Cartoons are better than people

There is no easy place to begin the tale of my life in cartoons. Animation dominated my early years so completely that any entry point feels both highly significant and irrelevant on its own. One of the first movies I saw was The Rescuers, from a period when Disney hadn’t quite figured out what it should be making; I got scared and had to leave the theater. I was a child of Saturday morning, guaranteed to be up early to catch whatever shows (Smurfs, Superfriends, Pac-Man, Looney Tunes) happened not to be running on weekday afternoons (Transformers, G.I. Joe, He-Man). Stop-motion, when it cropped up on, say, Pee-Wee’s Playhouse or Saturday Night Live, stopped me in my tracks. Live-action TV held less appeal for me. Though I enjoyed Who’s the Boss? and Gimme a Break, Alf and Small Wonder, Webster and Kate & Allie, these shows felt unreal, the situation of their comedy more alien to my life than Spider-Man or The Last Unicorn.

If, however, there was one inflection point in that first decade of animation obsession, it was Robotech: The Macross Saga, which aired early weekday mornings in 1985 on WPIX, a New York City TV station we could pick up, with frequent static, in Western Massachusetts. Adapted from a Japanese anime called Super Dimension Fortress Macross, Robotech told the story of an alien invasion of Earth by the giant humanoid Zentraedi, who were chasing a form of energy called protoculture. Opposing them were the crew and residents of the SDF-1, an enormous spaceship that had crash-landed decades earlier and whose technology was used to create jet fighters that could transform into robots. Our heroes included boy pilot Rick Hunter, his older-brother figure Roy Fokker, and Minmei, Rick’s crush and an aspiring pop star. So far, so normal, right?

But then, in episode 18, halfway through the series, Roy Fokker died. He’d been in a space dogfight with some Zentraedi, and had survived, but with enough internal injuries that he could not make it. He died, and it was clear the show wasn’t going to bring him back to life.

To 11-year-old me, this was monumental. In every cartoon I’d seen thus far, no one died. Wile E. Coyote could fall thousands of feet off a mesa, causing a mini-mushroom cloud on impact, and he’d walk away crushed but otherwise unharmed. G.I. Joe jets would get shot down by their Cobra nemeses, each blooming with an airman’s parachute. Every 30 minutes (24 if you didn’t count commercial breaks), the stories would reset: no progress, no continuity, no consequences. Even when Elmer Fudd killed the wabbit, it didn’t take. This was what cartoons were about, right? A fantasy land of colors and quirks that allowed you to pretend that the real world — the world of grown-ups — did not exist outside the TV room. And now here was a main character removed from the series, suddenly and permanently — and soon to be followed by billions more, as the Earth itself was ravaged by interstellar war, reduced to a few tens of thousands of survivors struggling through the apocalypse.

Reader, it blew my little mind. And it became the paradigm I’ve sought in animation ever since: this interplay between what we think cartoons are and the visceral reality of what they can be.

Cartoons are for kids. Cartoons are cheap. They’re silly — even when they’re serious, they’re silly. Cartoons are for weird Japanese teenagers, who call them anime, unless they’re for abstract French filmmakers. Cartoons are brief, transient, forgettable. Animation is something we all can ignore, because in the end it doesn’t matter. Because cartoons are for kids.

All of this is true, and none of this is true. A Japanese anime, Chainsaw Man, just topped the U.S. box office last weekend, earning $17 million, and that was about a month after another anime, Demon Slayer, brought in $70 million. Twice as many people saw Chainsaw Man as saw that new Bruce Springsteen biopic with the dude from The Bear. Japanese anime alone is a $60 billion industry. If money and popularity are your yardsticks, then animation is not an art form you can continue to ignore.

But who cares about money and popularity? Certainly not the anarcho-Marxists who run Trying! Here we’re more focused on headier subjects, like why and how and what it all means, and we’re certainly not going to bother trying to persuade you that cartoons are worth the time and effort of an aesthete such as yourself. If you’re turning your nose up at Akira or Adventure Time, please continue. We’re not going to change your mind. Instead, I want to get into what I think works in animation, and why that so often makes it superior to live-action film and television.

