For what it’s worth, the original characters and
cartoons were a product of their time. In most cases they’re not as
out-of-their-element as, say, Betty Boop; that doesn’t mean they’re
timeless. They were never made to be. They were made to amuse their
creators, at the time. When they were made, their creators had
something of a progressive, sophisticated sense of humor. As the
decades have gone by, much that was once novel in that humor has become
commonplace; many things that were outrageous have become formulaic and
tired. Humor has evolved somewhat, as it always does, as it always
must.
A person can still put himself into the mindset to appreciate the cartoons. Our context isn’t all that
removed, as yet. Still. The age is apparent, and it becomes more so as
the years go by. It’s a strange product of our current model of
culture, wth our huge corporations and our “intellectual property” that
we’re still being fed these old cartoons, made under a different
context, for a different audience with different expectations, instead
of them being constantly adapted to say something new, or else waiting
around in a vault for people with a yen for history — as with, say,
most of Max Fleischer’s work.
I mean, hell. Not that there’s anything wrong with a little history.
Look how long Shakespeare’s been going on. It’s just, imagine if movies
from the same period (the ’40s to the ’50s, mostly) were constantly
being rerun as contemporary entertainment, without any real context for
why they were made in the first place. Without the acknowledgement that
they reflected a different time, just expecting people would take them
at face value. And imagine if no one really made any more movies in the
decades since then; if they did, they were cautious to mostly use the
same characters in the same way, without questioning why the movies
were made the way they were to start with. (I guess, kind of like James
Bond.)
Although you need history for context, there’s a problem with
too much reverence. Mostly, it’s a distraction. Something seems a
little ill to me about holding onto icons made for someone else, in
some other circumstance, without really questioning why and without
really adapting them to make them your own. We all have our own
problems, we all have our own lives; why not, steadied with our
information about what has come before, make something that comes out
of our own situation? That’s custom-tailored to our own lives? Why does
Mickey Mouse still fucking exist
if he hasn’t been used creatively in sixty years? Why should we care?
For that matter, why does Disney exist if it isn’t doing animation
anymore?
I do not mean to suggest that the new cartoon is not a fucking
stupid idea. It kind of is. Although I must say I have a certain morbid
curiosity about it. It’s just, if you get around how dumb it is,
there’s nothing inherently wrong with it. On a level, it makes more
sense than making a new cartoon series with the old characters. The
characters that were designed to speak to our grandparents. Unless, of
course, it were made with that in mind.
Don Rosa, for instance, sets all of his Uncle Scrooge stories in
the mid-1950s. As far as he is concerned, Scrooge McDuck died in 1967.
The reason is, the stories that inspire him — those of Carl Barks –
were mostly made during that period. The ’50s was really his creative
peak. All of the details that define the characters and their world
(from Scrooge’s earlier days in the Klondike to the kind of car Donald
has to just the nature of Duckburg society) are intrinsic to the ’50s.
So Rosa sees no reason in pretending that the characters, the stories
are in any way contemporary; he works within the old framework, to
rather excellent effect.
You could always go another (postmodern) step and use the characters
within their time period to say something more meaningful about the
divide — kind of in the way that Watchmen picks apart superhero
comics. Roger Rabbit almost does this, though it doesn’t do anything
smart or very interesting with it.
IN CONCLUSION SINCE I DON’T REMEMBER WHERE I WAS GOING WITH THIS:
I want to see a return of animated shorts in the theater. I’ve seen
all of the animation festivals, and there are people trying to do
interesting work with the format. Then there are the Pixars, who are
content to recite the old gags, using the same old props and
archetypes, who think the old material is still funny just because all
of the cues are intact.
I mean, honestly. What is the meaning of using farm animals for
characters, these days? Sixty years ago, maybe it made some sense. A
lot of the animators grew up on farms, and so they looked to animals
for personality traits they could use in a satirical way, often to say
things that would be unsafe to say otherwise. It’s a natural thing;
we’ve done it for thousands of years. How many of us grow up on farms
today? How many of us grow up around animals, outside of house pets
(and gods, I beg, no more animated cats and dogs; the possibilities
have been expended)? And how much is really so unsafe for us to say, in
our current culture, that we have to hide behind familiar archetypes to
get away with it?
TO CONCLUDE MY CONCLUSION:
Everything annoys me.
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