A brief, and somewhat shocking, history of adult animation
Before Disney made animation synonymous with kid's fare, the genre was filled with horny cats, warrior blondes, and a 1930s flapper with a taste for men
Film Features Animation
In the Disney and Pixar era, most American moviegoers have come to define animation as candy-colored kiddie fare that traffics in facile, rugrat-ready themes about family and finding yourself. But according to Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro, that definition is not only limiting, it’s insulting. His Oscar-nominated, anti-fascist Pinocchio, for instance, operates at a darker and more challenging, adult-oriented remove that feels light years away from the antics of Toy Story’s Buzz Lightyear who once told Woody, “We need to figure out what’s best for everyone!”
Del Toro clearly chafes against such sentiments, especially in animation; while accepting the Golden Globe award last month for Best Animated Motion Picture for Pinocchio, he proclaimed that “animation is not just a medium for kids.” This comes after telling journalists at last year’s Toronto Film Festival that “animation is not a fucking genre for kids,” which further suggests how deeply held his beliefs are. Del Toro, of course, shouldn’t have to fight this hard to make his point. Because he is very right. Animation isn’t just for kids, and it never has been.
Meet Eveready Harton, a cartoon superhero from 1928. Eveready is the dictionary definition of “not safe for work.” In fact, his debut—and sole—cartoon short, Eveready Harton in ‘Buried Treasure,’ might be the single most pornographic movie ever made. The first minute alone includes flies landing on an erect penis that gets blown off a body by a pistol before reattaching itself with a backflip, at least five sex acts, including several by “funny animals,” and a naked woman cheerfully pleasuring herself.
Eveready matters because he isn’t a work of crazed fan art. His alleged creators are a who’s who of early animation legends, who supposedly wanted to liven up a dinner honoring the inventor of screen animation, Windsor McKay. There is no greater pedigree than that. Eveready is an extreme manifestation of a general tendency in studio short animation that lasted until 1934. With no production code in place, the “kiddie” cartoon stars slipped the leash all the time.
Animated Jazz Age flapper makes grown men flip
Betty Boop was a repeat offender, whose over-sexed antics may have brought censorship down on everyone else. Two of many examples: Betty as a dog-eared sex worker in the amazingly brassy Barnacle Bill The Sailor (1930), and Betty as the bikini-clad victim of workplace sexual assault in the truly disturbing Boop-Oop-A-Doop, where virtue is restored after a suggested offscreen sex crime when Betty cheerfully tells Koko the Clown, “He couldn’t take my Boop-Oop-a-Doop away!”
Progress toward a more sophisticated kind of commercial storytelling found its first great champions in the post-war cartoonists at United Productions of America, or UPA. The UPA artists chafed at the volume-based realism of the Disney house style, and they despised Disney’s bread-and-butter focus on stories for children. Each UPA cartoon had a bespoke visual palette based on modern art; satirists like Dr. Seuss and James Thurber provided the urbane material. UPA’s modernist break with Disneyisms made space for innovations like the Pop Art-derived Beatles cartoon Yellow Submarine a generation later. The UPA masterpiece is a subjective camera Tell-Tale Heart that marries Salvador Dali with Edgar Allan Poe, one of the great mid-century examples of how animation often does a better job than live-action cinema in rendering complex inner states.
Full-length animation took its own turn toward grown-up topics in the 1950s, thanks to an unlikely funding source. A sober animated feature based on George Orwell’s anti-communist fable Animal Farm materialized in 1954, courtesy of the CIA. You read that right: the CIA produced a full-length anti-communist cartoon during the Cold War—secretly, because secrecy is how they roll. The Agency actually changed Orwell’s ending to make it more uplifting, so we know they’d gone Hollywood. Fun fact: Animal Farm was the most financially successful animated film of that year.
(Rated) X marks the spot for animated Fritz The Cat
Meanwhile, the legacy of Eveready Harton persisted. The second great chronicler of cartoon sex (plus drug use and disturbing violence) was Ralph Bakshi. A pioneer of boomer TV faves like Spider-Man, Bakshi went rogue in the late 1960s, because hey, who didn’t? His pornographic R. Crumb adaptation Fritz The Cat (1972) upset Crumb so deeply that he killed Fritz off with an ice pick in a comic called Fritz The Cat, Superstar, as an act of protest. But the film grossed an astounding $90 million globally, and Bakshi went on to a long, significant career as an animation provoc-auteur.