Animation is a lot like writing. In writing, if you have an idea, you can put it into words. No matter how many words you write, or what the words describe, the cost is the same: your time and your labor. (Writing, let’s be careful to note, is not publishing.) The words for an elaborate fantasy epic are equivalent to the words for a quiet character study; you don’t pay per pixel; the 50-cent words are free. So, too, with animation at its most basic level. If you can imagine it, if you can draw it (over and over, 130,000 times or more), you can make it. Some techniques, perhaps, might require computer models or technical assistance, and voice actors and soundtracks take investment, but the core remains simple. Draw the pictures, make a cartoon.

This is freedom. A cartoon can be anything: a space opera, a seaside teenage romance, a slapstick comedy, a morose family drama. Unlike live action, a cartoonist doesn’t have to worry about locations and sets, call times and trailers, all of which limit how movies and television get made, and therefore what you see onscreen. In animation, the story — and everything that follows from it, art, music, style — can take precedence. The only limit is the animator’s imagination.

Well, okay, imagination and the script. But here, too, animation has an advantage: Because the script needs to be locked down before production begins — because you have to match the characters’ mouths to prerecorded lines — that script needs to be solid, unlike live-action scripts, which can be rewritten endlessly, often on set, or altered entirely via actor ad libs or directorial whim. This is not to say animation scripts are always better than live-action scripts, just that they have by necessity a greater degree of precision to them. I rarely feel like a cartoon is making it up along the way, but that’s far too often the case with live-action movies.

With that mix of freedom and precision, cartoons can be as, or sometimes more, cinematic than the movies. Lately, I’ve been rewatching Samurai Jack, which ran for four seasons on Cartoon Network starting in 2001, with a final season in 2017. The series tells the tale of Jack, a samurai whose homeland was invaded by the demon Aku, “the shape-shifting master of darkness,” who in a climactic episode-one battle flings Jack into the far, far future, where Aku’s evil is now law. It is Jack’s mission to seek in this bizarre landscape a way back to the past, where he can dispatch Aku once and for all with his magic sword.

From the beginning till its end, Samurai Jack is wild. The 2D art is angular, colorful, and striking — an expressionist’s version of Looney Tunes. The characters Jack encounters are drawn with an enthusiasm at once studied and goofy: a face-painted aboriginal Australian bounty hunter with a deadly didgeridoo, talking dogs wearing pith helmets, a brash and burly Scot whose left leg is a machine gun. Since this is a samurai story, there is constant action, much of it wordless. Minutes can go by, sometimes seemingly entire episodes, without anyone speaking. Instead, we get a cinematic purity unequalled in much of cinema itself. We see Jack reacting to subtle cues in his environment, leaping to defend himself against Aku’s robot marauders or a hungry, angry mystery beast. There are close-ups, detail shots, split screens. We see Jack, alone in the center of the screen, slashing with controlled fury, then cut to his mechanical antagonists falling and exploding around him. In one memorable sequence, Jack, clad all in white, battles an all-black android ninja inside a rickety wooden tower at sundown. The only colors are black and white, with the setting sun shifting the shadows and light, and the fighters vanishing and reappearing as they move in and out of their native backgrounds. Jack triumphs, as we know he always will, but the suspense lies in the artistry: How long can the animators keep this going? How many new ways can they invent to keep these two at odds?

The best cartoons are like this, taking full advantage of the freedoms of their canvas. In Japan, there are a million examples, Studio Ghibli’s movies (My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, etc.) being the most obvious. Less well known (outside Japan, at least) are the films of Makoto Shinkai, such as Your name. and Suzume. The former is about a teenage boy in Tokyo and a teenage girl in the countryside who mysteriously wind up swapping bodies; the latter is about a high-school student and an animated three-legged chair trying, naturally, to prevent a demon worm from destroying the world. Both are also gorgeous, lush in their visuals and sweeping in their scope. Damn good soundtracks, too.

