A Brief History of the Animation Age Ghetto

(Based on an article I wrote for a college magazine writing class, which was adapted as a blog post on WordPress on June 14, 2020. This version has been slightly updated to reflect current events in the world of animation, including incorporating another post titled “I Need to Vent About the HBO Max Situation” from August 21, 2022.)

I don't remember how old I was when I first saw the film Watership Down, but I couldn't have been older than nine or ten. I remember how my mother found it in a rental store and, having seen before sometime in the past, decided it would be a good movie to show the kids.

Needless to say, my siblings and I were rather unnerved by the scenes of violence that the film has become infamous for and ended up blocking it from our memories for the next decade or so. During that intervening decade, I grew distant from the Renaissance-era animated films of my childhood like Aladdin, The Lion King, and The Prince of Egypt, writing them off as juvenile nonsense that was beneath the more "adult" tastes I was developing.

However, two things happened during my high school years that shook me out of this mentality. The first occurred during a field trip I took with my school's history club (probably to Washington, D.C.) when our social studies teacher showed us Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away. While everyone else on the bus was going, "What the fuck am I watching?!"... well, so was I, but there was a small voice in the back of my head saying, "Oh my God, this is the greatest movie I've ever seen in my life!"

Don't worry, Mrs. Ruddy. There was one student out there who appreciated your taste in film.

As I’m sure you’ve guessed by now, that was followed by me rediscovering Watership Down on YouTube, probably sometime during my senior year. My re-watch of that forgotten childhood memory undoubtedly changed my life. I began to pursue film and literature far more stridently and decided that my destiny was to become a creative writer. I fell back in love with animation, recognizing the artistic potential in the medium.

At the same time, though, I began to recognize that the same antipathy I had developed toward the medium in my teenage years was a widespread problem many animators struggled to deal with. Perhaps Scott Mendelson, writing for Forbes, put it best: “...American animated films are strikingly similar in that they are mostly G or PG-rated comedic capers with stories and characters intended to appeal to younger moviegoers.” It doesn’t matter when these films portray themes like an old man coming to terms with death (Pixar’s Up), racism and prejudice (Disney’s Zootopia and Warner Bros.’ Cats Don’t Dance), man’s relationship with God (Dreamworks’ The Prince of Egypt), or even discussions of genocide (Dreamworks’ Kung Fu Panda 2 or Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame). It’s all kiddie nonsense to a lot of people in this country.

Because nothing says "fun for the whole family" like "Destroy Esmeralda! And let her taste the fires of Hell! Or else let her be mine and mine alone!" Keep it classy, Disney.

Of course, the obvious question is... why? Why do so many people, especially in my home country, hold onto this misconception of what TV Tropes.com calls the "Animation Age Ghetto"? Many answers can be found in the history of how the medium developed in the United States.

History Pt. 1: 1920s-1970s

Animation first came to prominence in America in the 1920s, especially after the classic Walt Disney short Steamboat Willie premiered on November 18, 1928. The period between then and the early 1960s is often considered the Golden Age of Animation.

It became a tradition to play animated shorts starring the Looney Tunes, Woody Woodpecker, Popeye, Tom and Jerry, and others in cinemas as a prelude to the feature presentation. Prominent creators of the era, like William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, Tex Avery, and Chuck Jones stated that they had adult audiences in mind when creating the shorts. Indeed, Betty Boop (created by the Fleischer Brothers) was infamous for her provocative fashion sense and flirtatious attitude until the Hays Code caught up with her around 1934.

Before you ask, no, she’s not wearing anything under that lei.

Walt Disney, meanwhile, proved that animation could be adapted into full-length feature films when Snow White and the Seven Dwarves hit the big screen on December 21, 1937. This would pave the way for future hits like Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo, and Bambi.

However, it should be noted that Snow White wasn't the first full-length animated film; that honor goes to the 1926 German feature "The Adventures of Prince Achmed."