Both Bakshi and a Mobius-driven 1981 anthology flick based on the erotic sci-fi comics magazine Heavy Metal had a measurable influence on the fantasy-driven aspects of Japanese anime. But anime encompasses every conceivable tone and genre; it’s a wonderland of great animation too intricate and vast to do justice to in a survey. Still, if you want to see a seminal work of “adult” cyberpunk futurism, Katsuhiro Otomo’s Blade Runner-esque Akira (1988) is a stunning place to start.
Animation tackles adult themes and Oscar takes notice
In our own period, the “grown-up” material has come thick and fast, especially since the Academy created a Best Animated Feature category, something it (shamefully) resisted until 2002. Oscar’s siren song draws in “art films” and indie projects, including this year’s A24 charmer Marcel The Shell With Shoes On, plus all the expected box office juggernauts from Disney, Pixar, and DreamWorks. The Best Animated Feature nominations are a literal battleground between studio animation’s focus on children’s entertainment and an internationalist trend toward more adventurous fare.
Miyazaki’s classic fantasy Spirited Away (2001) won the second Best Animated Feature Oscar (partly because it was distributed in the U.S. by Disney). Even deeper cuts among past nominees include Sylvain Chomet’s surreal The Triplets Of Bellville (2003), Tono Errando’s operatic love story Chico And Rita (2010), and two devastating biographies about Middle Eastern refugees: Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud’s tale of the Iranian revolution Persepolis (2007), and the adult animated documentary Flee (2021), which managed to get Oscar nominations for Best Animated Feature, Best International Feature, and Best Documentary, all in the same year.
Weirdly, Flee seems directly inspired by an animated masterpiece the Academy failed to nominate for Best Animated Feature: Ari Folman’s Israeli documentary/combat memoir Waltz With Bashir (2008). Like Persepolis and Flee, Bashir uses animation as a tool to create an enclosed subjective reality, colored by loss and memory. Animation informs every detail in these films with a depth and resonance a live-action film could never match.
Mumblecore Hollywood renegades like Wes Anderson (Fantastic Mr. Fox) and Charlie Kaufman (Anomalisa) have bitten their nails as the Academy tore open its Animated Feature envelope at Oscar time, too. Del Toro is nominated for this year’s Best Animated Feature Oscar, and given the recent woes at Disney, he may even be the front-runner to receive it—in a category Disney releases have carried 16 out of 21 times. If Del Toro’s rebel Pinocchio grabs the gold, it’ll be a grand historical rebuff to the old Disney formulas, underscoring how “animation is not a fucking genre for kids” once and for all.
125 Comments
I would put in a plug for the amazing French film Fantastic Planet. Amazing and strange designs for the beings on Ygam (and the planet itself), with a thought-provoking story. Plus, you know, the nudity and sexual content.
East European animation has always been subversive and fascinating.
ENDUT! HOCH HECH!
This is legitimately one of my favourite jokes they ever did. I remember occasionally stumbling on cartoons like this on international broadcasters and loving that I had no idea what was going on.
I still have my bootleg copy of Itchy & Scratchy meets Fritz the Cat.
I remember stumbling across Heavy Metal and Fritz the Cat on TV late at night as a kid. I loved Heavy Metal; Fritz the Cat not so much. Fritz’s use of crows as stand-ins for black people (I’m a practicing black person myself) did help crystallize what I’d found vaguely uncomfortable about the crows in Dumbo but lacked the vocabulary to articulate why. I’ve still never seen Akira, though the TV commercials for it are burned into my brain:
I know a lot of people resist Akira simply because of the hype. I was in that camp, but I finally broke down. When you watch it just keep in mind that it’s so good, everything after Akira copied it. So try to set your wayback machine to the 80’s, when no one had ever seen anything like it before. Even without that, the film is fantastic. Solid story and freaking gorgeous setting – the wide shots of Neo Tokyo are just…. dayum. Go watch it! 😀
I just bought the Blu-ray; if I hate it, you’ve made an enemy for life.
did you watch it yet tho
ROFL I’m prepared to face the consequences. But not worried. Enjoy!
And the music! No movie sounds like this and no movie has the chutzpah to try to sound like this. It’s one of those sound tracks you can listen to all the way through and be transported every time.
