- This video is brought to you by Skillshare.
(electronic music)
What's up Wisecrack, Helen here.
We're in the midst of an adult animation renaissance,
and there's arguably never been a better time
to be a grown-up who likes drawings that move.
Whether you're partial to the trippy space adventures
of the world's most lovable septuagenarian nihilist,
or prefer delving into the subconscious
of TV's most inebriated spy,
chances are you've had no trouble getting your fix
of illustrated, or clay-mated, insanity.
Now, before our current profanity-laden glut
of adult cartoons, many might have considered the format
to be generally more childish than peeing your pants.
But over the last few decades
that's become less and less true.
- Tonight, I'll be reviewing the latest
Tim Burton movie, "Edward Plungerhands."
(water sloshes) - Please shoot me.
- But how did we get to a day and age
when BoJack and Butters matter more to us
than almost any live action character?
What brought on the unexpected reign of the adult cartoon?
While you might consider our recent surge
in highly excellent animation for adults to be
one of the few blessings of the past decade,
it's actually not so simple.
That's because cartoons for kids is itself
a fairly recent phenomenon.
Animation for adults was previously the norm.
So, how did we get here?
To figure out why it's back better and grosser than ever,
we first need to take a walk down a cartoony memory lane.
Welcome to this Wisecrack Edition
on The Origins of Adult Animation,
and not a singular significant spoiler ahead.
But before we get into it, I wanna give a shout out
to this video's sponsor, Skillshare.
Skillshare is an online learning community for creatives,
where millions of people come together
to take the next step in their creative journey.
Skillshare offers thousands of classes
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I'm an aspiring filmmaker myself, so I was super stoked
about all the film production classes Skillshare offers.
The one I'm really digging right now
is film production on a budget,
taught by filmmaker and educator Julian Klepper.
It's an awesome overview of how to turn your stories
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when they're starting out.
Because Skillshare's classes give you a combo
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Right now, you can join the millions of people learning
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Just go to skl.sh/wisecrack21,
or click the link in the description.
Now, back to the show.
So, let's dive in.
The earliest animated pictures were actually
mainly intended for the delight of movie going adults.
They were short flicks that would play as a warmup
for a live action feature film,
and were comprised mostly of vaudeville-esque numbers,
featuring gags and tricks,
like this guy pulling a bottle of wine off of his easel,
fairy tales or folklore,
or just kind of random stories about, among other things,
couples having marital difficulties.
Then there was the heavily censored short
"Alice Solves The Puzzle" where the titular puzzle
involves avoiding a drunk cartoon animal.
Other cartoons were just plain dark,
like this 1919 short "Feline Follies"
which ends on Felix the Cat killing himself
with a gas pipe after discovering he accidentally
fathered a few too many kittens.
Of course, where there's artistic creation,
there's bound to be sex stuff.
♪ Puts you in a trance ♪
♪ With her hoochie coochie dance ♪
- Most of it was pretty innocuous,
featuring lots of female animals having underwear problems,
or, say, Mickey Mouse having uncomfortable relations
with an apparently sentient hot dog.
Also, cannons going limp after firing.
Then there was actual factual animated porn,
including one particularly infamous film
Eveready Harton in "Buried Treasure"
which depicted the titular character attempting
to get frisky with a woman, and a man,
and also a donkey and a cow.
Moving on, 1920s animated films are all well and good,
but mostly pretty tame.
That gave way to, as animation specialist Karl Cohen
puts it, sheer "wildness and wickedness"
from approximately 1930 to 1934.
This is typically called the Pre-Code Era,
because it came before Hollywood started
actually regulating itself in earnest.
That meant animated films, like live action films,
were filled with distinctly non-PG fare, like profanity,
obscene gestures, sexual references, more bootleg alcohol,
drugs, scatological humor, and even bondage and bestiality.
Some of the examples we name might sound somewhat tame
by today's the internet stole my innocence standards,
but remember that these were the 1930s,
an objectively much pruder time when people,
particularly children, were far less likely
to encounter sexualized media.
So, the fact that cartoons featured creepy men
watching a woman dry off through a keyhole,
or Cinderella in her rapidly-shrinking undies,
made them decidedly adult fare.
What's more, drugs are referenced repeatedly in these films,
from hallucinations on laughing gas to alcohol,
which was still illegal, and apparently made
clock towers somewhat menacing,
to more laughing gas being consumed
by the delightful Betty Boop.
That curvaceous sketch of a woman pretty well encapsulates
what Pre-Code animation was all about.
While a modern Betty Boop is certainly sexualized,
a Pre-Code Betty Boop was something else.
She was always inadvertently exposing cleavage,
or being disrobed, or being groped,
or having implied sexual relationships with a dog.
