1,692 words
Part 2 of 2 (Part 1 here)
My Problem with “Anime”
What I hate most about anime is the word “anime” itself, because the term was invented as a con to obscure the fact that you are simply watching a cartoon. It’s not “anime.” They are cartoons from Japan.
The term “action figure” was coined in the 1960s by the inventor of GI Joe, because he knew if he called them “dolls” — which is what they were — no boy would want to play with them. Dolls are for girls. So he called them “action figures,” and the trick worked. Likewise, in the late 1980s and early ‘90s there was still a strong taboo against adults watching cartoons because everyone knew that cartoons were for children.
As such, when cartoons from Japan were first being introduced in America, they had to call it something other than a “cartoon” or else no adult would have watched them. We were told that it was some sort of arthouse cinema that was highly respected by serious people in Japan. Not that all Japanese cartoons were deemed worthy of the label, however: Speed Racer was still a Japanese cartoon, whereas Akira was “anime.” Thus, no one bothered to say anything about the schoolgirls in sailor suits. No one said anything about the karate fights where people shoot lasers out of their arms. No one said anything about the girls in sexy maid outfits or the dudes with cat ears. We were told that “anime” was like Akira: artsy, dark, and noirish and with a lot of cyberpunk influence that was making some sort of social commentary about capitalist society.
Little did we know how atypical Akira was. Indeed, the first “animes” to get huge promotional pushes in North America — Akira, Spirited Away, and Howl’s Moving Castle — were atypically artsy-fartsy and marketed towards the sort of people who like watching artsy-fartsy foreign films. Just look at the word “anime”: phonetically, it sounds like something French — perhaps spelled animé.
Akira was critically acclaimed and praised by no less than Roger Ebert. Suddenly, for the first time in human history, it was possible for a cartoon to be respected as serious art. Jesus wept, and the sound of Satan’s laughter echoed throughout the valley.
It’s noteworthy that Akira still follows many of the previously-established rules for an “adult cartoon” that had been laid down previously. It’s rated R and includes some psychedelic scenes that do not advance the narrative in any way, and seem to serve no other purpose than to look cool to someone who is high on drugs. All it lacked was a soundtrack by Cheap Trick.
Once the term “anime” started gaining social respectability, we began seeing the term applied to any animated product coming from Japan, regardless of its artistic merit. Sailor Moon was anime. Dragon Ball Z was anime. Everything Japanese was anime.
The Simpsons’ Transformation of American Culture
The first episode of The Simpsons, the Christmas-themed “Simpsons Roasting on an Open Fire,” was broadcast in December 1989 following the eponymous characters’ previous incarnations in a series of shorts that were aired as part of The Tracey Ullman Show between 1987 and 1989. The premiere episode of the series was nominated for two Emmys.
The Simpsons was considered groundbreaking for its time. It was neither a cartoon for children, nor was it a risqué cartoon for adults, but rather a cartoon for both the young and old. It was silly enough for the kids but the wicked-smart writing of Golden Age Simpsons appealed to adults. Its early seasons were very different from what the show would later become in that it put a higher emphasis on realism. The original premise was that while The Simpsons was a cartoon, the episodes would be about problems that an ordinary family could relate to: the son has to deal with a bully, the dad’s boss is a jerk, the family has a goody two-shoes neighbor whose life seems perfect, and so on. The show soon departed from this formula and became more madcap and absurdist as the decade progressed.
In hindsight, most would agree that much of The Simpsons’ early success was due to John Swartzwelder, a comedic prodigy who was the series’ head writer throughout its 1990s imperial phase. The show then experienced a conspicuous decline in quality in almost direct proportion to Swartzwelder’s decreasing involvement.
The Simpsons was more than just a hit, but a pop-culture phenomenon. After the smashing success of the first season, the executives at FOX were bullish enough about the show to move it to Thursday nights and put it in competition with The Cosby Show, which had been America’s top-rated show for five years running.
