Everyone has grown up watching cartoons. You’ve probably had the experience of waking up on a Saturday morning and catching up on your favorite cartoons. For most people, this is where their love for animation began. As we grow and age, that love never goes away but tends to evolve. This is where adult animation comes in. The genre isn’t new but has grown into something else over the last few years. Let’s talk about adult animation.
The Beginning of Adult Animation
The genre can be traced back to the early 1900s, specifically the 1920s—1930s. However, most of those videos were X-rated. Today’s mainstream adult animation is still appropriate for TV. From there, adult animation began its rise. However, there was growing concern about censorship and making sure that children didn’t confuse adult programming for their regular cartoons. This is why “program blocks” like Adult Swim were created. The sub-channel of Cartoon Network showed exclusively adult animated content.
Adult animation turned a corner once the U.S. allowed animated content from other countries to play here without censorship. This happened because of the movie rating system we all know, which told parents what was appropriate for their children and what wasn’t. After that, animators began pushing the envelope of what was allowed, seeing what more they could get away with putting on the screen. Eventually, that led to the edgy adult cartoons we know today, The Simpsons.
The Simpsons
The iconic adult cartoon, which aired its first episode in 1989, showed something that Americans had rarely seen in adult animation. The show followed the Simpson family and all of their adventures. Each episode was filled with raunchy and crude humor. Each joke was more tongue-in-cheek than the last. The show was met with mixed reviews. Some people loved it, and others were concerned that the characters were too much of a bad influence.
This concern highlighted that people didn’t exactly understand what adult animation was. The fact that there could be a cartoon that was not meant for children was mind-blowing to some. Still, The Simpsons ushered in a new age of adult animation. The creator of Gravity Falls, Alex Hirsch, gave an interview in Time where he spoke about the subject. “Ever since The Simpsons came out, adult animation has been an arms race of different ways to copy The Simpsons.”
Hirsch isn’t wrong in his assessment; many adult cartoons emulate The Simpsons somehow. American Dad, Family Guy, The Cleaveland Show, and more all depict dysfunctional family dynamics that are played up for a comical effect. However, adult animation hasn’t stayed in the realm of The Simpsons.
The New Age Adult Animation
While most adult cartoons have been geared purely for comedy, the genre is taking on a new tone. With shows like Arcane, Bojack Horseman, Love, Death & Robots, The Midnight Gospel, and more, we can see the genre begin to step outside the confines of comedy. Some of these shows do have comedic elements at times, but for the most part, they’re focused on intense drama or action.
Even within the comedic lens, it’s taking a different turn. Shows like Bob’s Burgers, Central Park, The Great North, Rick and Morty, F is For Family, and The Boondocks use comedy differently to tell broader stories. Shows like Bob’s Burgers and The Great North are comedic but not at the expense of their depicted family dynamics. Rick and Morty and The Boondocks use crude and inappropriate humor that sometimes pushes the envelope and borders on offensive, but they do it in a way that aims to make a more significant point than the plot’s surface.
Final Thoughts
Even though adult animation is expanding and more subgenres exist within it, so do the aforementioned shows like The Simpsons, Family Guy, American Dad, etc. All subgenres should be depicted within adult animation because it is an incredible storytelling medium. Animation as a whole, regardless of what age it’s meant for, can sometimes be discredited as a severe mode of film or television. The diversity shown in adult animation paints the medium in a completely new light that people are finally beginning to see en masse.
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