Series like Amazon's Undone find creative ways to illustrate challenges to mental health. BoJack Horseman and Archer have proven that jaded comedies could still have a lot of heart. TV shows? Yeah, there’s an Emmy for animation, though it tends to be a tennis match between only a couple consistent comedies.īut it’s not that way everywhere-especially across Asia where dramatic animation gets deserved praise alongside live action television-and now with streaming services opening up the world of TV, even us westerners are getting in on some serious animated drama.Īnd with darker, heavier, more violent content, animation is starting to have its adult moment again (this time without the empty inanity of Beavis and Butthead or South Park we'll still watch those classics, though). Western cartoons are funny, and every year, the American animated movies hoisting Oscars over their heads are the ones consumed by kids and marketed for families and designed to make everyone laugh and feel good about themselves and their anthropomorphized feelings.
In some strange twist of cultural fate, animation in this hemisphere-that’s cartoon TV, films, shorts, commercials, etc.- seems to speak only in jokes and, mostly, only to children.
