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silveradept[This Year's December Days Theme is Community, and all the forms that it takes. If you have some suggestions about what communities I'm part of (or that you think I'm part of) that would be worth a look, let me know in the comments.]
When I was a youngling, enough things that were old were new again that I had a steady diet of cartoons to fill many of my days. Looney Tunes were the primary kind of cartoon in the house, because they were cheap to run on Saturdays (and we had a couple of tapes that contained a selection of Merrie Melodies.) Mixed in with that, and cartoons like the Flintstones and the Smurfs, though, were other offerings, like Don Adams doing a cyborg version of Maxwell Smart in Inspector Gadget (although it would be a much longer time before I was introduced to Agent 86, and thus understood where Gadget came from,) Jaleel White doing Sonic the Hedgehog (a somewhat marked contrast with the sitcom character Steve Urkel,) an animated version of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (whose theme and cadence of theme have had all kinds of words set to, especially in Tumblr memes,) and, eventually, an animation renaissance that Disney movies were certainly a part of, but not the only component of. Animaniacs and Tiny Toon Adventures, Freakazoid!, The Tick, The Amazing Screw-On Head, X-Men '96, Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego?, an afternoon Spider-Man cartoon, and the occasional inclusion in the rotation with things that didn't look anything much like the cartoons of weekday afternoon and Saturday morning. Mind you, there's a high probability they'd been altered from their originals. Sailor Moon showed up occasionally, but the most consistent Saturday joiner was Yoroiden Samurai Troopers, repurposed as Ronin Warriors. Not consistently enough for me to get a feel for what the actual plotlines were, or the characters, but they were there enough that I can remember bits and pieces of it. (I should probably watch the original at some point, honestly, or at least see how much it was chopped up and repurposed for the U.S. market.)
The resurgence of domestic animation of many different forms and levels of comedy made for, first, the creation of a satellite/cable channel that was nothing but cartoons, some of them the classics of Hanna-Barbera and similar, some of them commissioned new to feed the audience that was finally starting to appreciate animation again, and for its ability to work on multiple levels in the same way that many good comics (and classic animation) did. Dexter's Laboratory, the Powerpuff Girls, Samurai Jack, and the entire Cartoon Cartoons block came into existence. On other channels, like MTV and Comedy Central, programs like Daria, Beavis and Butt-Head, South Park, and Ren and Stimpy looked at things with more adult lenses. (Or, perhaps, with a certain amount of glee at the looser restrictions and requirements about language and what could be shown on pay TV compared to over-the-air TV.) Nickelodeon got involved in animation as well, and while they did do a lot of kid-friendly stuff, like Rugrats and the Wild Thornberrys, they also did Rocko's Modern Life, which really worked hard to provide a lot of material for older audiences that the kids would not understand (and which is very fun to come back to once you are old enough to get it.) As did both The Simpsons and Futurama, cartoons that were getting primetime blocks with the intention of the whole family watching them after football or other such activities.
Joining them, in fits and starts, in places not often known for animation, like the Sci-fi Channel, were some tentative imports from Japan, some of which were much less censored than what might appear on channels that children were expected to be watching. Ultimately, though, the place where a significant amount of anime went and would gain popularity was with the Toonami block on Cartoon Network, because they would do reasonable dubs and make minimal cuts, compared to the way that, say, Fox Kids butchered basically everything they could get their hands on, from Cardcaptor Sakura to Escaflwone, in the same way that Sailor Moon had also been cut up terribly in an attempt to make it something much more like what you might see on the Saturday morning of yesteryear. (Manga style also helped influence webcomics, so many of the communities that I am part of have other communities in their pasts and futures.) Dragon Ball Z and several other long-running shonen action series found their home and their fanbase on the Toonami block, and the presence of significant amounts of filler episodes meant that you had marathon blocks available as needed. I watched some of those things, but I had a wide variety of interest in fantasy, comedy, and a lot of the stuff that was marketed for girls by not having as much action and more romance things. Plenty of fandom involvement there, too, with conventions and enjoying fandubs and the late night programming, where I was also introduced to a fair number of other things, like some of the animated works of Don Hertzfeldt (Rejected is hilarious and also best experienced while slightly sleep-deprived and in the context of videos like Forklift Driver Klaus.)