However, television slowly began supplanting cinema as the go-to form of entertainment consumption after World War II. Theatrical shorts were dispensed with as animation began to move toward the small screen. Animation fans often refer to the period between the early 60s and mid-80s as the Dark Age of Animation, and for a good reason. Due to budget constraints, TV studios like Hanna-Barbera and Filmation were forced to use more limited forms of animation. What resulted was what Chuck Jones once referred to as "illustrated radio," characterized by an emphasis on dialogue over visuals and a generally lazier aesthetic that often only appealed to children. Fellow Looney Tunes artist Fritz Freleng was less charitable, describing TV animation during the Dark Age as:

...such a monster. It swallows up this animation so fast that nobody seems to care whether it's good or bad. These kids' shows are badly done technically; it seems as though nobody really looks at them but the kids.
-Fritz Freleng

The fact that this era of animation came on the heels of a revival of conservative values in the 1950s certainly didn't help matters. Parent groups were downright savage in attacking anything they deemed not child friendly. They purged the classic Looney Tunes shorts of their trademark cartoon violence and piled on content restriction after content restriction until even conflict, the very soul of storytelling itself, was excised. On top of all that, animation was often relegated to the now-famous Saturday morning block, which kids would watch while their parents often slept in from a long work week.

The result of all this was the bare minimum of effort being put into TV animation, especially in the 1970s. Endlessly restricted by moral guardians, TV studios often resorted to cranking out endless sub-par clones of Scooby-Doo, Yogi Bear, The Flintstones, etc. Some quality shows did slip through here and there, like Fat Albert, Star Trek: The Animated Series, Wait Till Your Father Gets Home, and Schoolhouse Rock.

This song will now be stuck in your head for the rest of the week. You're welcome!

They were still vastly outnumbered by poor-quality efforts, though. Even the king of animation himself, Walt Disney, expressed his frustrations with artistic restriction toward the end of his life. When he first saw the film adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird, he reportedly told his colleagues, "Now this is the kind of film I wish I could make!"

A Light in the Black: 1970s-1990s

Fortunately, not everything was bleak for the medium during the Dark Age. Europe was still producing edgy, avant-garde features like Yellow Submarine, Fantastic Planet, and the aforementioned Watership Down. Meanwhile, Japan started experimenting with more adult series, moving away from kid-friendly fare like Astro Boy, Speed Racer, and Kimba the White Lion to epics like Space Battleship Yamato and Mobile Suit Gundam. Even America saw the likes of Ralph Bakshi, who made such raunchy, controversial, and, surprisingly enough, financially successful escapades as Fritz the Cat, Heavy Traffic, and Coonskin.

Ya hear that, babe? That's the sound of a thousand Bible thumpers having a stroke.

Things began to look up for the American side of the medium as the 1980s rolled around. One of the most critical factors in this revival was President Ronald Reagan's rollback of broadcast regulations. This would spearhead the rise of toy-based cartoons like Transformers, My Little Pony, He-Man, G.I. Joe, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, etc. While these shows are often derided for being "half-hour toy commercials,"...

...and the man who made those cartoons possible is derided for... various other reasons...

... the fact was that these shows proved that animation could be profitable again. Artists and business investors quickly leaped at the opportunity, and the stage for the Renaissance Age of Animation was set. The Walt Disney Company helped kick-start a new era of quality television animation when the first cartoons of the Disney Afternoon block, like Adventures of the Gummi Bears, Ducktales, and Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers, first aired between 1985 and 1989. Television networks solely or heavily dedicated to animation, like Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon, began to find a vast audience.

Meanwhile, after languishing in the doldrums for several years after Walt Disney's death in 1965, animation in American cinemas found a new savior in the form of ex-Disney animator Don Bluth, who introduced a high-quality to his animated features that had not been seen since the Golden Age. Features like the cult classic The Secret of NIMH led to financial successes like An American Tail and The Land Before Time, both executive produced by Stephen Spielberg.

He was also known for putting some pretty dark shit in his movies. For us millennials, the Sharptooth killing Littlefoot's mom was the "Your mother can't be with you anymore" scene from *Bambi*.