This is a fantastic video going into the creation of the score for Akira.
100% I have seen it more times than I can count and have owned just about every version on VHS, DVD and Blu Ray. IF you liked the movie I 100% suggest you read the manga. It’s 3 volumes but a quick read and fills in a lot of things missing from the anime.
The Akira manga is six volumes.
You are correct I may have been thinking of the Ghost in the shell special edition I have. Still a great read
It definitely is. And it has Chiyoko who is just the best.
I saw that commercial endlessly as a kid and my main takeaway was that anime was just a sizzle reel of heads blowing up.Anyway, I’ll vouch for Akira as well. It’s such an amazing film.
That commercial scared me so much as a kid that the warning prompted me to cover my eyes or change the channel as quickly as I could.
KANEDA!!!!
TET
SU
OOOOOO!
Oh, yes, Akira. The film so boring I fell asleep watching it, and wasn’t interested enough to go back and try again. (To be fair, cyberpunk isn’t one of my preferred genres… I also find Blade Runner to have some nice visuals, but boring everything else.)
Akira is literally one of the only good anime ever made imo. I’ve never been able to enjoy the medium more than with these older feature-length anime. Series and everything post 2000 is trash to me.
So I’ll say something that’ll get me in trouble: I like the crows in Dumbo. I thought they were cool! Are they problematic? Sure. But I find them less harmful than a lot of other ways it could have gone down, given the time period. For what they were, they’re fun, they’re funny, I enjoy the jovial energy they bring to that part of the movie, and “When I see an Elephant Fly” gets my toe tapping every time. Those smooth moves! It’s a great song.
I’ve never actually seen Dumbo in full; we had Disney Sing-Along Songs VHS tapes that my sister and I used to watch all the time. So for me, it was just the experience of being, like, 10 years old and watching “When I See An Elephant Fly” and thinking that the song was good, but there was something that made me uncomfortable about the crows, and then a short while later seeing Fritz the Cat explicitly making the link between black people and the crows and realizing that’s what it was. That’s why I always find it funny when people are like “Kids don’t notice these things!!!” because I definitely had “Wait a minute…” moments just from watching a song in Dumbo (…and in Lady and the Tramp, and in The Aristocats).
Yeah, the “kids don’t notice these things” excuse does a disservice to kids. Like adults, some kids are going to pick up on it and some are not. As a child, I didn’t pick up on the fact that the crows were Black stereotypes at all, but I pretty much figured out right away that the Siamese Cat song boils down to “we are Asian and therefore bad guys.” I guess it depends on what stereotypes you’re familiar with. But kids (especially PoC kids) recognize more stereotypes than people realize.
I saw Fritz and Heavy Metal when I was a little kid in the early 80’s at my grandmother’s house. She also took me to just about every R Rated movie that came out between 1980 and 1990.
My favorite type of Guy is the one that goes cartoons can be for adults and rather than watch something for grownups like Perfect Blue or Mad God they make hours long Youtube rants about why the new Transformers cartoon is too “woke” or some shit.
Do… Do not type “masters of the universe revlation” into the yt search bar…
That was hilarious. Grown-ass adults pretending to be genuinely concerned for the artistic integrity of their 1980’s toy commercials.
Yesterday Twitter’s main character was a guy who was furious that one of the Transformers was trans.
Lots to unpack there but none of it worth the trouble.
Something something SuperStraightFormers I imagine :eyeroll:
Some conservative is going to try and get a Kickstarter going for “Cisformers: Robots That Aren’t Hiding Anything”, aren’t they?
“CISFORMERS: ROBOTS IN…the bathroom that is correct for their genitalia.”
You think he’s pissed? I’m pissed none of them are actually a pair of copper windings around a ferrite core.
I don’t watch a lot of anime, but when I check out popular suggestions, they tend to be some of the best movies I’ve ever seen. Perfect Blue was a prime example of this. I became obsessed after I saw it.
Most popular American movies that AREN’T animated are still for children.