The advent of the DVD helped quell out the battles that had been going on about whether one should get the localized dub of cartoons made in another country or let the language flow through and read the subtitles instead, because no you could include both language tracks and the subtitles tracks on your disc. (Although there is a nasty habit of including the subtitle tracks for the Japanese language audio and not providing a set of subtitles for the dubbed English audio.) It also meant that you could carry an entire series in a much smaller amount of space than you could on tape. High definition files and discs have only made carrying lots in small physical spaces even easier, and then the advent of streaming services gave us the promise that we didn't even have to carry space on our hard drives and still have access to a wide library of possible animation, whether with hand-drawn animation, computer-aided animation, or computer-generated animation. Disney got into the act by giving us many of the films of Studio Ghibli, all of which are, in a word, lush. Miramax, the Disney marque that handles things that would be too adult for the Disney brand, also released some things, but for the most part, if you wanted to get anime, you were dealing with a limited number of companies who were handling the releases of such things Stateside. (You still are.)
And as the audience grew up, so did their cartoons. Cartoon Network not only created the [adult swim] block, containing such delights as Robot Chicken, some seriously effective bumpers, and stuff that could not have been shown pre-watershed. They also produced scary-as-shit stuff like Over the Garden Wall, which was released under the main Cartoon Network name, along with a cartoon by the name of Steven Universe. Nickelodeon gave us first Avatar: the Last Airbender, and then followed it up with Avatar: The Legend of Korra, which had many of the same animation signals as anime, but definitely wasn't. Similarly, Rooster Teeth's RWBY aimed toward creating something similar to the effects of anime, but without actually being such. Disney got in the game with Gravity Falls and The Owl House, and, to some degree thanks to those ironic folks who found themselves having to justify why they were genuinely enjoying a show about pastel ponies, the G4 My Little Pony series. There's also Rick and Morty, Phineas and Ferb, Codename: Kids Next Door, and a lot of other animated series. Streaming services provided access to old properties and reboots of them as well, so we had a Gina Rodriguez Carmen Sandiego, and the adaptation of the comic book Nimona to film, and Disney/Pixar collaborations in addition to the more hand-drawn look of Disney films. Star Trek got a couple of animated stories, of which Lower Decks is very much Star Trek in its outlook, but is Star Trek in the same way that The Orville is Star Trek. More of the anime catalog came across, including some of the material that definitely was intended for adult audiences, whether because it was unafraid of showing nudity (which Ghost in the Shell did a little bit of, because the Major's camouflage didn't work with clothing), interested in showing sex, or was significantly detailed in its showing of violence and gore.
You'll notice that in addition to the viewers getting older, a significant number of the viewers were coming to acceptance of their own queerness, which was reflected, at least somewhat, in the animation that was there. It took Korra all the way to the end of the series before she and Asami had a kiss, Steven Universe had scads of it, although hidden behind some metaphors. the Owl House had a lot of outright queerness, Nimona has her girlfriend, Ballister has his boyfriend (although it takes the two of them nearly the entire movie to kiss and make up with each other), and, of course, all you have to do is listen to where the cries of outrage and "pornography!" are coming from to know which bits of comics or animation (and sometimes, live-action, but mostly comics and animation) are showing off their queerness where other people might be able to see them, and doing so in an approving manner, rather than condemning them in the strongest terms as the theocrats would want us to. It is a good sign that we're seeing more and more of this, and more and more of different skin tones, and just a greater amount of people working both in the drawing and in being represented by the drawing. We get better stories told, more interesting ones told, and we get to see an entire multiverse of Spider-people, most of whom don't look like a white guy.
Animation is, thankfully, back in as one of the legitimate forms of art for all kinds of audiences. Some of it is still intended for kids, some of it is intended for families to watch together (Bluey, I think, is one that falls into this category), some of it is for kids to laugh at the slapstick and adults to laugh at the innuendo, some of it is for people to revel in grossness and foul language and crude jokes. Some of it is for people to make jokes that require a musical background to understand, classical or otherwise. It can be informative, fun, silly, serious, gory, erotic, fantastical, basically anything that can be told as a story in a visual medium. The wide variety of stories tellable and approaches that work in animation gives it staying power. What it needs the most now, like many other creative pursuits, is paying people properly for their work, rather than using the threat that there are hundreds of other people who would take that job as a way of keeping wages depressed and hours very long.
