I still enjoy the shows from Nickelodeon that were created and aired in the early an mid-90s. My best friends and I watched cartoons that were intended for 11 year-olds well through high school. I also liked the wildly popular "Adult Swim" lineup, but not as much. I guess i just never stopped liking weird non sequiturs and absurd exaggerations?

My second reason is more substantive. I believe that at their best, cartoons are more expansive in their presentations. Animated television shows, movies, and video games come directly from the minds of their creators and illustrators. Even in "direct" representation of life around us, where cartoons simply give us the stories of people, cartoon television, movies and comics can materialize fantasies and emotions, making life more vivid. In less traditional illustrations of life (my favorite!) we might get an insight into the lives of aliens, personified objects, or animals as people.



Removing the limitation of simply capturing and then potentially manipulating the world around us gives people who create cartoons near unlimited potential in exploding the realm of possibility in storytelling. Their only limitations are what they might be able to fathom and then channel through their hands or their computer machines (again, my preference is hand drawn as I feel like computer illustrators have a tendency to strive toward 'life-like' instead of away from it).

In terms of storytelling, regardless of who they are intended for, cartoons are most often created by adults. As a result, audiences either get adult takes on reminiscences of their own childhoods/adolescences, animated representations of adulthood (see: Rocko, above), or stuff so removed from anything we've ever seen or heard that it could only drawn. This in and of itself should remove the 'cartoons are for kids' stigma.

This Scrooge McDuck comic from (from Videogum) sums up a lot of what i mean about imagination and stories.



You can read the whole comic here.

For a lot of people, the move Inception seems to represent an incredible example of innovation in the 'heist' concept, where dreams might be a place to commit theft given the weakness of the victim in a dream state. Still, making this idea stick in the 'real world' didn't happen until 2010, and when it finally happened, it was wildly popular.

Amazingly, this idea was printed and distributed to children in the 1950's. Even the 'kick' concept, if not directly ripped off from the comic, was already done:

.

To sum up, it strikes me that the most innovative storytelling, at least in the realm of fantastic cinema and television, is drawn. Unfortunately, animation doesn't sell like live action film or animation that's supposed to get really, really close to mimicking live action (see: the suck that was Avatar). I don't know why cartoons can't be marketed more effectively to adults. For me, Batman the Animated Series, a highly acclaimed Batman cartoon that appeared on the Fox Network while I was in elementary school was nearly as dark and just as compelling as the more recent and wildly popular Batman films. A feature-length cartoon, however, would never have been marketed so heavily nor as popular in theaters. The same is true of the new Scott Pilgrim movie, which, volume-length aside, is very unlikely to do justice to the original books. Nonetheless, it gets huge billing, television, internet, and print ads, a big name in Michael Cera, and probably (relatively) big box office numbers.

Me, i'd prefer it were a cartoon. Shit, i wish everything was a cartoon.

-kevillustrated