Now, we all grew up as kids (in the U.S., anyway) watching this stuff--cartoons, especially in the afternoons after school and on Saturday mornings. Cartoons about turtle people who happened to be ninjas and beat up robots and mutants. Cartoons about the surreal adventures of a middle schooler with barely any hair and his blue-skinned friend coping with the ups and downs of adolescence. Cartoons about video game characters being grossly misinterpretted. Cartoons about cats, sharks, and God-knows-what-else ripping off those turtle people.
In a sentence: What happened to that?
I've actually gone through a phase of actually wanting to persue a career as an animator until I found that it's virtually impossible to actually get into such a field right now in the U.S. at least. Unless you mean CGI or something. It seems most of what weird, offbeat 2D animation that's still being created for the American audience is being outsourced to other countries that'll do the grutnwork of actually drawing frame-by-frame for the cheapest rates--or we'll just slap it together with Flash. Not that there's anything wrong with Flash, but the number of cartoons sloppily pumped out using Flash these days is starting to get a little bit unsettling. And CGI, though it's neat, is being entirely overdone and as many other cartoon fans have pointed out, there are just certain qualities to it that will never, ever just quite capture the heart and fun of good old 2D pen-and-paper animation.
Then there's anime. I mean, heck, I like anime--most kids around my age or younger, born in the 80s at least, either love anime or at least went through a phase during which they openly or even secretly enjoyed it. I don't watch it as much as I used to, but when I do I tend to enjoy it (so long as it's not just flipping by something unimaginably boring-looking on some random channel late at night--I mean purposely watching it) and I have several that I consider really awesome, high-grade pieces of animation history as we know it. But, well.. in ways, it has absolutely killed what was once a glorious flurry of decent-to-awesome cartoons by and for the American market that ruled the airwaves back a good decade or tow ago. If it's not companies cashing in on the popularity of the 'new' cartoon form in any way possible (commonly ending up with terribly-dubbed, kiddied-down, once-great anime series slapped onto childrens' programming slots to rack up some ratings) it's wannabe animation studios churning out gut-wrenchingly bad Western-made attempts at 'cloning' the anime experience by stuffing random characters with huge eyes, overblown expressions and blinding hairstyles into generic action-scene universes with sappy, drawling storylines. Either way, it's bad news, and it's little more than trying to dig around the piggybank 'exciting' shows like Dragonball Z and Gundam Wing made when introduced to a very excitable and inquisitive preteen populace in the late 90s.
Now, I've done my share of research on cartoon lore and I know all about the 'silver age' of cartoons that came about around 1990 and lasted nearly a decade, but has since waned for the reasons I've listed and oh so many more. But really, with enough disgruntled fans like me, people who were kids growing up when great stuff actually made in the west was all over TV.. when enough of us get together and think about and talk about how much we miss those days, how much we want real animation studios back in the U.S., how much we loathe corporate hotheads twisting cartoon creators' ideas more and more to fit the current trends and how much they'd rather spend as little money as possible outsourcing and poorly dubbing and putting out crap they think kids don't know better than to see the poor quality of rather than making something with love and care that's actually WORTH WATCHING for a MUCH broader audience...
Well, maybe something might start to stir.
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