That's right, Pre-Code Betty Boop was banging a dog.
♪ Yip, yip, yip ♪
♪ Ah da, da, da, da ♪
♪ Yip, yip, yip ♪
- Similar antics ensued in other shorts,
like this secretary trying to hide her undies
with a strikingly catastrophic financial chart.
Also, some of it was just plain dark.
You've got Mickey being attacked by an army of skeletons,
and well, just a lot of weird skeleton stuff.
Also, Betty Boop's lover dog gets chased by monsters
to the gates of hell for gambling and pursuing women.
As you can see, "The Simpsons" and "South Park"
didn't invent the concept of putting
adult content in animated movies.
However, the Hays Code, a self-imposed series
of moral regulations that took hold in Hollywood,
effectively censored movies, including animation,
from 1934 to around 1968, though studios largely ignored it
by its final years.
But when it was big, it was big,
and banned everything from sex, childbirth, profanity,
and even ridiculing the clergy,
while strongly discouraging things like surgical operations,
a man and woman in bed together,
and the deliberate seduction of girls.
The code was overseen for around 20 years
by influential Catholic journalist Joseph Breen,
nicknamed the Movie Czar, who was in charge of reviewing
scripts and films, and let's just say
he took his job real seriously.
Studios were forced to edit their animated films rigorously,
ensuring that nose blowing was inoffensive,
and that the bubble dance performed by the elephants
in "Fantasia" wasn't too sensual,
presumably to avoid arousing
any suggestible elephant viewers.
This is the era when cartoons became more cautious.
It's also coincidentally when they became truly excellent,
more life-like and emotionally convincing.
The era also witnessed the rise of Mickey Mouse, Bugs Bunny,
Popeye, Tom and Jerry, and other assorted
famous line drawn creatures.
In 1937, Disney released the first
American animated feature film, "Snow White."
Still, the majority of cartoons were shorts
that played before live action features.
Therefore, animation was viewed as a medium
for kids and adults.
During World War II, the government even used
Donald and Daffy Duck in propaganda,
to encourage people to donate scrap metal, pay their taxes,
and generally fight the Nazis.
Most importantly, there was no specific market
for children's animation.
The major studios like Warner Brothers, MGM, and UPA
were pretty clearly not primarily targeting cartoons
to kids, according to publisher Martin Goodman,
who founded the company that became Marvel Comics.
He cites the sophisticated humor,
pop culture references, casual violence, sex, and jazz
in arguing that these animated shorts
still skewed primarily towards adults.
But then, cartoons for the big boys died.
The early '50s saw the weakening of the major studio system
due to antitrust laws.
Cartoons were among the casualties.
"When the cartoons became too expensive
"to recoup their costs and the great movie studios closed
"their animation departments," Goodman writes,
"we essentially lost adult animation in America."
Additionally, and ironically, the advent of TV
and its proliferation into nearly every American house
caused a major, arguably damaging,
shift in the animation industry.
The death of adult-ish animation coincided
with the birth of the Saturday morning cartoon,
a brand new way to target shows directly to kids
coked up on sugary cereals.
Now, there was some rare animated content that was
primarily made for adults in the early '60s,
including the truly excellent
"Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends."
Though many of us may have enjoyed the antics
of the world's greatest moose and squirrel duo as kids,
re-watching it now you might realize
how many of the Cold War era jokes, as well as the cultural,
political, and intertextual references,
flew right over your precocious little brain.
- Who are all those people, Rocky?
- [Rocky] Lots of them are Washington senators, Bullwinkle.
- Where's their baseball suits?
- Most famously, there was also the prime time,
iconic, family friendly fare of "The Flintstones."
Even in a time of expanding popularity
of kid focused cartoons, "The Flintstones" was primarily
an attempt by Hanna Barbera to capture an adult audience,
without isolating kids.
They did this by incorporating classic,
familiar adult sitcom tropes,
particularly those of "The Honeymooners"
and even pushing boundaries for the time
by showing Wilma getting pregnant,
a narrative that was bold if not brand new for television.
However, that show's declining popularity in its final years
was pretty much a nail in the coffin
for adult adjacent animation, giving rise to what
animation scholar M. Keith Booker calls
"a widespread perception in the television industry that
"animated programs could succeed only as children's fare
"on Saturday mornings."
From then on, cartoons were almost exclusively
aimed directly towards kids.
The slashed budgets of the television medium
and a demand for ever more content
contributed to declining animation quality
as artists had to rapidly churn out sketches.
This led to the dominance of what is called
limited animation, a technique popularized by Hanna Barbera
in the '50s, in which animators reuse large parts
of the same frame over and over again,
rather than redrawing them as they had previously done,
painstakingly and beautifully.