I feel like a lot of earlier stuff mentioned on here (Betty Boop, Fritz the Cat, Heavy Metal) pays into an even worse characterization that animation is only for kids AND perverts. No doubt there exists truly adult animation out there (not just sleeze, but things catered to adult tastes, themes, etc.), but I still feel like the majority of the animated output you get is primarily aimed at children. I think this may be why it’s hard to shake off that stigma that it is just for kids – because it mostly is still for kids. That said, I don’t feel like this stigma carries much weight anymore. It sounds like maybe it’s an issue in the awards circuit (who could imagine that an award voting committee might be out-of-touch!?), but anime is cool now, there is more adult animation out there than ever before, and I even think people are fine to admit that they’ll watch something that might be geared towards kids but has enough substance that adults can appreciate it too.
Also, the idea that Heavy Metal = major boobage spilled into the magazine which (pre-movie) was probably one of the most important works of SF ever published. Not just in comics but in the genre as a whole it was probably on equal footing with New Worlds in how it revitalized the game. Everyone from William Gibson to Ridley Scott to Katsuhiro Otomo have cited it as a major infleunce.
This response is off the top of my head so feel free to poke holes in what I’m about to say. I don’t think the US publication Heavy Metal was “one of the most important works of SF ever published.” I think “Métal hurlant,” the French publication that Heavy Metal was derived from was hugely influential for comics and probably sci-fi as well. Heavy Metal in the US was important for bringing the Franco-Belgian and Japanese comics traditions (the two other big comics traditions apart from U.S.) to the U.S. That format though — quality magazine production comics anthology — has never really gotten traction in the U.S. although it’s big in Europe and Japan.
This article seems to point out primarily the extremes in US animation, but there’s ones in the middle-ground, that aren’t kid’s films, but aren’t pornographic either. Bashiki’s Lord of the Rings, for example, was more of a “family film” than kid’s movie, aiming for the same audience as the later live-action version, but it’s an extreme example.Anime in particular has covered almost all age groups and genres for decades now, from kid fair to full on pornographic (typically referred to by its own name: hentai), and everything in between. So it’s partly a cultural thing, as the Japanese don’t view animation as solely for kids.It’s even a marked difference between how the Japanese and US handle manga/comic book adaptations. In Japan, manga can be adult, and is often adapted as an anime, although sometimes as live action. In the US, comic books can be adult, but when those are adapted, like with Watchmen, The Boys, Road to Perdition, etc., or even just most superhero films, they’re most likely live action. So there’s a bit of a feedback loop in the US where there’s less adult animated fare because it’s still looked upon as mostly kid’s stuff, so audiences mostly view kids animated fare and get used to thinking of animated fare as kids stuff, which means less adult animated fare is made…. etc. However, it’s possible for that to change, especially as anime is becoming more popular and accepted.
I agree attitudes towards animation are mostly broadening, but there’s still a stigma. I know a few (lame) people who wrinkle their noses and say, “I don’t like cartoons.”
I’ve known one or two people in Aus at uni who wanted to use animation to tell some fairly not-out-there adult stories – think bog standard drama sort of stuff – which were basically killed in the womb.“But you can’t do a story about woman grieving her elderly father and lamenting the connection she lost. Kids don’t like that.”
“I feel like a lot of earlier stuff mentioned on here (Betty Boop, Fritz
the Cat, Heavy Metal) pays into an even worse characterization that
animation is only for kids AND perverts.”“It sounds like maybe it’s an issue in the awards circuit (who could
imagine that an award voting committee might be out-of-touch!?), but
anime is cool now…”A surprising amount of anime, and I mean mainstream, not hentai, is also for kids or perverts. There was one I was enjoying until one of the characters got into a bikini and cleaned her motorcycle with her breasts, another I didn’t make it a full two episodes in because the main character kept landing into compromising positions with his mother. And this is leaving aside all the panty shots, boob shots, and loli BS (oh, the amount of loli BS is truly disturbing).
Yeah, anime has a real pedo problem, though many of its fans don’t want to admit it.
I agree, part of the reason why I don’t watch anime. That and the general tropes that make me cringe with anime, like characters wearing their emotions on their sleeves, shouting into words what they’re feeling and overuse of internal thought dialogue, either as means to evoke deep thought but really, it’s just a lazy budget convenience, on top of all the pointless fan service.
That said, I think ‘Made in Abyss’ gets a pass. Yeah, the author’s a creep and there’s a lot of unnecessary icky and uncomfortable stuff peppered throughout but it’s also beautifully written, engaging and really draws you into these characters and the every-growing mysteries they encounter. The art is both beautiful and sometimes horrifying. As I said, I don’t watch anime but this one I consider among the greats, along with ‘Akira’ and the best of Miyazaki.
