It hurts to see it.

Normally, I have one topic ready to go every Friday and planned on several weeks in advance. This week and into the weekend, I want to try something different, something special. A lot has occurred both in real life and the entertainment sector that may become old and stale if I add them to the empty spaces on my planner document (which goes into March 2024 as of writing this), so for today, I’ll cover my thoughts on animation today, tomorrow October 14, I will cover an anime adaptation that I’d been looking forward to personally, and on Sunday, October 15, I’ll cover the misfortunes of a company that, honestly, feels like it’s been on life support for a while now, each with sneak peeks at the end. Unlike this one, no YouTube recommended channels will be featured for those posts–just this one. Now to begin proper.

Since I was a kid, I remember part of my day was complete or going expressly well when I could turn on the TV after speeding through my homework and catching up on my favorite cartoons. Funny enough, a lot of what I liked at the time is now remembered as genuinely creepy and weird. Observe:

And it wasn’t just this one. Courage the Cowardly Dog, Invader Zim, The Secret Show, Kappa Mikey, Martin Mystery, and several other shows that I was always convinced I was the only one watching. The draw for me, aside from a series of moving drawings, was that a lot of them were so unique. They had their own art styles, plots, some of them were spearheaded by comic book artists, such as in the case of Invader Zim’s creator Jhonen Vasquez and Kaput and Zosky creator Lewis Trondheim.

They also had an air of black comedy embedded in the structure of the series, often based on works published prior. When these shows were picked up by Nickelodeon or its sister network Nicktoons, they were often marketed towards children, though often needed to keep the darker elements under wraps to avoid censorship. Still, a lot of stuff got through the cracks. Like this scene: [content warning].

And this wouldn’t be the only time, shockingly, that someone’s organs were outside them.

For all the flack cartoons have gotten for being “childish” and “immature,” it’s easy to forget that the pioneers of old like Disney, Warner Bros. and MGM had darker themes in a lot of their old cartoons. Never mind the modern day creepypastas featuring Mickey Mouse and co.; think about how many old cartoons had gun violence in them. Where else do you think we get this meme template?

I bring this all up, not so much to rant about cartoons getting soft, but more so to contextualize why I think animation and cartoons have become something of a laughingstock in the West. Ridiculous violence and anthropomorphic animals aside, it’s not like this was all western animation studios were throwing out since the 1960s onwards.

Think about comic book adaptations, like all those of Batman or Spider-Man or the X-Men. All of those comics and many successors trusted their audience, no matter how young they could’ve been, to understand the complicated themes and plot points within. For one such example, the YouTube channel, Shady Doorags, frequently covers animation and animated shows and their many mature themes. Even shows that had a high child and preteen audience like Teen Titans was covered several times, and this episode he covered earlier this year seems to have been one of the more mature ones in the series.

When referring to mature animated shows retroactively, there’s now a distinction between a show that’s mature and a show that’s adult. King of the Hill, The Boondocks, Black Dynamite, and Seth MacFarlane’s Family Guy and American Dad are all mature and handle maturity in different ways, through satire, social commentary, the politics within certain hot-button issues (especially if those issues are still front and center today), or some combination of all these.

By stark contrast, some recent animated shows go straight for the fences without the maturity or class of some of the older shows. I need more fingers to count the themes in a South Park or King of the Hill episode, but I’d struggle for something like that show Fairview or Legends of Chamberlain Heights among others. The same goes for maligned reboots of well-beloved properties. You probably know about the 2016 reboot of Powerpuff Girls or Teen Titans Go! or worse Velma, or if not, you know them all by their sour reputations among fans of the original properties.

Whenever I look into the main sources of criticism, similar talking points come about. Lazy art-styles, crude and purposeless humor, mean-spirited humor, a grave misunderstanding of the subject matter, and often the worst of the criticism relates to pandering. Pandering to a demographic that had a hissy fit on social media; pandering to an underrepresented demographic, likely because that specific demographic is literally extremely few in number; pandering to demographics that suffer from an advanced case of white savior complex. The types that won’t really watch the property, but will lie on the internet to look more virtuous than the person they’re arguing with over the keyboard, even if they’re talking to someone who has volunteered before in the past.

Altogether, it brings back problems animation and fans of animation were certain they’d dealt with years prior and this new generation of animators seem to be fighting an old battle. I’m looking in from the outside, but some of the recent shows coming out don’t do burgeoning animators any favors, especially if you’re familiar with what Disney and Warner Bros. Discovery are responsible for. Sometimes I only know about it because channels like Clownfish TV have experience and expertise on their design philosophy.

When I started conceptualizing this topic, at first I was going to write from the standpoint of award shows, but then I remembered some of the shows I mentioned in this post in passing have gotten recognition from awards boards in the past and even now so if there’s a group of people I’m asking or nearly begging to respect animation, it may be the studios that greenlight them and some of the animators that work on them. From my old high school art class, I remember learning of the philosophy of knowing the rules before breaking them, as in, learn how to draw before you put your own spin on things, and this rings true for all of animation. There’s a stark difference between Bugs Bunny and Tom and Jerry and the Pink Panther/The Inspector art-wise, and even animator-wise. Walt Disney and Friz Freleng were not the same people, but they both learned to draw somehow.

And this is true of today’s animators. You know the old saying: Rome wasn’t built in a day. It takes a lot of skill, craft, and imagination to make a disciplined practice look so undisciplined. Think about how radically different medieval music is compared to Black Sabbath. And for animation, there was a lot of respect for the creators of this:

And the studios that brought us animations like this:

The simple and obvious solution for modern day animators is multifaceted, though to take an example from the military would be to look at who’s at the top of the chain of command. I would never doubt the capabilities of a studio today since most of the time they’re only doing what they’re told; rather my efforts would be better focused on the people they answer to. Clownfish TV mentions names like Disney’s pair of Bobs, Chapek and Iger, as well as investors ignorantly chasing lightning bolts with an open mason jar, confident that it’ll hit the bottle and not them.

Then again, if we’re looking at the investor angle, as risky as it is to put your eggs on an untapped market, it’s equally risky to go for the diminished returns for obvious reasons. Call it the centrist approach, but why not blend the two together? Put a few eggs in the new and unforeseen while keeping the rest in safety boxes, only moving when things go consistently south. If the new thing fails, you still have some pennies, and when the old things lose favor, you can pull out before you lose everything. Oversimplified solution? Well, again I’m no expert. It’s just something I could see myself doing if given the resources to do so.

For this week’s recommendation, I bring you to the channel sydsnap.

https://www.youtube.com/@sydsnap/about

The channel, run by Sydney Maneetapho (née Poniewaz), covers anime and manga, but a more adult-oriented type variety of each, namely hentai. Sydney often recommends some of her own favorite series often for the sake of some guilty pleasure, but also because between all the exposure and nudity, some of the authors and artists behind these hentai have credits writing manga for general audiences, such as in the case with the author of Don’t Toy with Me, Nagatoro-san. She’s even interviewed several names in the adult entertainment industry, like retired porn actress, Kaho Shibuya, or active porn actress, June Lovejoy. If you’re looking for some recommendations or would like to learn more about topics of this nature, most of sydsnap’s videos cover this in detail or alternatively, a donation can be made to her associated Patreon page to get past the censors.

I will return tomorrow with an impression of a long-awaited adaptation.