At this point, most everyone with access to television or cinema has probably seen at least one episode of an animated series, or an animated movie. That says a lot about the versatility of the medium.
When I was a youngling, enough things that were old were new again that I had a steady diet of cartoons to fill many of my days. Looney Tunes were the primary kind of cartoon in the house, because they were cheap to run on Saturdays (and we had a couple of tapes that contained a selection of Merrie Melodies.) Mixed in with that, and cartoons like the Flintstones and the Smurfs, though, were other offerings, like Don Adams doing a cyborg version of Maxwell Smart in Inspector Gadget (although it would be a much longer time before I was introduced to Agent 86, and thus understood where Gadget came from,) Jaleel White doing Sonic the Hedgehog (a somewhat marked contrast with the sitcom character Steve Urkel,) an animated version of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (whose theme and cadence of theme have had all kinds of words set to, especially in Tumblr memes,) and, eventually, an animation renaissance that Disney movies were certainly a part of, but not the only component of. Animaniacs and Tiny Toon Adventures, Freakazoid!, The Tick, The Amazing Screw-On Head, X-Men '96, Where on Earth is Carmen Sandiego?, an afternoon Spider-Man cartoon, and the occasional inclusion in the rotation with things that didn't look anything much like the cartoons of weekday afternoon and Saturday morning. Mind you, there's a high probability they'd been altered from their originals. Sailor Moon showed up occasionally, but the most consistent Saturday joiner was Yoroiden Samurai Troopers, repurposed as Ronin Warriors. Not consistently enough for me to get a feel for what the actual plotlines were, or the characters, but they were there enough that I can remember bits and pieces of it. (I should probably watch the original at some point, honestly, or at least see how much it was chopped up and repurposed for the U.S. market.)
The resurgence of domestic animation of many different forms and levels of comedy made for, first, the creation of a satellite/cable channel that was nothing but cartoons, some of them the classics of Hanna-Barbera and similar, some of them commissioned new to feed the audience that was finally starting to appreciate animation again, and for its ability to work on multiple levels in the same way that many good comics (and classic animation) did. Dexter's Laboratory, the Powerpuff Girls, Samurai Jack, and the entire Cartoon Cartoons block came into existence. On other channels, like MTV and Comedy Central, programs like Daria, Beavis and Butt-Head, South Park, and Ren and Stimpy looked at things with more adult lenses. (Or, perhaps, with a certain amount of glee at the looser restrictions and requirements about language and what could be shown on pay TV compared to over-the-air TV.) Nickelodeon got involved in animation as well, and while they did do a lot of kid-friendly stuff, like Rugrats and the Wild Thornberrys, they also did Rocko's Modern Life, which really worked hard to provide a lot of material for older audiences that the kids would not understand (and which is very fun to come back to once you are old enough to get it.) As did both The Simpsons and Futurama, cartoons that were getting primetime blocks with the intention of the whole family watching them after football or other such activities.
Joining them, in fits and starts, in places not often known for animation, like the Sci-fi Channel, were some tentative imports from Japan, some of which were much less censored than what might appear on channels that children were expected to be watching. Ultimately, though, the place where a significant amount of anime went and would gain popularity was with the Toonami block on Cartoon Network, because they would do reasonable dubs and make minimal cuts, compared to the way that, say, Fox Kids butchered basically everything they could get their hands on, from Cardcaptor Sakura to Escaflwone, in the same way that Sailor Moon had also been cut up terribly in an attempt to make it something much more like what you might see on the Saturday morning of yesteryear. (Manga style also helped influence webcomics, so many of the communities that I am part of have other communities in their pasts and futures.) Dragon Ball Z and several other long-running shonen action series found their home and their fanbase on the Toonami block, and the presence of significant amounts of filler episodes meant that you had marathon blocks available as needed. I watched some of those things, but I had a wide variety of interest in fantasy, comedy, and a lot of the stuff that was marketed for girls by not having as much action and more romance things. Plenty of fandom involvement there, too, with conventions and enjoying fandubs and the late night programming, where I was also introduced to a fair number of other things, like some of the animated works of Don Hertzfeldt (Rejected is hilarious and also best experienced while slightly sleep-deprived and in the context of videos like Forklift Driver Klaus.)