There were a few adult stand-outs in the era,
exceptions like "Yellow Submarine"
and the first X-rated animated film "Fritz the Cat."
These films are rare forerunners
of the animated content that was to come.
- You think learning is a really big thing,
and you become this big (bleep) intellectual
and sit around trying to out-intellectual
all the other big (bleep) intellectuals.
You spend years and years with your nose buried
in these (bleep) tomes,
while the world is passing you by.
- [Helen] But then circa 1981, something happened
that was going to really change the future
of talking drawings for grown-ups, specifically, this.
- [Man] Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll.
(rock music)
- That's right, MTV was born, and hair was wild.
MTV shook things up big time,
introducing young people to a 24/7 vessel of pop culture.
But the channel also made the savvy,
and perhaps risky, choice to reintroduce people
to bold, adult-y animation.
The channel's first creative director Fred Seibert
recalls that "cartoons seemed to be the closest
"visual equivalent to rock and roll.
"We wanted to create essentially the notion
"of moving album cover art."
Fittingly, Seibert also cites children's shows
like Bugs Bunny as inspiration.
All of which is to say, MTV was appealing specifically
to the nostalgia buttons of audiences who had grown up
watching children's cartoons
They did this in a few different ways.
First of all, there were the famous promotional pop videos,
used as interstitials before and after commercial breaks.
For these, the channel hired animators like Steve Fiorilla,
Ken Brown, and later, Henry Selick,
and quickly became known amongst artists
as one of the most boundary pushing homes for animation.
In the late '80s, the channel created
a special animation division to oversee
the increasingly elaborate animated logos.
Secondly, the channel started featuring music videos,
including Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer,"
with claymation done by Nick Park,
who would go on to make "Wallace and Gromit"
and "Chicken Run."
The channel would go on to air other
excellent animated music videos,
including "Money for Nothing," "Take on Me,"
"Do the Evolution," and "Leave me Alone."
But the biggest event of all came in 1989
when "The Simpsons" debuted on Fox.
It was born out of cartoon interstitials punctuating breaks
on The Tracey Ullman Show, a variety show that blended
sketch comedy, song and dance, and, indeed, animation.
The Simpsons brought animation back to prime time
American TV for the first time since the '60s.
Ingeniously, it, like "The Flintstones,"
centered the show around sitcom television's trademark
neurotic American family.
- You make me sick, Homer.
You're the one who told me I could do anything
if I just put my mind to it.
- Well, now that you're a little bit older,
I can tell you that's a crock!
- [Helen] But at the same time,
it quickly grew into something else entirely.
By the third season, it had perfected
its unique brand of humor.
- Is there a doggy hell?
- Well, of course.
There couldn't be a heaven if there weren't a hell.
- Who's in there?
- Oh, Hitler's dog, and that dog Nixon had.
- [Helen] Complex storylines,
and borderline exhausting supply of pop culture references.
- You can't take my Emmy.
- Hey, you know the rules.
Awards for excellence in entertainment are contraband!
No Emmys, no Oscars, not even a Golden Globe.
- Cultural historian Christopher Cook argues that
"The Simpsons" is really one of the first
mainstream postmodern shows,
a collage of recognizable pop culture elements
glued together by irony.
This would become a defining feature of many
of the adult animated shows we know and love today.
Most specifically, one of the production companies
behind "The Simpsons," Klasky Csupo,
went on to make "Duckman," a show about a crude
anthropomorphized duck detective,
while two of "The Simpsons" showrunners,
Al Jean and Mike Reiss, went on to create the "The Critic,"
a show about a jaded film reviewer.
- And that's our show for today.
All the movies stink, particularly the three by John Hughes.
- [Helen] Back at MTV's animated studio,
the '90s kicked off with the introduction of a new
animated anthology show called "Liquid Television,"
which became a vital home to short, bizarre pieces
made by independent animators who were
pushing the medium every which way.
Fittingly, the show also became a breeding ground
for bold new ideas, with some short segments
then blossoming into their own massively successful shows,
like "Beavis and Butt-Head" and "Aeon Flux."
It also proved that there was a ravenous audience
for adult aimed animation.
By this time, out-there animation was pretty much central
to the MTV brand, and it would lean into that hard
by introducing more shows of the like,
including "The Head," "Celebrity Deathmatch,"
and "Daria"" to their slate.
Meanwhile, Nickelodeon semi-followed suit
by introducing the weird world of "Ren & Stimpy,"
which is either an adult-y children's show
or a childish adult show, but beyond a doubt
creepy and disturbing and awesome.
Then, when "South Park" burst onto the scene in 1997,
it was ready to confound our expectations
of what animation could be.
