Hey, man, hate to break it you, but ten million Elvis fans can be wrong. Just because a working class generation of Americans conflate animation and cartoons doesn’t mean the rest of the world, the animation industry on the whole, academia, the art world, or the English dictionary necessarily does.
I’d love to bring this discussion to a more relevant area, since because I’ve illustrated my point twice using esoteric examples to point to oft-overlooked animators, and you just apparently think that’s a really stupid thing for someone to do.
The filmography of the Brothers Quay would be found in the Animation section of whatever streaming platform is holding the distribution rights.
They are animation in tone and style derived from the lineage of satirical newspaper cartoons and slapstick puppet shows like Punch and Judy?
Because that’s what a cartoon is.
The filmography of Jan Svankmeyer would be found in the animation category of whatever streaming platform is holding the distribution rights.
They’re cartoons, then? Meaning they are animation in tone and style derived from the lineage of satirical newspaper cartoons and slapstick puppet shows like Punch and Judy?
The academy of motion picture arts and sciences has a category for best animated film, and best animated short, but I don’t see a category for best “cartoon.”
Oh, but you’ve seen the nominees of those categories, right? Like, every one? Like the 1974 nominee Sisyphus by Hungarian wizard Marcell Jankovics? It’s easy to see why 1981’s Feherlofia is so celebrated around the animation world as being a “far out” cartoon, dude.
What did you think of this year’s Czech nominee “Daughter?” I haven’t seen a animated film - I mean cartoon - that made me that emotional since “The Man Who Planted Trees.”
The idea of animating thousands of paintings to make a rotoscoped Van Gogh biography was recently explored. Did you enjoy that cartoon? How about Richard Linklater’s animated work, Waking Life, or A Scanner Darkly? Cool Cartoons. How about Charlie Kaufman’s Anomalisa? You know, the cartoon!
And of course you’ve watched the forty films - sorry, I mean cartoons - of Silhouette animator Lotte Reineger - one can tell because of how much enjoyment you get from contrasting them to the animation - I mean cartoons - in your Satyajit Ray blu-ray criterion collection.
Is it possible that the problem really lies within you, being part of the general public that thinks of animated film as cheap, made for children, and stuffed with gags?
Is it possible you simply want expression to end at the limits of your personal imagination because you think abstract thinking or art for arts sake is an attack on your intellect? Like Hitler?
Because we have an entire pro-cartoon Cartoon Network that provides a platform for the perpetuation of this conflation, but we don’t have a competing “Animation Network” that provides a wider and more inclusive selection of what the animation industry offers, I can see why you would think cartoons are it, man, the end all, be-all.
Or are you simply saying that artistic animation, or animation made for mature storytelling or featuring abstract art shouldn’t a thing that people should be allowed to know about because your limited idea of what constitutes animation is shared with your compatriots? A majority wins situation? Because we are in that reality, and we’ve been in that reality since cartoons and serious animation first started vying for public attention, and it’s wrong that shit went down the way it did and I’m allowed to protest, on behalf of the fucking anime fans, which is by the way, not in the cartoon section of Netflix. Hmm. It’s almost as if Netflix. Knows. The. Difference. Between. Adult. Animation. And. Cartoons. You. Fucking. Dimwit.
And what sort of child would think that an animator wouldn’t be able and willing to write fucking paragraphs about his own fucking job?