Other networks tried to emulate the The Simpsons’ success by putting out their own cartoons for adults, and most of these early attempts failed miserably. The first was ABC’s Capitol Critters, which debuted in January 1992 and was cancelled after seven episodes. Around the same time, CBS offered Fish Police, which had an all-star voice cast that included John Ritter, Ed Asner, Jonathan Winters, and Tim Curry. It lasted three episodes. The following year, CBS took another stab at it and presented Family Dog, which was not only created by former Simpsons writer and future Incredibles director Brad Bird but boasted no less than Steven Spielberg and Tim Burton as executive directors. They even got Danny Elfman, who had composed The Simpsons’ famous jingle, to do the theme song. According to Wikipedia, Family Dog is “considered one of the worst animated television series of all time,” and lasted then episodes. In 1994, The Critic starring Jon Lovitz lasted 13 episodes on ABC before it was cancelled, after which it moved to FOX for a second season and a guest appearance in The Simpsons — and was canceled after ten.
You can buy Trevor Lynch’s White Nationalist Guide to the Movies here
Thus, for a period in the 1990s it looked like The Simpsons might have been a fluke and that Western Civilization might be spared the hellscape to come.
But then cable got into the adult cartoons racket. MTV had a minor hit with Ren and Stimpy, and a major one with Beavis and Butthead. Comedy Central struck gold with South Park in 1997, and in the final year of the century came Family Guy, a show that would eventually surpass The Simpsons and become Fox’s flagship, and perhaps even defining, series. While The Simpsons had been the creation of boomers, the next wave of cartoons were made by Gen X-ers. Whereas The Simpsons attempted to appeal to both young and old, Gen X cartoons appealed to youth culture. You didn’t expect your parents to understand why Beavis and Butthead was funny.
By the turn of the century, there were therefore several adult cartoons on the air at any given time in the United States, and many of them were successful. Then, in the 2000s, Adult Swim came along and started mass-producing them. It’s around this time that I said “No more. As a matter of dignity, there is a finite amount of my life that I am willing to dedicate to watching cartoons. I’ll continue watching the cartoons I currently watch but I refuse to watch anymore.” I have not watched any cartoon that debuted in the twenty-first century.
But by now, the seeds of the West’s destruction have been sown.
Conclusion
The concept of a cartoon for adults was originally one drenched in irony. Seeing adult humor presented in a cartoon was funny because cartoons, understood as being for children, were typically maximally inoffensive. Thus, the whole concept of adult cartoons was originally intended as a joke.
You can buy Trevor Lynch’s Classics of Right-Wing Cinema here.
My problem with adult cartoons is not that they are all bad. Some of them are well-written and impressively crafted. I can see the appeal. My problem is that entire generations now grow up watching cartoons as children, and when they reach adulthood, they just move on to more sophisticated cartoons. Your teens and twenties should be a time when you branch out and learn about new things. Explore the classic movies of previous generations. Watch a foreign film — one that’s not a cartoon. Or better yet, read a book.
But young adults don’t do this anymore. They watch Paw Patrol until age six, then watch SpongeBob until high school, and then they get into Dragonball Z. Once in college they start liking the Rick and Morty sort of cartoons, and on and on. By the time they reach 40, many of these people are still watching cartoons but still haven’t seen Gone with the Wind.
Some people will defend the “anime”’s artistic merits. But how many of these people, besides watching “anime,” are also engaging with genuine art? How many could explain the difference between French Impressionism and German Expressionism? If you seriously believe that you can get all your cultural vitamins and minerals by watching cartoons, then you don’t have much incentive to engage with higher culture at all.
The end result is a significant blurring of the lines of what adulthood means. How old is too old to still be reading comic books? How old is too old for Pokémon? When are you too old for the next Pixar movie? If you’re never too old for cartoons, then when are you ever too old for anything? As the Bible says, “When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child. But when I became a man, I put away childish things.” Today, many people not only don’t ever put away childish things, but it’s not clear anymore what a childish thing is.
A lot of genies have been released from a lot of bottles, and it will take generations to get some of them back in. There is only so much we can do. We do not have the power to get women back in the kitchen or gays back in the closet, but one thing we can do — and one thing we must do, if we are going to roll the snowball back up the hill — is that we as a people have got to stop watching cartoons.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kN7exshJ7hQ
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18 comments
Excellent two part series but I have to disagree that kids will be watching cartoons all their lives. They’ll be watching far more toxic material found on Tik Tok and YouTube. I’ve witnessed this firsthand. They don’t even watch TV.