This inspired Disney to step up its game, leading to financial juggernauts like Who Framed Roger Rabbit and The Little Mermaid. This led to animation regaining much of the artistic respect it had lost in the Dark Age, to the point that Disney's Beauty and the Beast even became the first animated film to be nominated for Best Picture at the 1992 Academy Awards.

On top of all that, Japanese animation started to develop a fanbase in North America due to the gritty and intense adult drama of films like Akira and Ghost in the Shell and the sheer artistic beauty of Studio Ghibli's filmography. Anime TV series like Sailor Moon, Dragonball, Pokemon, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and Cowboy Bebop further cemented its popularity.

A New Downturn: 1990s-2000s

Unfortunately, all of this failed to break the Age Ghetto's death grip on the American psyche, especially as the Renaissance Age gave way to the Millennium Age around the turn of the century. Many animated films toward the latter half of the 90s started to rely increasingly on the Disney "formula," resulting in many films that recycled the I-don't-fit-in characters, "I want" songs, wacky sidekicks, pop culture jokes, and other tired tropes of the time. Warner Brothers' Quest for Camelot, released in 1998, is often considered the absolute nadir of this trend.

It originally started as a PG-13-rated film based on Arthurian legend. It ended with the two heads on that blue dragon singing about how much they hate each other while doing an Elvis impersonation. I am not kidding!

Economic downturns throughout the 2000s also led to a decline in quality television animation, to the point that Cartoon Network actually stopped airing cartoons for a brief period in the late 00s. This proliferation of subpar TV shows may have convinced 90s kids who grew up on Ren and Stimpy and Animaniacs that they had outgrown the shows of their childhood.

You were the chosen one, Ron! You were supposed to save animation, not leave it in darkness!

It certainly didn't help that adult animation shows started their own toxic "follow the leader" mentality. They became what I would refer to as Family Guy or South Park turned up to eleven in all the wrong directions, overusing edgy and offensive vulgar humor while ignoring the clever political/social satire that made both those shows so beloved in the first place. Thus, we received schlock like Brickleberry, Drawn Together, and Allen Gregory, which can be better described as adolescent rather than adult.

A New Renaissance: 2000s-2020

However, as the current decade reaches its twilight years, there are increasingly promising signs that America may finally be putting the ghetto mentality out to pasture. One sign of this reckoning is the massive popularity of creator-driven cartoons spawned from the successes of such shows as Disney's Phineas and Ferb in 2007 and Cartoon Network's Adventure Time in 2010. Other shows like Regular Show, Steven Universe, Over the Garden Wall, Gravity Falls, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, and many others have gained massive fanbases even among adults.

Adult animation has also received shows this decade like Bojack Horseman, Rick and Morty, Bob's Burgers, and Moral Orel that have shifted the focus away from vulgar shock humor and put the spotlight more on character development and more relatable adult issues. Some adult series like Castlevania, Primal, and the Samurai Jack revival even moved away from comedy entirely, becoming dark fantasy epics focused more on story than being as offensive as possible.

Let’s see *Brickleberry* try to top this.

The more diverse animation offered by Japan has also exploded in popularity in the States thanks to series like Fullmetal Alchemist, My Hero Academia, and Attack on Titan, largely thanks to the Internet. As the world has grown smaller and more connected, fans of animation have grown closer together and have been able to assert themselves in the public eye more easily and have easier access to content that might interest them.

Sadly, the ghetto retains one last stronghold: the Hollywood studios and their executives. Especially as capitalism reaches its late stages, the big studios have grown extremely risk-averse. Since adult animated features have not proven financially successful among moviegoers, the executives hesitate to invest in them. The ghetto mindset is incredibly frustrating regarding how it affects the Best Animated Feature award at the Oscars.

Many anonymous interviews with the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences members responsible for deciding the Best Animated Feature have revealed an incredible contempt for the art form, viewing it as lesser than live-action. Many interviewed individuals even admitted to having their kids watch the nominated films instead and based their vote on what their kids liked best. One particularly infamous comment from the 2015 voting season had one voter complaining about The LEGO Movie not even being nominated...

Which, as someone who has seen the film, I can definitely agree.

