“And they lived happily ever after””—a classic footnote to a classic Disney-style animated fairytale. The idea of animation as a happy children’s medium along these lines is so persistent that it has seldom been adjusted over the past five decades. Indeed, in this so-called “golden age” of television we have seen very little recent progress beyond a simplistic conception of animation. The genre remains overrun with children’s shows and formulaic slapstick comedies that have changed only slightly in form and function since the 1980s.
There is, however, a rising experimentalist trend in the medium that has revealed untapped potential. Recent work has demonstrated that animation can be more than fairytales and satire—that it can be a mature medium that deals honestly with the crests and troughs of the human experience.
Homer’s Odyssey
To understand animation’s resistance to change, it is important to examine its roots. In an interview with the HPR, Harvard senior lecturer on animation Ruth Lingford explained that animation was not always so predominately a children’s medium. She affectionately described the Fleischer cartoons, including Betty Boop and Popeye, as “surreal” and “quite drug-addled.” However, these cartoons fell out of favor when “Disney became more popular and brought with it a sort of wholesomeness.”
But Lingford believes that animation fulfills its highest potential when it returns to its subversive roots: “Animation has these fantastic opportunities for transgression … You can do things in animation that you’d be put in jail for in live action—and rightly so.” But thanks in large part to companies like Disney, its diverse potential has been curbed in the United States by its relegation to Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon (with several notable exceptions).
The first obvious deviation from the family-friendly genre established by Disney was The Simpsons, which previewed in 1989. Greg Daniels, a former writer and producer for the show, told the HPR that the four-fingered family of five caught viewers’ attentions for “being the first sophisticated animated show in twenty years since The Flintstones and the first animated show in a more modern era with a modern sensibility.” While Daniels acknowledged that The Simpsons had “excellence of execution and first mover advantage,” he was less eager to highlight the brilliance of introducing a program with an adult tone into what had previously been a children’s market. The Simpsons, whose first season was and is still revered by audiences, had a Disney-esque effect on animation: it set the tone for the medium going forward.
Daniels kept in mind the enormous impact of The Simpsons when he co-created King of the Hill: “I intentionally tried to zig when the other show [The Simpsons] was zagging and never use the same cast or style,” he recalled. Daniels’ approach is in the minority, however. The general trend in animation has been to keep zagging along. Shows like Family Guy, American Dad, The Cleveland Show, and even to some extent Beavis and Butthead and South Park all adopted The Simpsons’ formula: a satirical take on the middle-class American experience. Relying heavily on slapstick comedy and absurd characters with irrational motivations, these shows largely repeated and generally failed to improve upon The Simpsons’ model.
These shows are reflective of the status quo of adult animation: They’re humorous, engaging, and occasionally thoughtful, in much the same way that The Simpsons was and continues to be. But none of them have revolutionized the medium of animation the way that The Simpsons did. Since The Simpsons transcended the realm of children’s entertainment in 1989, animation seems to have found its niche and been largely content to stay tucked inside of it.
Opportunities for Transgression
But status quos don’t last forever. Today, two new shows are defying the typical model of adult animation: Community creator Dan Harmon’s wacked-out sci-fi Rick and Morty and the deeply contemplative Netflix original Bojack Horseman. Both shows are in their second seasons, coming off of successful and critically acclaimed debuts. Both also represent a departure from the pitch and timbre of Family Guy and the like.
Rick and Morty features a grandfather and grandson duo reminiscent of Back to the Future (in fact, it is derived from a short co-creator Justin Roiland wrote parodying Back to the Future) and is a self-described “high-concept sci-fi rigmarole.” The refreshingly serious show differs at a storytelling level from the light-hearted joking of The Simpsons, which at its heaviest only parodies works of a more serious nature. It also diverges from the angry, over-the-top, societal critiques found in South Park by forcing the watcher to confront difficult realities in subtle ways. Take Morty’s parents’ failing marriage: nothing is resolved in easy 23-minute chunks. Just like real people, Beth and Jerry have good days and bad days; while they try hard to support each other, sometimes they succeed and other times they fail.
The show builds realistic personalities to which the audience can relate, but their setting and form teeter on the reductively absurdist. Take, for example, Mr. Poopy Butthole—an ear of corn wearing a top hat who has deep feelings with which the audience can identify and empathize. In contrast to shows like Family Guy and The Simpsons, which derive humor from ridiculous protagonists’ handling of mundane situations, Rick and Morty places characters that feel emotionally real in situations that are absurd.
This ironic counter-play between character realism and setting absurdity is mirrored in the Netflix original Bojack Horseman, starring Will Arnett. “I wanted to tell a [story] that I felt was honest,” creator Raphael Bob-Waksburg told The Verge, “and I think a lot of shows that I see are not honest about sadness.” The titular character, Bojack, a washed-up actor from a popular sitcom—who also happens to be a horse—struggles with rejection, alcoholism, and an all-consuming need to be loved. There is a particularly poignant scene in which Bojack says to his girlfriend, “You didn’t know me. Then you fell in love with me. Now you know me.” It is a scene that cuts to the core of Bojack’s struggle: not feeling—and oftentimes not being—good enough for anyone but needing beyond anything else to be loved. It is also a scene in which a horse is talking to an owl who just woke up from a thirty-year coma. It is a scene that should be plainly ridiculous but is instead sad and, more importantly, honest.
Bojack Horseman offers an intimate, personal exploration of the human condition. When asked about making a show that dealt heavily with issues of depression, Bob-Waksburg said, “I think the best way to do that was a wacky cartoon starring a talking horse.” This is one of the strengths of animation as a medium: Not only is it feasible to feature a talking horse, but the semi-absurdist nature of animation itself also allows viewers to accept a talking horse without a second thought. A talking horse—a talking anything, really—is an animated form with which most viewers are familiar thanks to the experience of Disney animation. And centering a plot around an animal character allows for a Kafkaesque reading of the nature of (horse)man: Bojack’s unique appearance gives viewers some much-needed distance to observe human nature from an impersonal, objective perspective. This distance allows for a kind of paradoxical intimacy with the character: without a preconceived notion of how Bojack should act, we are better able to see his strengths, weaknesses, and emotional states for what they are in the show rather than what we might expect them to be in a real-life human being. Cartoonist Lisa Hanawalt’s two-legged horseman design is the perfect vehicle for Waksburg’s animated, equestrian anti-hero.
And while Bojack and Rick and Morty are abrasive and crude at times, the difference they represent from the norm of animation is that their offensiveness is never the point of the scene. The audience is always in on some larger joke that the characters never quite seem to get, for they are instead caught up in their own personal failings. Whether or not they succeed in their endeavors, there’s a certain Sisyphussian pleasure that we take in watching them struggle. The actions are not funny in a vacuum—they are funny in context of each individual and his or her particular story. These two shows have begun to produce a strange hybrid of comedic and serious animation, in which the primary goal is not to solely be funny but rather to tell a story and to explore heavier themes of morality and humanity, even when the characters themselves are not literally human.
For so long, repetition has been the industry standard in animation, which is why shows like Rick and Morty and Bojack Horseman breathe much-needed life into the medium. They do the work that we need from television but seldom see. They serve as portraits of events and people in a crazy, scary world that in some way allow us to more fully experience our own.
We’ve still got to do all the work—we’ve got to deal with our own sadness and experience our own realities—but there’s a comfort in knowing that someone else is worried about the same things we are, even if that someone is a talking, alcoholic horse.
Image Credit: Flickr/Gareth Simpson