Once again it is time for the World Animation Celebration, and once again I shall be stranded here in East Central Indiana, a prisoner of my day job. I have exhausted all ruses, ploys, and deceptions by which I might fool my employers into believing that this conference is relevant to my job duties, so authorized absence from work is unlikely to be granted. Travel pay, conference costs, and lodging are also thus forgone, and Dame Fortune has not yet seen fit to bestow the correct numbers in the correct order on any recent lottery ticket in my possession. Sigh. Well then, so it goes, and enough of these maudlin whinings; the next best thing to attendance is vicarious attendance, so...
First stop is a component program of the WAC, The World Summit for Feature Films and Visual Effects, February 17 and 18. Yes, I'm registered. Uh huh, that's my name right there...yes, as a matter of fact I AM that opinionated, pedantic martinet who writes for...never mind; just show me to the conference room, if you please. Let's see...Tuesday, February 17, 11:15 a.m....Panel Two: "Animation's 30-Year Quest to Establish a Theatrical Audience For Adult-Themed Animation". Now this, dear readers, looks to be a good one! From the program, it looks like an exploration of the development of adult-themed movies from Yellow Submarine through the feature films of Ralph Bakshi, with consideration of Beavis and Butt-Head Do America thrown in. "This panel will explore what can be learned from the past to help carve a path of success for future adult-themed releases".
Since I can only attend vicariously, let me offer some of my thoughts on this admittedly important subject for the perusal of those giving our site a hit this month. My first thought is: What is the nature of adult-themed releases? What does "adult-themed" mean? Romance? Sex? Violence? Would, say, Sleepless in Seattle or Natural Born Killers been as significant or less significant to their respective audiences had they been animated? Recently I saw a bumper on the Cartoon Network, a "Cartoon That Never Made It" called Salt and Slug. This was a two-minte tale of love, loss, and redemption in the face of overwhelming incompatibility; was that an adlut-themed piece? Novelists from D.H. Lawrence to Victor Hugo would have to agree that it was. Who is the target audience? I remember when The Ren and Stimpy Show was the rage on campus, a position now occupied by South Park. These college students are certainly adults; are we speaking about them? Or are we speaking about their parents? What sort of animated features would be themed for them?
Perhaps these questions obscure rather than clarify an already opaque subject, so let me again refer to the program (as presented in Animation Magazine). The Ralph Bakshi movies of the 1970's are mentioned. If we look at Fritz the Cat, Heavy Traffic, Coonskin, and Bakshi's other works of that and later periods we do find themes largely absent in such features as Rainbow Brite and the Star Stealer. These themes deal primarily with class and racial conflict. Those topics are definitely adult in nature, but it should be noted that these pictures resulted in a fair amount of grief for Bakshi, Steve Krantz, and Barry Diller before the ruckus was over. Bakshi's next feature, Hey, Good Lookin' was kept out of release for years by Warner Bros. During this phase of his career Bakshi managed to alienate everyone from Robert Crumb to The Congress of Racial Equality in merely trying to present a unique, adult-themed vision. Later the Rev. Donald Blackmon would unfairly use these films as ammunition against Bakshi in the infamous Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures imbroglio. This society is still, on the evidence, lacking the ability to carry out any serious discussion on race and remains at odds over subjective definitions of sexual morality. Given these facts, one wonders why anyone would want to take a crack at adult-themed animation at all.
How about a Marxist cartoon feature, then, in which proletariat characters struggle in hilarious ways against the prevailing ideology and cultural hegemony of the ruling class: Petit bourgeoisie boobs of the Frankfurt School vying for the Gramsci Awards? Adorno in the Family? (Actually, there is such an animated series similar to this called The Simpsons. However, the themes of socialist struggle are undercut by the surplus of comic relief characters and their relative ineptness in realizing how thoroughly they are manipulated. Much of the humor comes from watching the characters get suckered and co-opted by said hegemony, but when this show does get it's digs in it's as subversive as anything Marx ever disseminated). What's that? You'll drop an Acme anvil on my head if I keep up this ridiculous twaddle? Fair enough; let's keep searching for viable adult-themed animation that has a chance of commercial success.