...but then they go on to complain about “these two obscure freakin’ Chinese fuckin’ things that nobody ever freakin’ saw” being nominated over it. To add insult to injury, this voter could only have referred to The Tale of Princess Kaguya and Song of the Sea, which are Japanese and Irish, respectively. I can see why the Oscars are such a laughingstock among serious filmgoers.

Even on this front, though, animation fans still have cause for optimism. In 2016, Sausage Party became the first financially successful R-rated animated feature film to be theatrically released since 1999’s South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut. It grossed over $140 million over a $19 million budget and earned an 83% approval rating from Rotten Tomatoes. The film’s creator, Seth Rogan, has since expressed a desire to create more animated adult films in the future. Sony Pictures, the company that released Sausage Party, has also announced several more adult films in development as we speak. While not as financially successful as Sausage Party, Wes Anderson’s PG-13-rated Isle of Dogs, released in 2018, was well-received by critics and audiences, which certainly doesn’t hurt.

A New Dark Age (2020-)

Unfortunately, in many ways, things have taken a turn for the worse in the wake of the COVID pandemic when streaming services started to take off. Perhaps the epitome of this new and disturbing trend came on Friday, August 19th, 2022- a date that will live in infamy for anyone who cares at all about animation. The animation section of the popular streaming service HBO Max was suddenly and deliberately attacked by the corporate forces of the empire of Warner Brothers Discovery.

Sadly, this unprovoked and dastardly attack was not entirely unexpected. On August 2nd, the company announced it would cancel two original film projects, Batgirl and Scoob! Holiday Haunt, despite both films being well into the post-production phase of development. Indeed, the latter’s cancellation was so abrupt that the studio date for recording the orchestral score had already been scheduled, so they recorded it even after the cancellation was announced.

Things only went downhill from there. The day after the cancellations were announced, HBO Max quietly removed all the HBO Max Original Films they had already made, as if in an Orwellian attempt to convince people that they had never existed in the first place. Then came the August 19th purge, in which several animated/children’s shows were removed from the site, including but not limited to: The Not-Too-Late Show with Elmo, OK K.O.! Let’s Be Heroes, Victor and Valentino, Summer Camp Island, Little Ellen, Mao Mao: Heroes of Pure Heart, Uncle Grandpa, Mighty Magiswords, Close Enough, and Infinity Train.

Also, 200 episodes of Sesame Street because David Zaslav hates inner-city kids, I guess.

The termination of the latter two is especially infuriating for many animation fans, myself included, especially for how both shows had to fight an uphill battle even to get distributed in the first place. Close Enough, created by J.G. Quintel of The Regular Show fame, was initially set to air on an animation block on TBS that included American Dad! and Final Space. That was ruined when a show on the same block to be produced by Louis C.K. was canceled after his sexual misconduct allegations. Fortunately, it found a home on HBO Max a month after the service launched in May 2020, only to be canceled and evicted a little over two years later.

Infinity Train, meanwhile, started as a pilot that premiered on the Cartoon Network App on November 1st, 2016. It quickly became the most viewed pilot on the network's official YouTube channel, and a petition to turn the pilot into a whole series garnered 57,000 signatures. Cartoon Network announced an entire series in March 2018 that premiered in ten eleven-minute segments (similar to Over the Garden Wall) in August 2019. After four seasons (out of a planned eight) where audiences were enthralled by the adventures of the passengers on the mysterious and gigantic train as the bizarre and impossible environments therein forced them to confront their psychological demons, the series was abruptly canceled in April of 2021.

Don't be a worry, baby/No need to hurry, baby, when you're with me/Just take it easy peasy/My little lemon squeezy/You're always with me.

Social media campaigns to #RenewInfinityTrain (which I participated in) went unanswered. Finally, on August 19th of this year came the final insult, when not only did HBO Max remove the series, Cartoon Network deleted the original pilot from Youtube, as well as the soundtrack. Series creator Owen Dennis even gave fans of the show his blessing to pirate the series in retaliation. Fortunately, as of the day I’m writing this (August 21st), the series is still available for download on iTunes... for now at least (also Amazon Prime, but I don’t think I’m willing to further enrich that Lex Luthor cosplaying ghoul that runs the company, personally).

