Critical Report:
The Correlation Between Western Animation’s Target Audience and Overall Quality
If you’re from a Western country, you probably can read between the lines when you encounter the “Adult Animation” section of Netflix. You want to enjoy some nice animation, but feel like engaging your brain more than a children’s movie would accomplish, and so you skip through nearly identical titles and indistinguishable art styles- Family Guy, American Dad, F is for Family, Big Mouth– until you land on one. You then ask yourself whether you’re in the mood to tolerate lowbrow, boring sexual humor and exaggerated levels of gore and viscera so that you can engage in a conversation about the show with your friend who has a Pickle Rick tattoo. The fact of the matter is that a lot of Western animated television shows are indistinguishable from the others. They all seem to trip up on the same hurdle: convincing adults that they’re not for children.
It isn’t that all or any of these shows are bad, necessarily- in fact, most do well for their intended purpose. It is, however, dull that they all follow the same format, and even the same genre. Western adult animation infrequently exists outside of comedy. It’s almost as if the fact that they’re animated is part of the joke- here you are, an adult viewer, watching a cartoon. The show invariably revolves around intentionally distasteful amounts of sex and violence rather than an actual plot, not only to assert its place as adult animation but also to further push the “joke” that you’re watching this in a cartoon.
There is no lack in the children’s animation category of a diversity in genres, even horror, thanks to Courage the Cowardly Dog. So why does the category “Adult Animation” dictate a zeitgeist of low comedy, rather than including a broad scope of genres, stories, themes, and art styles?
The long and short of it is that although we are very slowly moving away, animation is still broadly considered a children’s medium in the West. Due to this dichotomy juxtaposed with the leaps and bounds being made in the animation industry- technically and narratively- we now have this phenomenon of “children’s” animation that can often be more nuanced, complex, and well-written than “adult” animation. A perfect example is the Emmy award winning Avatar: The Last Airbender. Avatar deals transparently with themes of war, death, politics, responsibility, spirituality, mindfulness, and cultural differences. With incredible stories, writing, and breathtaking visuals, It’s not hard to see why Avatar appeals to adults as well as children. None of it is “dumbed down”, yet it is still considered to be child-oriented, presumably because, despite its depictions of air raids and systemic oppression, not a single swear word is uttered and sex is only hinted at in the slightest of whispers. It’s interesting that the line seems to be drawn here. Despite its popularity among adults, I question whether Avatar would even make it to a pilot episode if pitched as an adult show.
There’s a long history surrounding this situation. In the mid-20th century, animation in the West was originally created for all audiences, and some very traditional cartoons, like Felix the Cat and Betty Boop, were actually meant to appeal more to an adult audience. Though they didn’t rely heavily on “adult topics” as adult animation does today, they didn’t hold back on references to sex and drug use. With television being a rather new medium, though, guidelines were quickly being drawn up to govern this lawless land in a climate that was much more Puritanical than our own. The 1934 Hays Code set up a strict set of rules as to what could be shown on TV, and Fleischer, Disney’s rival, lost their powerful Betty Boop character’s impact and fell behind in the race to be the leading animation studio. Disney’s cleaner, more child-oriented animation then reigned, and other studios struggled to emulate that rather than create their own content, with animation being too expensive of a medium to take risks.
Then came the 60’s, when all-ages animated TV shows were moved to the Saturday morning slots, and did numbers from the huge percentage of children watching TV at that hour. At the same time, with the rise of popularity in television and the higher percentage of families who owned one, animation studios saw budgets being slashed and a demand for quicker, cheaper output. Hannah-Barbera, animation titan of the day, accomplished this through the use of “limited animation”. This resulted in the mockable looping, paper-doll-like animation with repeating backgrounds recognizable from Scooby-Doo and the like. With brainless animation, the plot also suffered, and a child-friendly narrative was easier and faster to write.
After the Hays Code was lifted in the late 60s, adult animators like Ralph Bakshi (Fritz the Cat, American Pop, Cool World) immediately began creating fantastic work that did include typical “adult humor”, but also relied on more dynamic, complex narrative structure and exploration of heavier themes, like racial inequality and generational responsibility. He and his peers, however, did not prosper in the same sense that children’s animators did, and adult animation was still somewhat underground and viewed as an artistic enterprise rather than realistic as mainstream media.
Then Who Framed Roger Rabbit earned four Oscars, and turned the public eye towards adult animation. It wasn’t until the 80’s and 90’s, though, when 24 hour television meant a high demand for new content, that adult animation began receiving television slots. The Simpsons did well from the get-go, and served as the new standard model for a hit adult animated series. Thus, most animated adult shows revolved around comedy as a tried-and-true moneymaker.
1997 and 99 respectively birthed the Family Guy and South Park era. This began the rise of shock-factor humor in “adult cartoons”, in order to over-assert its place as an adult medium.
And so that brings us back to nowadays. Though they aren’t as popular as others, there are a few new contenders that explore some heavier themes and narrative structures in genres outside of comedy, at the same time experimenting with different ways to implement the art form.
To this point I have been addressing 2D animation only, mostly due to the very negligible amount of 3D animation that exists in the “adult” subcategory. As of the time of writing there is only one 3D animated series on Netflix: Love, Death, and Robots. This series truly marks a turning point, not only in its brilliance, but also because of its use of hyper realistic models in narrative fiction, almost exclusively used up to this point in video games. Although all of its shorts are good, I personally feel that these hyper realistically animated ones have the best narrative structure, and noticed that they spent much less time trying to convince the audience to watch it and devoted more energy to the story. My conclusion from these observations is that 3D animation holds less of a stigma of being “for children” than 2D animation does- but only when it’s hyper-realistic. I theorize that this is because hyper-realistic animation has, for the most part, only been associated with adult-oriented video games, and now the only boundary it needs to push is claiming its place in the film and TV world. Despite the rocky past, I foresee a bright future for broadening the scope of adult animation and utilizing it as a tool for new and intelligent storytelling in the future. We as 3D animators are lucky to be taking our place in the industry during this time.
Bibliography
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Lawrence, J., 2020. Cartoons Have Always Been For Adults But Here’s How They Got Tangled Up With Kids. [online] The Conversation. Available at: <https://theconversation.com/cartoons-have-always-been-for-adults-but-heres-how-they-got-tangled-up-with-kids-130421> [Accessed 23 December 2020].
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