Maybe because of Adventure Time and maybe it’s stupid to say, but I’ve got this feeling that cartoons are becoming less and less grounded in reality. Not that this is a bad or a good thing.
There is an increasing trend towards random looking magical make-believe worlds where “everything is possible”, where actions have no consequences, where characters face no threat. The fact that Ready Player One is now a major blockbuster shows that this trend affects not only cartoons but entertainment in general, and American entertainment in particular. To the point that old cartoons like Gargoyles, Hey Arnold or even Ed, edd n Eddy now look down-to-Earth and “mature” in comparison, when in their days they were the epitome of kiddy shit.
Just take a look at upcoming pilots like picrel and tell me they me they don’t all look straight out of Mabel’s bubble. The irony being that Alex Hirsch intended the bubble thing as a way to mock this kind of escapism.
I actually think this guy has a point. Everything is loud randumb wacky colors now since Adventure Time. I don't like it much either. Wish we could get some conventional traditional stuff again.
Ryder Bell
no, you are growing dependant and infantilized. Adult color books were just the beginning.
Jaxon Cooper
>no, you are growing dependant and infantilized. You are aware that the topic is cartoon for little children right?
David Powell
>ready player one is for kids! >ALL CARTOONS ARE FOR KIDS >ALL KIDS ARE DIAPER TODDLER UNTIL THEY MATURE TO 70 This is your mental state right now
Juan Mitchell
Cartoons being unrealistic isn't a problem in and of itself - a unique setting can set itself apart and present story opportunities that might not gel in a pedestrian universe. The problem is that the whimsy and quirk that's becoming more prevalent doesn't have any cohesion to it. It's like making a show based off of every last margin sketch in a 7th-grader's notebook.
Joshua Anderson
If anything there's been a trend of 'grounded' cartoons like Criag of the Creek etc as of late.
Charles Rodriguez
Because real life fucking sucks, OP. Nothing wrong with a little escapism.
Brayden Hall
The issue here is not being realistic or unrealistic but rather the lack of responsibility being taught. When you think that kids spend more time in front of a screen than with their parents or friends that's quite frightening.
Ryder Kelly
Mass delusion is what's wrong with America. Don't encourage it.
Easton Rogers
>TV shows in charge of education That's your first mistake. Anyway it's a simple market decision, it's harder to sell "down to earth" cartoons to young adults because they want escapism and because seeing a kid's show perspective on the real world makes it too obvious that it's actually a kid's show. Go in the current SU threads, everybody fucking hate the townie episodes, we want the fighting lesbian rocks from space.
Isaiah Ramirez
Pfft, responsibility. You know what responsibility means?
We live in a world where owning up to your mistake means someone can, and usually does, sue you for everything you're worth and ruin your life. Is it any wonder people aren't responsible?
Cooper Rodriguez
>escapism Fantasy doesn't mean living in a cocoon where people chage your diaper, fill your bottle with soymilk and wve in clown outfit repeating positive words until you wave them back.
Thomas Thomas
Cartoons have never been incredibly grounded or realistic, and they aren't any less so now.
Here's your "grounded in reality" cartoon, now go fap to realism in corner. >Everything is loud randumb wacky colors now since Adventure Time You're retarded
It's a product of the energy entropy of the infrastructure nation Age.
Really, outlandish cartoons date back to the 90's of not sooner, before that you had way more rigid animation and worlds that were rooted to a degree in reality (if only because Hanna Barbara dominated that ancient time period before even computers existed). Before you saw cartoons with anthromorphism, but now you see cartoons that regularly integrate fantasy, world building and more atop of the slapstick and anthromorphism.
With digitizations, culture not only increased in volume, but things have gamified the world as well. All of this has untethered us from being solely in reality and this has been the case for a while now, it has been the case since the 90's at least. It is more than the temporal escapism of the past- we are in a time period where it is common to see people living while lives based on a form of digital solipsism that was impossible before. These cartoons going to more surreal territory in a quest for novelty is really more a symptom of digitization that anything else.
Really our whole civilization is less grounded in reality for better or worse- the cartoons produced these days are just a reflection of that.
Julian Mitchell
You kinda lost me on this one.
Jayden White
TV education only really works for introducing subjects more than actual teaching- see Carl Sagan's Cosmos. You just aren't going to learn astrophysics or even astronomy listening to Carl Sagan for ten hours since internalizing the concepts requires actually getting hands on. Like say actually using a telescope or actually knowing how to experiment and do math problems.
Liam Morris
>but I’ve got this feeling that cartoons are becoming less and less grounded in reality. >There is an increasing trend towards random looking magical make-believe worlds where “everything is possible”, where actions have no consequences, where characters face no threat. I think the problem you describe is less that they're not grounded to reality and more that they're in fantastical settings without any proper rules and logic behind them.
David Baker
Cartoons don't really need to be internally consistent beyond perhaps characterization.
...
You can stop laughing now.
Jonathan Rodriguez
Let's just compare some random popular cartoons >Scooby Doo A gang of teenagers with a talking dog solve mysteries about (usually) adults making overly convoluted plans to sabotage businesses or people they don't like and pretending to be supernatural creatures >Apple and Onion Normal people are food and two autistic millennials get free money, housing, and annoy everyone but their behavior is excused because raisins.
>Tom and Jerry A cat and mouse (and sometimes dog) shoot, stab, burn, pummel. or just generally inconvenience eachother, and sometimes they do magic/alchemy to assist in annoying each other. >Loud House A family has to make compromises because two irresponsible parents never learned to use protection and now have 13 kids and 5 pets. Also a nigger is around.