Can anyone tell me if unfunny comedienne Tracy Ullman is Jewish?
Cartoons once had their place for adults in movie theatres as shorts before the main feature, which means you would see a brief Woody Woodpecker episode before more serious fare.
Since it’s about money on one end, animation is cheaper to produce than paying actors with big heads and a large salary. This must account for the proliferation.
Absolutely. A lot of the cartoons were definitely aimed at an adult audience, although there was enough in them that kids could grasp, so they worked for everyone. Give me a Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd over just about anything that in the theaters or on television these days.
Cartoons a threat to Western Civilization?
Hmmm…I kind of bristled at first blush but reading all the way through you finally got to the problem: kids who grew up on cartoons transform into adults who watch cartoons to the exclusion of serious content. I watched cartoons as a kid and read comic books too. I liked War Comics with Sgt. Rock and other WW2 icons. (I guess my age is showing). The last comic book I read was when I was 12 years old. I quickly graduated to real books, adult books.
Like the author, I was fascinated by Heavy Metal, I enjoyed the first few seasons of the Simpsons and I loved Beavis and Butthead Do America. Some great satire there. But I’m also a voracious reader. Henry James is probably my favorite novelist.
Years ago a friend’s son was getting ready to go away to college and I asked him what he liked to read. He said, “graphic novels.” Really? What is a “graphic novel.” Well he showed me some. “Graphic novels” were comic books. I was quite surprised. More surprising is that he was serious.
The nomalization of cartoons for adults is indeed a dangerous trend. You’re right. It’s part of the dumbing down of the culture.
You may be the best writer CC (Don’t tell Jim Goad!). Impressive vocabulary, research depth and compelling even when I disagree.
Say what you want about South Park, but it had one of their main characters be a raving anti-semitic ten-year-old boy. That alone is funny enough. To me, however, Cartman’s antics brought the existence of Jews as a class of people to kids’ attention everywhere. When I was a child, Jews were invisible, they were only things told of in Holocaust legends, they were things to be pitied and respected, and definitely not to be taken lightly or made fun of. And what’s more, over here in the Old World, Jews don’t like being seen. They keep a low profile, they’re subtle, and they apply their influence only through an extensive web of political and financial pressure groups. And then this show came along and shattered that. I’m aware that one of the two creators of the show, Matt Stone, is extremely (and visibly) Jewish, and probably couldn’t stop himself from putting a whole bunch of Jewish stuff into the production, intending the anti-semitic Eric Cartman to be a villain and the Jewish kid Kyle Broflovski to be a protagonist. But in the end, everyone who saw the show liked Cartman a lot more than they liked Kyle.
The European shadow-Jews must be really frustrated with those loud, obnoxious, unsubtle American Jews, those daywalkers who just wear their Jewishness on their sleeves like a star of David.
Very astute observations!
This was a cool series. I agree with the premise that is summed up by the Bible verse extolling the virtue of putting away childish things. In the late 90s I was privvy to the outermost circles of the inner circles of The Simpsons and Matt Groenig’s creative entourages and hangers on in LA. I was in close orbit with the painter Ron English who made, “popaganda”, famous. English is an astounding technical talent whose work lampooned the vacuous American pop culture and its childish sexualization and consumerism. His craft with oils is top notch and can be seen in his series of Rembrandt parodies using American pop iconography. He was/is also a brilliant subversive in that his series of Kiss Kids got him sued by Kiss for using their likeness. He painted his kids up in Kiss makeup and showed them doing child activities. That controversy only made him more famous. (See popaganda.com)
The problem with English is that he could never get out of his Leftist viewpoint. He couldn’t connect that American capitalism was a leftist not a rightist phenomenon. I chalk this up as another failure of Enlightenment liberalism. Were English to grow up in feudal or Republican Europe his prodiguous talent would have been used to paint art with intelligent messages but aimed toward the transcendant rather than fall short as yet another plebian critique of a failing merchant run society that used the merchant’s tropes to uphold it.