“It’s fine because it’s Japanese, silly! Don’t be xenophobic! Asian cultures are like that! It’s normal!” That’s the stock response. Neckbeard orientalism. It’s always surprised (sadly, getting less and less surprising these days), me about how what would be considered unacceptable creepiness in Western media by Western audiences is considered not just acceptable, but good, in Japanese media. I’m replaying Metal Gear Solid V, and holy hell, for a game that has precisely one female (supporting) character in it, they managed to shove in an epic amount of creepiness onto her. Quiet got way, way, way, way, less pushback from publications than pretty much any other mainstream female character, even though Kojima sexualised her way, way, way, way, way, WAY more than almost any other character you care to name, and totally unnecessarily to boot. Or, rather, he went out of his way to come up with an explanation as to why she a) never talks and b) why, despite being a special forces sniper she gets around in naught but a black bikini and some…torn stockings (an anime classic!)She pointedly bends over and stretches in front of the player when the view’s locked. She leans in and over the player’s camera in the helicopter, when you can’t really look anywhere else, let alone walk away. Cut scenes involving her roving the camera over her breasts and arse. The cut scene where you first capture her goes to first person, so you can get a reeeeeally good look at her boobs and panties as Snake picks her up. And, of course, they went hard on the Jiggle Physics. It’s offensive to women, and it’s offensive to me thinking I’d need or want that sort of thing. (It’s this sort of shit that’s why I don’t like telling people I play video games, a long with a million other reasons.)And no one really talked about it. At all. In an industry where there’s an increasing discourse around the portrayal of women in games, even back in 2015 the talk around Quiet was…well, quiet. There were a few mutterings, but compared to the outrage around, say, Lara Croft.There was the double standard, which felt very Orientalist to me: you have to respect Western women, but not Asian ones. You can demand that women in Western media are portrayed positively, but, come on, you can’t expect that from Japan…
“They’re really over 18, they just look 12!!”
Show me the filth!
The output matches the data because kids LOVE cartoons. There are child psychology studies, and as any parent can attest, the appeal of animation to children is pretty strong, so I think this is one stigma that just can’t be helped.
However the article didn’t touch on adult animation on tv, which I find to have been a bigger influence on changing hearts and minds about what can be for who. The Family Guys, Rick and Mortys, Bojacks- I bet most adults can name at least 1 grown up cartoon they’ve enjoyed watching.
I’ve never seen Family Guy as adult animation. It’s mostly for 12 year old who want to think it’s for adults because of the occasional innuendo.
part of the whole controversy about the simpsons when it first came out was that people mistakenly thought it was for kids, because CARTOON.
Even when American animation isn’t for kids, it’s usually pitched at adolescents, not adults. It’s a shame.
I would suggest that the perception is also partly caused by the lack of ready venues for seeing contemporary adult animated films. You either need to follow the “film festival” circuit, or know which channels to watch on YouTube. The only stuff that makes it into the mainstream movie theaters is the kid-friendly family fare. Perhaps if one of the cable networks or streaming services could devote some time to showing things like “Fantastic Planet” or the works of Don Hertzfeldt…..
We don’t make entertainment for kids, but we don’t exclude them as an audience.Dan Povenmire, co-creator of Phineas and Ferb
George Orwell’s anti-communist fable Animal FarmIt’s really a Trotskyist fable, with the heroic pig Snowball being a clear standin for Trotsky.
Miyazaki’s classic fantasy Spirited Away
It’s not as childish as the conflict-free My Neighbor Totoro, but it’s still a children’s story in the vein of Alice in Wonderland.
“It’s not as childish as the conflict-free My Neighbor Totoro, but it’s still a children’s story in the vein of Alice in Wonderland.”Perhaps. Personally, I like to draw a distinction between something being suitable for all ages and being a children’s story. I’d put Spirited Away in the former category, while Totoro belongs to the latter.
I’m no mumblecore expert, but I never would have thought the highly stylized films of Wes Anderson and Charlie Kaufman were in the same universe as mumblecore.