- Cartman, they killed Kenny.
- He's not dead!
- Dude, Kenny is dead!
- It exemplified the roughly constructed,
even crude, aesthetic popular in adult animation.
Like "Beavis and Butt-Head" it supplemented
that simplicity with a cacophony of weird adult content,
as telegraphed by its first episode,
which shows Cartman getting anally probed by aliens.
They'd go on to show everything from Oprah queefing
(woman flatulates)
to Saddam Hussein banging Satan.
It was quickly followed by the debut of "Family Guy,"
another animated classic that takes "The Simpsons"
subversion of classic sitcom format to new,
more twisted, and darker heights.
(group laughs)
But Cartoon Network gave adult animation lovers
a great big time consuming present in 2001
with the creation of Adult Swim.
For several years, the channel had experimented
with mature late night animated content, most notably,
the bonkers talk show "Spaceghost Coast to Coast."
- You'll wake me up if this pod
starts to replicate me, right?
- Probably not.
- It also aired "Sealab 2021,"
a show helmed by Adam Reed and Matt Thompson,
who would go on to make "Frisky Dingo" and "Archer."
Adult Swim's gamble paid off, gifting audiences iconic shows
like "Robot Chicken," "The Boondocks,"
"Aqua Teen Hunger Force," "Morel Orel,"
the UPN-originated "Home Movies,"
and eventually, "Rick and Morty."
Shows like these would continue to proliferate
throughout the aughts, to great audience
and critical acclaim, with new classics being born
in the form of "BoJack Horseman" and "Archer."
There's no end in sight for the trend either,
with "BoJack Horseman "creator and showrunner
Raphael Bob-Waksberg predicting in 2018 that
"You're going to see even more in the next five years,
"including a larger diversity of the kind of things
"we would call adult animation," as more networks
and streaming services are open to taking risks
on inventive content.
Increasingly shows like BoJack
and "Rick and Morty" have been particularly willing
to push limits, delving into darker,
not always funny, issues, like depression and nihilism.
- Why do you keep doing this to us?
- I don't know, Morty, maybe I hate myself.
Maybe I think I deserve to die.
I don't, I don't know!
(Morty screams)
- Of course, the larger question remains
why are these shows so popular, and why right now?
Well, we'd argue it's all about the still ingrained
expectation that animation is for kids.
Scholar M. Keith Booker argued in 2006 that animated shows
had in recent years "provided some of the most daring
"and innovative programming on American television,"
and that "perhaps for the very reason
"that animated programming is not always taken
"entirely seriously," these shows "have dealt with issues
"that might otherwise have been deemed too controversial
"for American commercial television."
In other words, because people dismiss adult animation
outright, they don't pay attention
when it's doing super rad, mind bending, stuff.
Animation scholar Paul Wells further argues that
the "supposedly innocent language of animation"
provides unique opportunities to subvert
the viewer's expectations and challenge societal truisms.
Seen this way, the particular simplicity of the animation
style in many of these shows may have been part
of what allows them to offer such cogent
and twisted social commentary.
- They don't even know what "Walden" is!
I bet if "Walden" was a sitcom, you'd all know what it was!
- Interestingly enough, we may owe a big thanks
to those 1950s to 1980s dark ages of animation,
when the format was pretty universally seen
as an innocent art form intended solely for children.
That's because this era of limited animation
seems to have laid the groundwork for the renaissance
of uniquely subversive shows that we love today.
First off, these modern shows often copy that retro,
crude animation style, particularly seen in the 1970s.
Secondly, these shows play off of
and actively laugh at the presumptions
that cartoons should be for kids.
In effect, shows like "Archer" and "Rick and Morty"
are so delightful, and perhaps so successful,
because they feel decidedly unlike what animation should be,
full of sex, drugs, and potentially soul crushing nihilism.
- Nobody exists on purpose.
Nobody belongs anywhere.
Everybody's gonna die.
- But as you can see, animation never really belonged
to kids, they just kind of had it on loan for a while.
The visual, thematic, and creative opportunities
afforded by this unique art form actually make them
precisely ripe for enjoyment by those of us
above the age of our shoe size,
and there's literally never been a better time
to be an adult who loves weird animation,
unless you're into spider skeletons,
in which case, your time has passed, sorry.
But what do you guys think?
Why is animation for adults catching on faster
than a love potion at Morty's school dance party?
Let us know what you think in the comments.
Thanks to our amazing patrons for supporting the channel
and our podcast, and before you go,
I wanna give one last shout out to Skillshare.
Right now, you can join millions of people
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Go to skl.sh/wisecrack21
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Thanks for watching, guys, peace.
(electronic music)