As you can probably imagine, I’m not exactly pleased with what has happened at Warner Brothers Discovery lately. Thanks to its variety, HBO Max rapidly became my favorite of all the streaming services I use. From new blockbuster releases and Studio Ghibli’s library to Cartoon Network and the Criterion Collection, I had no shortage of content to discover.

But then David Zaslav took over as CEO of Warner Brothers Discovery and decided to pursue several cost-cutting measures, including said removals and cancellations. Many have accused Zaslav of outright tax fraud, as it is nakedly evident that he’s using these shows as tax write-offs and trying to get out of paying residuals to the people who made them. He’s also stated that he wants to focus more on theatrical releases and is no longer doing HBO Max Originals.

As if that wasn’t bad enough, Netflix also went on a cancellation binge with several of its animated programs in January of this year, most notably Inside Job and Dead End: Paranormal Park. Fortunately, none of these series have been deleted from Netflix. Still, considering that the service recently deleted all seasons of Arrested Development from its library, including both Netflix Original seasons, I’m not holding my breath.

Honestly, though, it’s not anger that I feel in this situation so much as despair. As someone who wants to work in the creative arts and who wants The Divine Conspiracy to become an animated series one day, this, more than anything else, has rammed home how much the arts are devalued under our capitalist system. This, paired with Disney’s lackadaisical approach to queer representation (or outright hostility in the case of The Owl House) and the recent news that Barnes and Noble will be effectively barring new authors from selling books until they can prove they will be successful, shows how incompatible the profit motive is with artistic creation. Artists are held hostage to the whims of fickle CEOs like David Zaslav and Bob Chapek, who can kill a movie or T.V. show just as quickly as they can greenlight it.

Indeed, my mind keeps coming back to a line from a recent USA Today article about the bombing of the Georgia Guidestones, in which Christopher Kubas, executive vice president of the Elbert Granite Association, had this to say:

It's unfortunate. There are people that think just because they don't like it, that no one should have the opportunity to see it or experience it, and so they're going to destroy it for everyone else.
-Christpoher Kubas, quoted in "Destruction of the Georgia Guidestones, a monument puzzling from the start, has only heightened the mystery," by Amanda Perez Pintado for USA Today, August 19th, 2022

That echoes my feelings on the situation with HBO Max and Netflix, especially with shows as wonderful and creative as Infinity Train, Close Enough, and Victor and Valentino being tossed aside in one of the most nakedly capricious acts I’ve seen committed by a CEO in a creative industry outside of mainstream video games. It’s left me even more uncertain of my future as major corporations continue to make decisions that condemn us all to a future where neoliberal fascism continues to ruin everything we love.

It’s not all doom and gloom, though. There are several adult animated series out there still helping to show a more artistic side of the medium, like Genndy Tartakovsky’s Primal and Amazon Prime’s Invincible (co-produced by Seth Rogan, incidentally). Tartakovsky has even signed a cross-studio deal with Warner Bros. and Cartoon Network, allowing him to work with his original creations or any Warner Bros. Discovery I.P. Granted, I do wish other creators than just him had that kind of creative freedom, but we take our victories where we can, I guess.

Conclusion

C. S. Lewis once had this to say about people who appreciated artistic works for the sole reason of them being “adult”:

Critics who treat 'adult' as a form of approval, instead of as merely a descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown-up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish: these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence.
-C. S. Lewis, On Three Ways of Writing for Children

If I could get the average American filmgoer to understand one thing about animation, it is this; you are not stupid for liking the same movies or T.V. shows your kids like. If anything, the adult who enjoys animation is far more adult than the one who mindlessly insists that live-action is inherently superior. Lewis went on to state the following:

"When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly."

Not only do the elites in Hollywood need to follow Lewis' advice, but maybe it wouldn't be out of line to remind them that Walt Disney holds the record for the most Oscars won by a single person (22, to be exact). I mean, the Academy Awards is where the very best in film is honored, right?