By Their Cartoons Shall Ye Know Them

By Crispin Sartwell

We are privileged to live in the second golden age of the cartoon. Such contemporary classics as The Powerpuff Girls, Cat Dog, Angry Beavers, and Sponge Bob Square Pants tower over our society artistically and intellectually.

The first golden age was during the nineteen forties and fifties, when the basic form of the animated short feature was defined. These cartoons were screened before movies and, later, cobbled together to make television shows. And though the Disney studios created the visually richest animation, Disney cuteness slid easily and often into insipidity.

The real soul of the cartoon was created at Warner Bros., where such free spirits as Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett, and Friz Freleng gave birth to even freer spirits such as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Tweety, Yosemite Sam, Foghorn Leghorn, and Pepe Le Pew.

Bugs and Daffy were truly subversive icons: their talk was free-association, rapid-fire standup; they were animated in a style somewhere between Salvador Dali and Jackson Pollock; they devoted their lives to torturing authority figures such as Elmer Fudd and Porky Pig; they liked to dress in drag and imitate Mae West; they revelled in revolutionary violence. In short, they combined the approaches of Oscar Wilde, Sigmund Freud, Groucho Marx, and Che Guevara.

Other studios, such as MGM, which hired the great Tex Avery away from Warner's, were on the same wavelength. Tom and Jerry speechlessly pursued their path of glorious destruction in a continual enactment of the victory of the undermouse over the uberkitty.

It is hard almost to see how they got away with it. Perhaps the fifties was not quite the era of buttoned-down conventionality that it appeared to be in the television shows aimed at the unfortunate adults. But there's no doubt that Bugs had a profound social influence.

Many explanations have been offered of the various sixties social movements that attacked the constituted authorities. But surely Looney Tunes should be in there somewhere. The entire sensibility of the Yippies, for example, is incomprehensible without Daffy Duck's anarchic activism. When Abbie Hoffman and friends nominated a hog named Pigasus for president, they were taking up the mantle of Chuck Jones.

Unfortunately, though, the sixties were a period of decline for the cartoon itself, partly because the elaborate hand-made animations of Disney and Warner had become prohibitively expensive. But there were still great shows, not least Warner Bros.'s Road Runner/Wile E. Coyote chase marathons, featuring malfunctioning Acme products that delightedly ridiculed consumer capitalism with its complicated gadgets and planned obsolescence.

"Rocky and Bullwinkle" was drawn in an extremely primitive way, but Jay Ward's beat-poetic cartoon, with its fractured fairy-tales and wayback machine, was an intellectual feast for adults and a wonderfully questionable influence on impressionable young minds,. Shows of a similar sensibility sprouted up and receded: Clampett's Beany and Cecil (the seasick sea-serpent), Underdog (it's a bird; it's a plane; it's a frog), Dudley Do-Right (who battled the greatest of cartoon badguys, Snidely Whiplash). (Many sixties cartoons have been revised on Boom, a cable network devoted entirely to baby boom cartoons.)

But there were bad signs too: the Flintstones and the Jetsons were simply bad sitcoms translated into the world of animation. Their use of the form was anything but creative.

The truly dark age of the cartoon, however, extended from around 1970 to 1985. The chaotic anti-authoritarianism of Daffy and the Yippies atrophied into a grim political correctness. Sesame Street, though not a cartoon, was the model of the new children's programming: devoted above all to affirmative action and sledge-hammer didacticism. Soon every children's program was conceived as a piece of moral or educational training rather than as an entertainment. Childhood became as a pure training-ground for adulthood, and there was to be not a moment's surcease from the improving messages.

Well, perhaps a moment's. "Scooby-Doo" was nominally devoted to the continual scientific refutation of the possibility of the supernatural, but it was really about a dog who talked funny and wolfed Scooby Snacks. Despite its current revival as camp, however, Scooby-Doo was idiotically written, indifferently drawn, and insufferably repetitive. In every show, a ghost was unmasked as a fake, and always in the same way. Meanwhile Josie and the Pussycats followed the insipid hijinks of an all-girl rock band. He-Man and She-Ra battled evil with big arms and not a thought in their pretty heads.

A true ecstasy of emptiness assaulted the unsuspecting younguns with shows such as the Carebears and the Smurfs, vehicles for the constant pounding-home of messages that no one could possibly disagree with, featuring characters that lived in tiny embattled utopias and who each represented a microscopic piece of empty moralizing (Good-Heart Bear, for instance, or Smurfette).

The eighties were rather a decadent time, a time of wall-to-wall cocaine, promiscuity, and acquisitiveness. That, I propose, was the direct if paradoxical result of the Care Bears, as a generation of young minds came to the decade associating ethics with sheer stupidity and cant. And given the quality of their cartoons, how could it have been otherwise?

Credit for the revival of the cartoon and hence of American culture must be given to Steven Spielberg. In the late eighties he produced the film Roger Rabbit, which was above all a cherishing of golden-age cartoons, and the television show Tiny Toon Adventures, featuring baby versions of the Looney Tune characters.