>Ed Edd n Eddy A group of kids come up with convoluted scams to trick other kids in their neighborhood into giving them money. Laws of physics bend to their will on occasion >Craig of the Creek Kids do stupid shit for stupid reasons, because they're stupid LARPers, and also there's niggers.
>FOP A kid has the doom and gloom in his room broken instantly by his magic little fish that grant his every wish, because in reality, they are his god parents, Fairy God Parents >Gumball A cat and a fish do school/friend things and sometimes reality warps to preserve the status quo or generally screw them over.
>Mighty Mouse A mouse is given super powers by (radioactive? Magic?) cheese and uses these powers to defend a mouse town from cats and dogs >Steven Universe A small faggot in a quiet town and a hippie deadbeat dad is raised by a group of lesbians(?) really have something against being honest and decent people and are being invaded by a race of overtly superior people who wish to maintain order and civility.
Cartoons aren't really more or less realistic now than they've ever been. and being realistic doesn't inherently improve anything.
Christian Myers
I like the points and make
It's not really about realism but more about having plausible sets of rules, even if they make sense only within the show. It's important for cartoons to have some sort of causality unless it's a show that's supposed to survive only on the comedic elements.
It's just important for the writing, I don't know. If there are no rules, consequences or limitations, there can be no conflict, and it's just boring. That's probably why no one cares about Walter Lantz shows anymore.
Michael Young
>The issue here is not being realistic or unrealistic but rather the lack of responsibility being taught Cartoons aren't and never have been responsible for teaching lessons to people, no form of media is. We can all look at greek mythology and see warnings of hubris, and greed, or read aesop fables and come away with a lesson, but pretending this is the primary purpose of media is stupid. Even something like the 3 little pigs or Red Riding Hood, while having lessons that are important to the story is not the reason they're popular or loved, it's because they're actually engaging (and at times humorous). And there's a lot of engaging media where there is no lesson of responsibility or morality, something such as Ed Edd n Eddy (inb4 some stupid non-argument like "it's just >lolsorandum xD") is entertaining because of it's comedic timing, impeccable sound design, and for lack of a better word, absolutely amazing animation, or Dexter, because of it's constant sense of tension, and good dialogue, or Monster, because of its compelling MC, tone, and general storytelling.
>that they're in fantastical settings without any proper rules and logic behind them That depends heavily on the what you're referring to, but a story can maintain a sense of tension even without setting hard rules for what it's fantastical systems can or can't do. It has to do more with how new powers or limits are introduced, something like Harry Potter never really tells the reader exactly what limits are there on magical power, how much a spell can do, or how powerful a person can be, but it establishes that some people are powerful, whether through dialogue or by showing their abilities, so when these abilities come into play in certain situations it doesn't feel cheap like it would if some kid's dead parents were able to help him outcast the most powerful wizard in the world without any real foreshadowing of this ability. This just really depends on context. (cont.)
Christian Wright
What I meant is that it's not the tv's job to educate kids but the parent's but sure
Dominic Morales
Now that's interesting.
Do you know anything I could read on the subject?
Robert Thompson
>people go hundreds of thousands in debt to be fed that pseudo intellectual garbage
Alexander Clark
Of course, yet the opposite is happening and the way kids grow learning about the world is being molded more and more by the stuff they watch.
Mason Rodriguez
>You are wrong because I will dictate you how to think and interpret things that would otherwise go against my narrative again?
Lucas Murphy
He has a point though. Our generation and the next one has been shaped by the internet, which is the very embodiment of a "magical make-believe random world where everything is possible".
Landon Richardson
For example something like, Adventure Time (the early seasons at least), aren't hindered by ill-defined rules. The "rules" were simply a vehicle to tell a story, and the rules could change to better fit the story, if Finn could beat up large monsters in one episode, but couldn't in the next simply doesn't matter, because that wasn't what engages the viewer, it was the character interactions, dialogue, and visuals that these stories served to create, and while you can have your own opinions about them, it was clearly doing well to amass a large viewer base.
Then you look at something, like... new AT. In which character's abilities still fluctuate, and now their personalities too, and then attempt to tell a serious narrative about love, loss, and redemption and the entire thing begins to feel meandering and incongruous.
It wouldn't be much different than having the Eds take someone's outline and eat the sun in one episode, then having a episode about the dangers of global warming in another.
Josiah Price
Grounded in reality =/= realistic
Brody Hughes
Maybe it's getting that way because reality is getting ever more difficult to deal with. We got goddamn demons walking around reading pop up books to kids, there's that play with the giant human person and all their organs fly out and they've got a vagina and penis and the penis squirts shit at kids. And if you're of the liberal variety, we're going to war with Russia and a celebrity gameshow host is in charge of the most powerful nation on the planet.
I think everyone's just fucking sick of reality and hates it now, and they want to escape to wacky egg characters and sexy vampires and gum ladies because the real world is cold and shitty and it gives you the flu. Jake the Dog can't give you flu. Jake the Dog can turn into a car.
far from the worst issue this shit has >pushing trannies on kids >pushing pride parades >horrible art style
Tyler Cook
>I think everyone's just fucking sick of reality and hates it now, and they want to escape to wacky egg characters and sexy vampires and gum ladies because the real world is cold and shitty and it gives you the flu. You are now starting to realise that the trouble isn't the world turning shit but YOU being unable to deal with shit since it contradicts with the escapist culture you spent you childhood and teenagehood in.
Wyatt Brown
While I enjoy fantastical and surreal stories, it's also the go-to genre for people with little life experience, or people who need to rely on artificial constructs to create arbitrary resolutions. They just are clever enough to make things work with logic.
I think that's what's been happening with cartoons. The networks seem to be going after younger and younger creators. They want to be like IT.