Idea: Let's suppose instead that an entire "adult" film genre were to be wedded to animation in order to produce the desired hybrid. A sharp producer could wed, say, film noir to animation, and...Voila? Who Framed Roger Rabbit! Except...how many such features would the public accept on a steady basis? There are also some risks involved; once a number of these are created, be they noir, war, or western, the tendency to veer into satire and parody may become uncontrollable due to the playful nature of the medium. I suspect we would eventually get a succession of too-clever=for-their-own-good, Tiny Toon-ish efforts that would be neither fish nor fowl; beautifuuly animated but thematically incoherent.
Do we raelly need another takeoff on Sunset Boulevard by the likes of Babs and Buster, an episode that surely went over the heads of the kids watchiong and was none too funny to adults either? Besides, once animation weds itself to genre, by definition it becomes a sub-genre (i.e. "animated noir") and is thus constricted in what themes it can portray. To be sure, a clever director could create revisionist features or subtly alter the mise en scene but why even pursue this line of thought any further? It only ends in books such as The Illusion of Life, that incomprehensible and joyless collection of essays compiled by Alan Chodenko in which mentally flatulant deconstructionists foundered through the study of animation using the arcane and obscure blatherings of Derrida and Lacan as their leaden oars; never had animation seemed so depressing. No, let's not.
Perhaps-just perhaps-there should not be a "quest" at all. That does not mean that adult-themed animation is either undesirable or a waste of time, not at all. I am simply invoking history here. Rarely, if ever, have animated stars or series become hits through the careful planning and promotion of any any given studio or creator, and I would venture to guess that the same is likely true of animated features. Fox bets the farm of Anastasia but Beavis and Butt-Head end up as cocks (huh huh) of the walk. Serendipity, synchronicity, and total surprise appear to often be the rule when aniamtion success occurs. Take the two animated series mentioned earlier in this discourse, for example. South Park started out as a studio joke, a Christmas card that resulted in major offers from major studios for it's bemused creators. Ren and Stimpy were originally mere secondary characters in John Kricfalusi's initial pitch to Nickelodeon. The Tazmanian Devil, today one of WB's most popular (and merchandisable) characters would have disappeared after one appearance had it not been for the subjective opinion and intervention of Jack Warner. Most times he was so typically unaware of what was transpiring in his own animation studio that he thought his crew to have been reponsible for Mickey Mouse.
On the other hand, Tex Avery (under pressure fro MGM) tried to manufacture a star in Screwy Squirrel. It didn't work, not even for a genius such as Tex. Ub Iwerks, one of the great animation mavens of his day, couldn't put Flip the Frog across as a rival to Mickey Mouse despite having an all-star lineup of some of the nation's greatest animators at the time. To sum up, it seems that many of the best and most memorable triumphs in animation occured unexpectedly when no one was traying to make them happen.
Therefore, a modest proposal: Rather than trying to make animation fit the Procrustean bed of "adult themes", why not simply let animation do what it does best, and the rest will follow? Animation is a highly plastic, wonderfully expressive medium, adaptable to every subject from political propaganda to scientific research. It can portray anything. Let us simply generalize at this point and see what we can come up with. One, adult themes are related to universal conflicts and truths about the human conditionwhich are commonly faced at certain developmental milestones in a given culture and lifetime. Two, these themes are so common as to be instantly recognizable to a vast audience that will relate to, and empathize with, the characters who are experiencing them.
Scriptwriters of "adult-themed" animated features might do well to take a cue from the animators who will bring the script to life. When these talented craftspeople go to work, they may use live-action reference films in order to study movement and attitude. They may even rotoscope, but too much rotoscoping in a feature tends to undercut what they are trying to do. So it may go with scriptwriting: Place characters in adult situations, but simply use both as a reference. Exaggerate these situations and characters slightly (or occasionally grossly), and the animated feature will be entertaining while taking advantage of animation's most engaging properties at the same time.
Above all, don't push too hard or cogitate overmuch on those so-called "adult themes". Relax. Let the animation come in and fool around a little. You can never tell what might happen. We might agree, in the end, to call it adult-ery.
Talk to Dr. Toon about it (unless you plan to discuss themes of racial and class-based inequities in Rainbow Brite and the Star Stealer. It's been a long month).
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