For U.S. productions, my favorites tend to be shows like Aqua Teen Hunger Force, about a trio of anthropomorphic fast-food friends — Frylock, Master Shake, and Meatwad — living in squalor in Los Angeles, and Adventure Time, about the heroics of Finn the human and Jake the dog in the post-apocalyptic, magical land of Ooo, and The Amazing World of Gumball, which is sort of like The Simpsons if Bart and Marge were cats, Homer and Lisa were rabbits, and Maggie was an adopted goldfish, and Over the Garden Wall, in which a pair of brothers traverse a spooky-goofy autumnal landscape in an attempt to find their way home. All of these are unhinged from the get-go, embracing the unending possibilities of animation.

And I realize, too, that the base immaturity of these premises is what probably turns off “older” viewers (i.e., anyone over the age of 25 who does not frequent a dispensary). These shows and movies are certainly silly and unreal and often marketed to children.

But I think the reason this appeals to me so deeply — beyond my obvious case of arrested development — is that they all recognize the unreality inherent in animation. They all start from a point that is undeniably outside the live-action world we witness with our own eyeballs every day, and they know it. And because they know it, they can wallow in this artifice, they can play with it, they can enjoy the lack of physical and emotional constraints — they can show us what cinematic freedom looks like.

Many cartoons are content, of course, to stay right there, endlessly amused in the playground they’ve erected. But when they go farther, when they evoke real human feelings and construct complex dramas with meaningfully messy outcomes, they’re a revelation. Samurai Jack does this in its portrait of Jack, who remains stoic and good-natured (if occasionally annoyed) throughout his quest, even as he faces failure after failure. The constant action, the seriousness with which he must conduct himself, the zaniness of his surroundings, the allies and friends he earns through his courage and virtue — all accrete over five seasons into a surprisingly moving finale where he must decide what to sacrifice and who to save. Likewise Adventure Time, whose teenage hero, Finn, sets off with Dungeons & Dragons fantasies and, 11-minute episode by 11-minute episode, must contend with the inevitability of growing up, the messiness of heroics, and the all-too-human fragility of the stretchy dogs, candy people, and schizophrenic walking GameBoys he calls his friends. To watch Adventure Time is to feel like you’re 13 or 14 all over again, able to imagine anything for yourself and your future but also, finally, for the first time, able to see the world for the terrifying, imperfect place it really is.

To me, this is a structural advantage that cartoons have over live action: They move from unreality to reality, from fantasy to drama. They make no bones about it, so I can accept it. Not so with live action, where reality, in the form of recognizably human faces, is our table stakes. How easy it is for live action to disappoint! Bad makeup, poor set design, sloppy writing, sloppier acting, uninspired camera work — any of these can take us instantly out of the “reality” we’ve assumed and into the realm of disappointment and disbelief. We — I — cannot watch “real” people fail to be real.

There are certainly strategies for live action to get around this problem. Filmmakers like David Lynch, Quentin Tarantino, and Paul Thomas Anderson (among many others) approach their movies with a keen sense of artifice and style. You know from the first moments (“Let me tell you what ‘Like a Virgin’ is about”) that you’re watching a movie, and that the movie itself knows it’s a movie, and we’re all in on this joke together. But not all filmmakers can do this, or even want to do this, and so we’re left with an enormous number of movies and TV shows are always a single misstep away from losing our trust and our attention.

Or maybe this is just my own weirdness, that I would prefer to engage with an art form (or subgenre, really) where my expectations are moderate and can be exceeded, rather than with one where they’re slightly higher but so often disappointed. I am a negative motherfucker, after all.

Except that what I also get from cartoons, even those that aren’t trying to do anything more than sell toys to please grade-schoolers, is an unbridled expression of joy. Cartoons have an obligation to first of all be fun, to surprise and delight the kids who are, for better or for worse, their main audience. You can’t get far in this business being boring, so cartoons aren’t. They revel in that simplest satisfaction — Hey, here’s a funny picture I drew! — and then multiply it 24 times per second, for a few minutes or a few hours or a few seasons, however long you’re willing to immerse yourself in their action-packed artifice and let go of your imagined need for more adult entertainment. Cartoons, you could say, make us feel like kids again, except that some of us have been feeling that way for decades now. 🪨🪨🪨

A brain-twisting short film by the genius Don Hertzfeldt. Watch it!