I meander here hoping this is an interesting topic on art and our movement. Back to the Simpsons circle experience, it was a collection of some of the most un-interesting, un-creative and self indulgent people I have ever met. It was like hanging out with corporate bores who layered on top of themselves airs of self-importance as fig leaves before the Gods, who they must have felt in their bones, saw them as the rabble that they really were.
The cartoon culture is a tragedy and I think its first cousins are video games and sportsball. All of them are infantalizing and low forms of entertainment at best and life wasting at worst. All of them must be pushed to the margins or altogether destroyed. At least the Roman games were raw in honesty as spectacles of death.
The path to vanquishing these infantalizing wastes of time is to create better alternatives. However, that isn’t enough. We can’t just have talented sparse individuals making great works. Western High Art didn’t just create the artists and institutions that created them, it also cultivated the audience. That is to say, they didn’t just make an art for an elite the elite made and cultivated themselves for the art.
This is a critical point and I offer it as serious food for thought.
Why can’t moving paintings be considered art? If “cartoons” can’t be art, neither are paintings. It’s the story after all that matters. Walt Disney was a great artist and storyteller. Everyone derided him when he invested everything in an animated feature. That was snow white. It’s the message that matters. Storyboarding and many other innovations in film direction and editing, originated in cartoons.
True, animation could be a powerful medium, but to grow up steeped in cartoons to the detriment of serious art education is disastrous.
I don’t think the issue is whether or not cartoons can be art. It is a format that has been from the beginning designed for children. I think the point was made here that it is a low form.
One thing that is typically missed in these discussion is something that J Webb got at in his comment. That is that in a mass age things are made for mass consumption. Many of the things that are made are products. One of the strange things this plebian age has done is that you have products and then you have a counter reaction to people making products that attempt to be higher art that are mostly drab contrivances.
I tend to think that most of the things we call art and who we call artists are not what we call them.
To elaborate on my other posts point, to make the kind of transcendent art that came from Europe’s cultural apex you need three things.
1. A comprehensive commitment to making institutions that identify and cultivate talent. They do this at an early age and the training in the craft aspect is comprehensive and extremely rigorous.
2. A commitment from the elite who fund those institutions to cultivate themselves in order to ingest, understand and appreciate the art they pay to have made for them by their institutions.
3. The system must honor the bio-culture it springs from. For Occidental man that was the individual genius playing within a cosmopolitan style/genre for a given epoch but pushing its bounds. Those who transcended the formulaic responses and pathways in their creations through deep skill mastery and the transcendent spark to go beyond the formulaic bounds made what came to be called art while the others made the product that was flushed by the toilet of time.
I think it is often too early to tell if something is art. A lot of what is made today is really a product, and even things that have that transcendent spark that makes art are often made by people whose lack of craft due to the lack of ingredient one falls short of its potential. As J. Webb says, people are creating content.
The cartoon format is approached by people attracted to its essence. That childish impulse is further enhanced by the commercialist impulse to feed the formula and ensure mass consumption for maximum returns. It is an impoverishing system ironically. It will take a daring and deeply talented person or team of people to break the mold and make art from within the cartoon form.
I must confess, I still really like Disney’s The old Mill from 1937, even as an adult.
Our ‘high culture’ became hideous, tendentious and corrupt in the 20th century: modern art, music and architecture. The Left ensures that the glorious legacy of previous centuries is ‘problematised’ — it is patriarchal, colonialist, proto-Nazi, fit only for ‘deconstruction’ and parody, or to be handed over to non-Whites to wreck. Therefore our people take refuge in low-culture: the never-ending parade of Hollywood space-opera and fantasy (almost all of which promote anti-white and anti-traditional messages), the cartoons, the merchandise and ‘action figures’ — toys. This is a retreat to infantilism, the second childhood of a culture that is being propelled into oblivion. If we cannot create we should at least resist: don’t watch rubbish, boycott race-swapped productions, read books instead of comics — and leave toys to children.