Tiny Toons was definitely a transition between the dark and new golden ages. Buster and Babs Bunny (baby versions of Bugs in blue and pink respectively) delivered the occasional anti-smoking screed but also romped with impish impunity through Acme Acres. They spun off such delightful derivatives as Animaniacs and Pinky and the Brain, a show about lab mice seeking world domination.

Disney finally came up with some decent television shows around the same time: especially Darkwing Duck and Talespin, which featured the characters from Jungle Book flying around in airplanes. Incomprehensible, perhaps, but also pretty funny.

But it was the advent of the 24-hour children's cable stations Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network which really opened the new golden era. The shift that took place in the pivotal period around 1990 was represented best by Ren and Stimpy, made by John Kricfalusi. Ren and Stimpy was one of the greatest works of art of the postmodern epoch (I am quite serious about that). Featuring a look that was torn-up art moderne and a constant bizarre appropriation from the whole century's popular culture, Ren and Stimpy was joyfully nihilistic, unpredictable, hilarous.

When I watched Ren and Stimpy with my then-little daughter Emma, I couldn't believe what we were seeing: an idiotic cat and a hyper-tense Chihuahua negotiating a world of useless consumer products, kitty litter, and shaving scum. Their theme song "Happy Happy Joy Joy" seemed perfectly to encapsulate the peculiar combination of jadedness and naivete of the early nineties.

With Ren and Stimpy, anything seemed possible. And since Ren and Stimpy, everything has become actual. There are so many excellent cartoon shows out here that it's impossible to keep track of them all, and they are giving birth to a culture that will end up being more interesting, and certainly funnier than our own.

Various cartoons have taken up the visual mantle of "Ren and Stimpy": most directly "Sponge Bob Square Pants," which tracks the adventures of a sponge named Bob who befriends starfish, flips burgers in underwater fastfood restaurants, and ridicules the Little Mermaid.

But my favorite children's cartoon these days is the "Powerpuff Girls," in which three kindergartners with gigantic, Japanese-anime-style eyes keep Townville safe from evil. Professor Neutonium made The Powerpuffs in the lab out of sugar, spice, everything nice, but he accidentally spilled in some Chemical X, which lent Bubbles, Blossom, and Buttercup the ability to prosecute evil-doers with extreme prejudice. The evil-doers in Townville, as in our own world, are usually adult men, though the girls also battle the occasional spoiled brat who seizes the Mayor's office and declares that "crime is legal."

Almost equally wonderful is Fox Family's "Angela Anaconda," in which the nerdy but intense Angela battles perfection, i.e. evil, in the form of her bete blanc, Nanette Mamoir. The animation of the show is unique, featuring photographic heads in surreal dialogue and jerky action.

There are more earnest and uplifting shows as well, such as the whole Klasky/Csupo kingdom of cuteness on Nick: Rugrats, Rocket Power, The Wild Thornberrys, As Told By Ginger. And there are also fairly traditional super-hero toons, especially Japanese action shows like Dragonball Z, with rudimentary plots but extremely striking visuals. Computers are giving rise to a new generation of wild-looking three-dimensional cartoons, such as Action Man, though their makers are still working out the kinks.

But perhaps the most encouraging development in the cartoon over the last decade is wicked satire aimed at all ages: "Beavis and Butthead," "The Simpsons," "South Park," and "King of the Hill," for example. These shows feature quirky if not outstanding animation and above all extremely pointed and clever writing that skewers our culture like Vlad the Impaler dealing with unruly peasants

The most interesting recent addition to this roster is the now twelve-year-old Emma's favorite: MTV's Daria, in which the incredibly smart and sarcastic title character negotiates and subdues the pirana-infested social shoals of high school, verbally disassembling jocks and cheerleaders in ways that they are incapable of comprehending.

By their cartoons shall ye know them.

Obviously, the best way to understand a culture - western or non-western, ancient or modern, tribal or industrial - is through its half-hour children's shows. And by that standard we are doing damn well. As the cartoons of today shape the leaders of tomorrow, we can rest assured that our future will be funny, creative, and smart, yet annoying.

So let me make a few predictions for the future of our culture based on today's cartoons. First of all, we will be living in a world run by girls, while men such as myself will be subject to the ridicule we have so long deserved. I predict the long-overdue comeback of anarchism as a lifestyle choice and a political movement. I predict the advent of a generation that, if such a thing is possible, is more aware of and cynical about the marketing strategies of late capitalism than their parents.

Above all, I predict a generation that is a lot cooler and more fun than the one that cut its teeth (and earned its cavities) on the Care Bears.

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Crispin Sartwell (mindstorm@pipeline.com) teaches humanities at the Maryland Institute College of Art. His most recent book is "End of Story: Toward an Annihilation of Language and History."

Some of the best current cartoons:

Angela Anaconda, Fox Family Channel

Sponge Bob Square Pants, Nickelodeon

Poweruff Girls, Cartoon Network

Dragonball Z, Cartoon Network

South Park, Comedy Central

Daria, MTV

Cat Dog, Nickelodeon

Hey Arnold!, Nickelodeon

Cow and Chicken, Cartoon Network