WHILE IT CAN BE READ THAT WAY, I AM QUITE CERTAIN THAT GEORGE ORWELL, A COMMITTED SOCIALIST, DID NOT WRITE ANIMAL FARM AS AN ANTI-COMMUNIST MANIFESTO. IT IS MORE OF A DESCRIPTION OF HOW REVOLUTIONS CAN BE SUBVERTED, AND ALSO MOST LIKELY ANTI STALINIST.
He was a socialist, a supporter of democratic socialism, which is a whole different branch of socialism than communism. So I think it’s perfectly acceptable to call Animal Farm anti-communist. But it is true that without context one might not realize his problem isn’t with the socialism aspect. He’s a fan of that part.
Yeah, I dunno. I think Death is right on this. Orwell fought with the communists in the Spanish civil war. But the Trotskyite (anti-Stalinist) faction. Animal Farm is anti-totalitarian…
There’s a movie called Down and Dirty Duck that brings the phrase fuck a duck to life.
The film that answers the question, “Hey, what if Roger Corman made Fritz the Cat?”
Ok. Just watched Eveready Harton for the first time.Anyone who think the internet has made us more perverted is dead wrong. We’ve been perverts as long as we’ve been sentient.
Would you care to see my etchings?I also just watched Eveready. It’s as lurid, puerile and juvenile as anything these kids today could come up with!
I have to admit, I chuckled at the wheeled support for his penis.
I laughed.I’m only a little bit ashamed…
This figurine is believed to be 25,000 years old.
I’ll be in my cave.
Oh, yeah!I remember reading Tijuana Bibles when I was in college, which is what this movie reminds me of—well, that an a very pornographic retelling of “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves” that used to play the Midnight Movie circuit.
Yeah.
Is “Eveready” our oldest extant example of a “Christmas tape”?
Animation for adults is good when applied correctly. Compare something like Who Framed Roger Rabbit to Cool World – very similar premise, both made for a decidedly not kid audience, but Cool World fails because it mistakes being edgy as being adult.
Cool World fails because Bakshi had a very specific story planned out (a horror noir set in the world of Dick Tracy/Sin City style crime/detective comics) and the studio mandated that he do a Roger Rabbit knock-off.
Cool World fails because it’s Bakshi. Bakshi is the fucking worst.
He’s cheesing his balls off!
Because it’s fon to due!
Eveready HartonEver HartEver HardAdult themed cartoonsCoincidence?
No mention of Phil Tippett’s MAD GOD?
Shame Ralph Bakshi never had any taste. His movies would be so much more interesting.
I think the only interesting thing about Fire and Ice is Bakshi’s lack of taste.
Bakshi has a great deal of taste, and its all acquired.
I have consumed a ton of Ralph Bakshi because of my fascination with his roto style, and while I agree as far as the films go you can generally take em or leave em, but American Pop is a goddamn masterpiece and I won’t hear otherwise
Fun fact, a quick glance at the animated films released in 1954 shows Animal Farm and…not much else. One other movie released in the US (the stop motion Hansel and Gretel: An Opera Fantasy), Czechoslovakia’s The Good Soldier Schweik (also stop motion), Brazil’s Amazon Symphony, and the USSR’s Tsarevna The Frog. Animal Farm almost had to be the highest grossing animated film of the year. (For reference, and I’m sure what you were trying to hint at/make people think of (assuming you weren’t just copying and pasting from Wikipedia): Peter Pan ($87.4 million box office) was released in 1953, and Lady And The Tramp ($187 million) was released in 1955.)
“the erotic sci-fi comics magazine Heavy Metal”The what now?
It’s exactly what it sounds like. If you get a hold of it in your teens, it’s all you want to read. Then you turn against it in your 20s. Then you rediscovery it in your 30s and realize it’s pretty good.
I can’t believe they haven’t done a live action remake of Heavy Metal yet.
For which I am thankful! However, there was the internationally produced live action Métal Hurlant Chronicles series that adapted several stories originally published in the french comics magazine that inspired Heavy Metal. I’ve seen a few episodes and while they were generally entertaining and had some neat guest stars, the pacing made made every episode I saw feel bloated. Instead of adapting two or more short comic stories into a compelling half-hour, they stretch a single punchy story to fill the time and as a result it loses all momentum.
Well, not technically one, but Blood Machines on Shudder certainly feels like an attempt at a live-action Metal Hurlant story.
Love Death + Robots on Netflix feels very Heavy Metal adjacent.
Ooh! Good pull. I totally agree.
