Don't all cartoons take advantage of the medium (SPOILERS)

[Leviathan]

I was going to post this in the John K. thread, but I think it deserves its own. John K. has argued that cartoons that are written on scripts, are driven by dialogue or try to be "realistic" (meaning they don't try to be all rubbery and cartoony like a 1940's Looney Tune) aren't real cartoons because they "don't take advantage of the medium" and that's become a sort of religion among his followers.

But one of the reviews done for the latest season of Bojack Horseman made me realize something. Bojack is itself what John and his acolytes would consider a "fake" cartoon since it's script-driven, characters don't make wacky Basil Wolverton faces, and tries to present something resembling reality. Very little happens on the show that couldn't be done in a live action show. But would it be as good or as memorable if it were?

Another, far more offbeat feature of the show unexpectedly adds to its portrayal of mental illness and substance abuse: the talking animals. Bob-Waksberg has talked about the influence of Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics in interviews, specifically the idea of iconography, when discussing why people might relate more to BoJack than to other, more ostensibly realistic TV shows and movies. The simplistic nature of a cartoon, and of cartoon animals in general, helps people understand real-life concepts by making them less overtly anchored in reality and more universal. It’s why comics and animated films probably won’t ever quit on anthropomorphic creatures. It’s likely that BoJack being literally a horse-man is one of the main things enabling empathy from the audience and separating him from the aforementioned, run-of-the-mill antiheroes.

Bojack did an episode that is just him delivering a eulogy for his mother at a funeral home. Though it's just it's just mostly Bojack monologuing in front of a static background without even a lot of camera movement, it's one of the most emotionally powerful episodes of the whole show and a grand display of what animation can do.

The Simpsons uses animation to turn Springfield into a fleshed out city with numerous memorable locations and dozens of unique characters. If the Simpsons were a live-action show, would that be the case if those locations had to exist in real-life or be CGI'd, and you couldn't just have Dan Castellaneta, Hank Azaria and Harry Shearer give completely different characters different voices? South Park breaches topics all the time that couldn't be addressed or would provoke massive outrage on a live-action show. Rick and Morty has new universes and alien races almost every episode that would probably exhaust a live-action weekly TV budget. Even with something like King of the Hill, Mike Judge can completely disappear into the role of Hank Hill, who looks nothing like him. Plus you probably couldn't have the double act of Hank and Boomhauer without a lot of green screen and CGI work.

Just because shows don't all use animation in the same way, does that mean they're all live-action in disguise?

 

[Red Arrow]

I guess John K. assumes that script-driven shows might as well be made with real actors, but that isn't true.

Hey Arnold is as non-cartoony as it could get, but it's art style is a huge part of what makes it so great. I can't imagine liking Hey Arnold that much if it were a live-action series.

I can give hundreds of other examples. There might be cartoons that are live-action in disguise, but most do take advantage of the medium.

Interesting thread, btw.

 

[Leviathan]

Hey Arnold is as non-cartoony as it could get, but it's art style is a huge part of what makes it so great. I can't imagine liking Hey Arnold that much if it were a live-action series.

A lot of the characters and stories that made fantastic Hey Arnold episodes would probably be too ridiculous to take seriously in live action. Like Stoop Kid, for example.

 

[Fone Bone]

Kricfalusi is a sociopath and all of his arguments about animation boil down to "If it isn't like my or Bob Clampett's cartoons, it is bad." He entire critique of animation is guided solely by narcissism.

It's so easy to destroy this argument. Kricfalusi is always talking about how people aren't using the medium properly. Well, it IS a medium, John. People are allowed to use it any way they like. In fact, experimenting and doing new things in a medium leads to much better results. What Kricfalusi SHOULD be arguing is what is proper for the GENRE he enjoys: Funny animal cartoons. That he can actually complain about. What he wants to do instead is limit everybody else's creative freedom in the name of creative freedom. But he does not actually get to dictate how artists choose to use any particular medium they want, and he is a psychopath for trying to control the entire industry this way.

For the record, The Simpsons and Justice League Unlimited, both scripted series, are better than The Ren And Stimpy Show, and I can think off the top of my head more than 20 scripted series that are too. If Kricfalusi's entire argument boils down to the idea that only quality comes from writers who can also draw, maybe he should have spent less time in his own project on booger and fart jokes.

 

[Dudley]

I used to think cartoons that don’t take full advantage of the medium by aiming for realism is a waste of money, as at that point it’d be cheaper to do a live-action version instead.
But thinking about KOTH, if you do the show in live-action, you’d have to deal with a kid playing Bobby who grows up over the course of 13 seasons. All the shenanigans and life lessons a kid will learn will be limited as you won’t be able to do them all, as by the time the show ends, he’ll be college graduate age. And then they might have to get a new kid to the cast and have him go through things that Bobby would’ve gone through.

Interestingly enough, it works in reverse. For example, The DC superhero shows on the CW would be be better suited for animation, as you won’t be limited by sets or visual effects budget.

As for whether it’s script or storyboard driven, can anyone provide an example where that actually made a significant difference to the show?


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[Rhaynebow]

It shouldn’t matter whether a cartoon starts out with words or pictures or whether it’s a comedy or not. The content is what matters.

To say that live action could replace a cartoon is quite ludicrous because even the most realism-based toons have things that live action can’t. Like Dudley said, you have characters that can get away with not aging. You can have kid characters whose voice actors would have to be replaced once they hit puberty, but finding a kid with a similar voice is a lot easier than finding a kid with a similar face.

Looking past John K’s ego and his past for a second, his belief about dialogue/scripts in cartoons isn’t unique and you can absolutely find animators and animation enthusiasts that believe scripts don’t belong in the visual medium of cartoons. I had a colleague of mine say to my face years ago that “if you need dialogue in your animation, you shouldn’t be in animation”. SU is frequently used as example of why solely relying on the artists to tell the story isn’t exactly the best move depending on the story you’re trying to tell. On the flip side, I’m 100% sure some people felt bored out of their minds watching Hey Arnold because of all the talking.

Like I said before, why should it matter which method uses animation best? The crew wanted it to be animated instead of using real people, DONE. Just tell a good story.


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