cartoons is something America excels at. America has created the vast majority of the characters that the children of the world know and love now and forever more. But what is happening to American Cartoons? There is something very odd and very different about the cartoons today that was not present in cartoons from the past. They are changing for the better by better by including more intense/more adult themes then seen in the past and invoking extremely powerful emotion that cartoons in the past tried and failed. The success of this can be seen in the cult like following of some of these shows that are heavily comprised of adults. The best example of this phenomena is Adventure time.
Adventure time is a children's cartoon set in the magical land of Ooo with a whole cast of generally weird but adorable and lovable characters. The general theme of Adventure Time is.. well... Adventures. The Two main characters, Finn the Human and his sidekick Jake the Dog, go on a whole slew of moral and ethical adventures. They both have a strong disdain towards evil and evildoers and are champions of fighting for the innocent.
As a child, adventure time is awesome because it is very much like your imagination. It is filled with fantasy creatures, landscapes, magic and terrifying monsters getting beaten by the good guys. Yet, adventure time is not just for kids. If you're an adult viewer, Adventure Time is appealing to you because it is relatable to your own childhood. Finn the Human deals with common teenager issues such as romance or fighting to be understood. These are things we all remember dealing with as young adolescents but Finn also faces less generic challenges that are less prevalent in other cartoons. Finn often deals with death, loneliness being an outsider (he is the only human), moral dilemmas, and Fear (which is actually embodied as a black cloud that lives inside of him and causes him to doubt himself).
The reason for Adventure Time's success with the adult community is because of the Nostalgia in brings. It brings pain or longing for an age of innocence and wonder, one that is unattainable now that it has passed us by. Nostalgia is the feeling of fondly remembering something while sadly acknowledging that that time is gone. Why is this special? you may ask. Couldn't you argue that all cartoons do this? Ah, but Adventure time takes it a step further by having nostalgia within nostalgia. As you are experiencing nostalgia the characters in the show are experiencing it as well. The characters in the show often grieve over the old world that was destroyed in the great "Mushroom War", human remains and destroyed rusted pieces of war machinery such as tanks and helicopters litter the land of Ooo and can be seen during many episodes. At one point the planet the show takes place on is shown from space and it can be recognized as earth with a huge clean cut crater existing where North America should be. This alludes that Ooo is in fact not a fairytale land but is in fact our own world after it has been destroyed by war. The show claims that after the fall of man magic returned to the world as it was previously shunned and rejected by humans. The existence of magic has allowed the world to rebuild and flourish once more. At the same time Adventure Time uses constant goofiness and weird humor to balance out the depressing nostalgia and create a perfect ambivalence which is a feeling that is so rare in media in general, let alone a cartoon. Yet this ambivalence is only be felt to the full extent by an American. As an outsider might not have the same connections to the recognizable landmarks in the Ooo wasteland, or perhaps not the same connections to issues Finn is dealing with, or perhaps not even have the same value for Nostalgia as we Americans do.
No comments:
Post a Comment