This is a fun discussion and I enjoy the chronological reportage, but I’m skeptical all the blame should go on cartoons. There is plenty of terrible TV and media at large. Also, what is the correct ratio of watching TV sports vs. actually doing something exercise related? Sometimes terrible failures can at least offer some amusement, but it’s the glut of mediocrity that is most insufferable. ‘Netflix bloat’ refers to shows with excess episodes that add nothing to a series, other than seem to be a contract fulfillment. This is nothing new, as this sort of bloat has existed in TV series (recap or flashback episodes), movies with bad sequels, or musicians who toss off an albums to ‘fulfill’ a contract with a record label because they have some sort of agreement with a new company.
I totally agree that The Simpsons had some great early years and then settled into mediocrity. Adult Swim sounds interesting on paper as an art project, but what I’ve seen of it suffers the same mediocrity disease of “content creators” creating “content”.
There used to be a stigma against “corporate rock” or Hollywood mass produced media, but the democratization of creating media means everyone can now be a “creator” making “content”. A while back I remember a funny article mocking the number of lame bands and demanding that there ought to be a tax credit for “not being in a band”. Nowadays that tax credit should be extended to not trying to be an “influencer” and not making a podcast (especially a true crime podcast).
Before the guys in Tiki torches offended Charlottesville, locals the Happy Flowers (1980s) made an unlistenable din with splashes of satire, I Said I Want To Watch Cartoons.
I’m going to go out on a limb here. I think that the collapse of Western society may owe slightly more to mass immigration, corrupt politicians, ZOG authoritarianism and Hebraic usury than to Beavis & Butthead and Abe Simpson.
But I could be wrong. It could be that cartoons are the real enemy here.
I can’t find it, but I think it was LeBlanc who did a great article on Counter Currents about Beavis and Butthead. May have been Spencer Quinn.
I personally love adult cartoons. I likewise enjoy LeBlanc’s writing here but I think the conclusion was somewhat anti-climactic for an article with a grandiose sounding title such as “Adult Cartoons Are a Disaster for Western Civilization.” The lesson here seems to be the classic moderation is the key. Sure, there is that subset of men who are still into Pokemon which is kind of weird and those who are a little too enthused about adult cartoons.
I grew up watching South Park and still watch for that mix of nostalgia. Super Jail, Robot Chicken, and Mr. Pickles are among the most funny adult cartoons I’ve seen, surpassing even South Park.
But I think a good point is made about people not branching out. It dawned on me in college that I was playing A LOT of video games. I decided to go the extreme and go a whole year no video games. This gave me lots of spare time which I used to go the gym, work a part time job, and socialize. Eventually I found a middle ground such that I would play video games but in a way that would not adversely affect other aspects to living a healthy life.
There is the recent McDonald’s meme, of a post from a Japanese McD vs. one from America, one showing a cartoon of a “family” where as there other of a vile warthog. Look how the Japanese have not succumbed to woke say some. But for pete’s sake, the post from Japan is a drawing–a fantasy, a depiction of …nothing! McD Japan could have photographed a real Japanese family. (There is no way Japanese parents would allow their 6 year old girl to dye their hair orange from naturally black–forget about mom’s choice in hair color).
Get out of the cartoons and read the news. Japan has its fair share of strident trans-animal alphabet soup misfits screaming for “equality” in Japan. Japanese politicians who decry such insanity, who display a little “conservatism” are pilloried by the Japanese and foreign media.
LeBlanc is correct–open your eyes and gaze upon the real unfiltered unvarnished world. Cartoons distort our grasp on what is real and what is fake. The cartoon from McD Japan is 2D. The vile warthog from America is breathing in your face right now.
I’ve yet to hear any meaningful argument about why animation as a medium should be inherently linked to children’s entertainment (which has always been a uniquely western attitude, and even there has been steadily dissipating).
This is an important point when it’s the central thesis of the article, and without it the whole thing rather falls apart like wet tissue paper. The reasoning we are given is on the level of “come on, man”.
We can at least agree that there is animation inappropriate for children to watch, but even that goes further to show the broadness and potential of the medium vs. the narrowness the author seems to want to ascribe to it.
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