The advent of the DVD helped quell out the battles that had been going on about whether one should get the localized dub of cartoons made in another country or let the language flow through and read the subtitles instead, because no you could include both language tracks and the subtitles tracks on your disc. (Although there is a nasty habit of including the subtitle tracks for the Japanese language audio and not providing a set of subtitles for the dubbed English audio.) It also meant that you could carry an entire series in a much smaller amount of space than you could on tape. High definition files and discs have only made carrying lots in small physical spaces even easier, and then the advent of streaming services gave us the promise that we didn't even have to carry space on our hard drives and still have access to a wide library of possible animation, whether with hand-drawn animation, computer-aided animation, or computer-generated animation. Disney got into the act by giving us many of the films of Studio Ghibli, all of which are, in a word, lush. Miramax, the Disney marque that handles things that would be too adult for the Disney brand, also released some things, but for the most part, if you wanted to get anime, you were dealing with a limited number of companies who were handling the releases of such things Stateside. (You still are.)
And as the audience grew up, so did their cartoons. Cartoon Network not only created the [adult swim] block, containing such delights as Robot Chicken, some seriously effective bumpers, and stuff that could not have been shown pre-watershed. They also produced scary-as-shit stuff like Over the Garden Wall, which was released under the main Cartoon Network name, along with a cartoon by the name of Steven Universe. Nickelodeon gave us first Avatar: the Last Airbender, and then followed it up with Avatar: The Legend of Korra, which had many of the same animation signals as anime, but definitely wasn't. Similarly, Rooster Teeth's RWBY aimed toward creating something similar to the effects of anime, but without actually being such. Disney got in the game with Gravity Falls and The Owl House, and, to some degree thanks to those ironic folks who found themselves having to justify why they were genuinely enjoying a show about pastel ponies, the G4 My Little Pony series. There's also Rick and Morty, Phineas and Ferb, Codename: Kids Next Door, and a lot of other animated series. Streaming services provided access to old properties and reboots of them as well, so we had a Gina Rodriguez Carmen Sandiego, and the adaptation of the comic book Nimona to film, and Disney/Pixar collaborations in addition to the more hand-drawn look of Disney films. Star Trek got a couple of animated stories, of which Lower Decks is very much Star Trek in its outlook, but is Star Trek in the same way that The Orville is Star Trek. More of the anime catalog came across, including some of the material that definitely was intended for adult audiences, whether because it was unafraid of showing nudity (which Ghost in the Shell did a little bit of, because the Major's camouflage didn't work with clothing), interested in showing sex, or was significantly detailed in its showing of violence and gore.
You'll notice that in addition to the viewers getting older, a significant number of the viewers were coming to acceptance of their own queerness, which was reflected, at least somewhat, in the animation that was there. It took Korra all the way to the end of the series before she and Asami had a kiss, Steven Universe had scads of it, although hidden behind some metaphors. the Owl House had a lot of outright queerness, Nimona has her girlfriend, Ballister has his boyfriend (although it takes the two of them nearly the entire movie to kiss and make up with each other), and, of course, all you have to do is listen to where the cries of outrage and "pornography!" are coming from to know which bits of comics or animation (and sometimes, live-action, but mostly comics and animation) are showing off their queerness where other people might be able to see them, and doing so in an approving manner, rather than condemning them in the strongest terms as the theocrats would want us to. It is a good sign that we're seeing more and more of this, and more and more of different skin tones, and just a greater amount of people working both in the drawing and in being represented by the drawing. We get better stories told, more interesting ones told, and we get to see an entire multiverse of Spider-people, most of whom don't look like a white guy.
Animation is, thankfully, back in as one of the legitimate forms of art for all kinds of audiences. Some of it is still intended for kids, some of it is intended for families to watch together (Bluey, I think, is one that falls into this category), some of it is for kids to laugh at the slapstick and adults to laugh at the innuendo, some of it is for people to revel in grossness and foul language and crude jokes. Some of it is for people to make jokes that require a musical background to understand, classical or otherwise. It can be informative, fun, silly, serious, gory, erotic, fantastical, basically anything that can be told as a story in a visual medium. The wide variety of stories tellable and approaches that work in animation gives it staying power. What it needs the most now, like many other creative pursuits, is paying people properly for their work, rather than using the threat that there are hundreds of other people who would take that job as a way of keeping wages depressed and hours very long.
At this point, most everyone with access to television or cinema has probably seen at least one episode of an animated series, or an animated movie. That says a lot about the versatility of the medium.
