ANIMATION XX
An Adult gaze into animation
RESEARCH QUESTION: What has led to the rebirth of Adult Animation?
TOPIC
I want to expose the evolution of adult animation, how it was born, perished and eventually re-embodied into the images belonging to our current times.
Cartoons have long been associated with children’s fairy tales and our brains tend to regard animation as a form of entertainment more suitable for those who have not yet reached puberty. The dissertation aims to show that there is nothing scandalous or scabrous behind animations that are exclusive for an adult audience but are merely a reflection of the social context. It always depends on the eyes and minds that
assimilate an object, not on the object itself. Through this study, I want to show how the innocence and fantasy of cartoons has been used over the years to represent something pleasantly unexpected.
- Rationale
Nowadays, animated content is still often classified as children’s material; this thinking is partly understandable, as this is the largest segment of its target audience. However, by following this idea, many people miss out on watching animated films and works of art designed for an adult audience. Animation, from its earliest experiments, has always referred to an adult audience, but over the years this intention has become increasingly difficult to grasp, as our unconscious associates this type of entertainment with the purity of childhood (Chow, 2021).
With this thesis, I intend to explore adult animation, understanding where it has been hiding over the years, and to demonstrate how it represents the historical and cultural context in which it exists.
Contents – General structure
Chapter 1: Explaining Adult Animation. 3
Chapter 2: Hays Code – the before and after 4
Chapter 3: The Rebirth of Adult Animation. 5
RESEARCH
The early days of adult animation
The misconceptions about adult animation
Since the early days, animation aimed at adults has always had controversies and misconceptions about its target audience. Let’s take a look at them here.
Animated films in their early days back in the 1920s to 1930s were actually invented and produced mainly for adult audiences. The concept of an animated film made for children didn’t even exist at the time. The reason is that at that time movies were only shown in cinemas in the evening after 9 o’clock, which was bedtime for children, so going to the movies was an activity only for adults.
A good example is Betty Boop, who became a cartoon sex icon upon her debut in Talkartoons in the early 1930s. However, like many other adult animated characters throughout the 1930s, her role was curtailed when the Motion Picture Production Code of 1930 came into effect and began to control what was shown in movies. Therefore, she didn’t make an appearance on television until around 1955.
Fritz the Cat was the first animated film to earn an “X rating,” which is basically just a pornographic film. Fritz the Cat is more than simply porn. The film has only a small amount of nudity. It is, nevertheless, a striking satire of the 1960s excesses, including sex, drug usage, race relations, and politics.
All other cartoons were popular mainly for adults until Disney made Snow White with the exclusive intention of aiming it at children.
In general, animation for children at that time was a very new concept except for Disney movies and a few others. Only when television was made popular in the 50s that animation for children became more widely accepted as the norm. However, these films still contained adult elements because there was no clear age classification yet.
The adult animation channel
The first cartoon channel was Cartoon Network, which showed mainly Hanna Barbera’s old adult animated series from the 1950s-1960s like The Flinstones, The Jetsons, and so on. The channel then became the most popular source for children’s entertainment on TV.
However, all that has changed since The Simpsons came out. It was the first hugely popular adult animated series.
The introduction of Adult Swim was one of the most significant breakthroughs in the American adult animation scene. Adult Swim, which debuted in 2001, was a program that specialized in showing Cartoon Network’s oriented shows after 9 pm to separate them from daytime children’s content. However, in 2005, it became a separate channel.
The future of adult animation
Today, other platforms have begun to produce their ORIGINAL animated adult comedies, such as FX’s Archer and Netflix’s BoJack Horseman, both of which have gained critical praise and treaded the line between drama and comedy. With newer shows like Bob’s Burgers, Fox has maintained its position as a leading network for adult animated comedy.
Background
As an introduction to my dissertation, I intend to investigate how the historical context of the 1990s was the most suitable period to host the return of adult fiction, which for years has been forced to hide from the periphery because of the Hays Code. The X generation was the first generation to have spent their childhood in front of a television set.
Consider that in the 1990s, an American child watched an average of 40 hours of television per week, while a well-off family spent around 7 hours a day in front of the television. The result was the development of teenagers who were virtually indifferent to the marketing strategies of generalist TV.
It is not by chance that the TV heroes of these years shared with this generation a certain disinterest and detachment to the real world
General outline
After establishing the historical context, I intend to open the main body of the thesis with an opening chapter that will explain the meaning of adult animation, the themes it covers and the benefits it brings to society.
For the second chapter I intend to prove the point that animation has always been intended to entertain an adult audience and to do this I plan to talk about the way animation was used and seen in the years before the Production Code and how it caused its disappearance.
Finally, in the last chapter, I want to talk about the renaissance of this style of adult animation and how it is constantly expanding and evolving.