The one time the AV Club should have used the slideshow format for the story is the one they didn’t, huh?
When the Wind Blows. That is all.
As a tangent, it’s weird to describe Wes Anderson and Charlie Kaufman as “mumblecore.” To the extent that mumblecore was ever a thing, it was the opposite of what Anderson and Kaufman do – minimal writing and art direction, almost entirely improvised dialog. Neither of them made a mumblecore movie (Ti West and Greta Gerwig got their start in that space, but even then it would be weird to describe them in relation to a micro-genre that briefly existed 10 years ago).
“Del Toro clearly chafes against such sentiments, especially in animation; while accepting the Golden Globe award last month for Best Animated Motion Picture for Pinocchio, he proclaimed that “animation is not just a medium for kids.” This comes after telling journalists at last year’s Toronto Film Festival that “animation is not a fucking genre for kids,” which further suggests how deeply held his beliefs are.”Bob c;ampett acknowledged in the 1975 documentary “Bugs Bunny Superstar” that Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies were actually cartoons for grownups. And nearly all the Warner Bros. shorts proved this to be true. So did Fleischer and mostg of the other studios before the Hayes commission lowered the boom. Somehow Warners, Lantz (when Ben Hardaway left Warners; his handprints were all over the early Woody Woodpecker shorts) and MGM (specifically during the Tex Avery years) found a way around this.Good call, Del Toro.
That’s the point I’m always bringing up, Looney Tunes was made by adults for adults… there’s so many other examples of animation in western culture not specifically targeting kids, prior to the introduction of the Disney formula and the Saturday morning cartoon.
I always got mad when I was a kid watching Looney Tunes, and one of those random shorts came on where something like Daffy Duck was being a waiter at a restaurant serving food to all the caricatures of famous movies stars of that time. Like why should I find it funny that Humphrey Bogart is reaching into his coat pocket just because Daffy didn’t get him his ham sandwich.
What I’d like to see is more stuff like Persepolis and Waltz with Bashir on the small screen. More animated shows that aren’t action, or futuristic sci-fi, or raunchy comedies, but straight up dramas. Networks probably don’t see the justification in doing so if it won’t be fantastical, considering the production time it takes, but Undone from Amazon was a recent series I enjoyed (though it still had a supernatural twist).
The Liberator on Netflix was a good recent one too. (Though again, justified by having combat as a hook.) Both series use rotoscope-like techniques, so the actors’ every detail comes through. This may be the best way to capture a dramatic performance for animation, but it surely can’t be the only way.
del Toro’s opinion on animated not withstanding, the potential win of his Pinocchio, a PG movie starring a kid, won’t change much of anything.
Kids these days honestly have a glut of cartoons to choose from, whereas my childhood was largely just toy commercials and Looney Tunes reruns.
I mean, my teenage son grew up on Avatar: the Last Airbender, which is objectively better than anything my Gen-X ass watched growing up.
That’s almost like saying that kids today have a million times more video games to choose from than in the late 70s.
“Windsor McKay”Oof, AVClub. The man’s name was Winsor McCay. He also created a comic strip called Little Nemo in Slumberland which was beautifully detailed and creative but problematic for issues involving racist caricature.
The Mandalorian would have made a great adult animated movie back in the day.
One of my favorite shorts from the Heavy Metal movie.
I grew up in the late 70’s and early 80’s. I was always looking for adult animated movies. I remember not believing they could show boobs in an animated movie. I rented Heavy Metal so many times from Night Owl Video.
Then I discovered Ralph Bakshi films.Then as time went I discovered anime.
The most ripped off, inspired, parodied scene in any anime history. The skid out scene in Akira.
Uh…yeah, Eveready. ‘Nuff said.Wow! And it goes on, and on, and on.
Simpsons did it.
Satoshi Kon, who passed much too early, was very explicit in making anime for adults, and was so highly influential that Darren Aronofsky explicitly used a scene from Perfect Blue in Requiem of a Dream and while he denies it, the similarities between Perfect Blue and Black Swan are too much to be coincindental.
I always thought cartoons (in the US anyway) began as intermission filler in movie theaters; not as “distraction fodder” for children.
Another “don’t miss” title is “Grave of the Fireflies”. To avoid spoilers I’ll simply say it made it onto Roger & Ebert’s list of the best films they’d never watch again.