Why are there rarely any “serious” adult cartoons with a story? Why is it mostly just raunchy comedies?
Why are there rarely any serious adult cartoons with a story? Why is it mostly just raunchy comedies?
Why are there rarely any “serious” adult cartoons with a story? Why is it mostly just raunchy comedies?
Comedy takes advantage of animation well
Yep. And comedy is generally better than drama.
It doesn’t tho
That’s the only thing execs greenlight
Because Family Guy sold ridiculously well in the DVD era and the industry has been pumping out cheap clones ever since. Before that, the only adult animated series to come anywhere close to Family Guy in terms of DVD sales was the HBO Spawn series.
Serious stuff is done infinitely better in live action.
>Serious stuff is done infinitely cheaper in live action.
FTFY
Cheaper and better.
Because it's easier and more profitable when you can just point to existing successes rather than needing to be the trend setter
To subvert western culture
Because normies already have live-action for serious stories. And honestly, if your cartoon's story can be told just as well in live-action, it probably shouldn't be a cartoon in the first place.
And American normies above their 30s usually aren't too interested in animation that takes advantage of the medium (i.e. one featuring fantastical concepts or surreal imagery). They want their generic down-to-earth dramas in a realistic setting and lose the ability to take drawings seriously altogether. Sad and dull but that's how it is.
>surreal imagery
Surrealism is captured well in live action.
How would you even do a live-action Pink Elephants on Parade?
They're probably talking about stuff like The Holy Mountain or Possession, not Disney movies lel.
Stuff like that is impressive but live-action is still inherently limiting to its nature.
Animation is also limiting. It's harder to creater, for incstance, realistic faces and movement. That's why for many people animation is synonymous with slapstick.
>harder to creater, for incstance, realistic faces and movement.
That's why it's preferable to have it be stylistic to an extent.
Live-acting has pretty limited means of conveying emotion. Uncomparable to animation.
For example: you have character A beating up a helpless character B in anger in live-action. Most of the time you won't show the character actually getting brutally beaten because you don't want to actually abuse your actors. You'll just try to emphasize the repeated motion of A hitting B through sound and movement to convey some vague discomfort. Typically you'll focus on A's face or do a wider shot. You'll mostly imply rather than show cruelty. Animation can afford to show a character getting beaten and their body reacting to it, contorting and maybe even changing shape or color, as well as character surroundings being colored differently or just disappearing altogether to focus only on the necessary details. Sky's the limit with what you can do when you don't limit yourself to realism.
>Live-acting has pretty limited means of conveying emotion
cartoony face faults =/= more emotion
It is an exaggerated expression of emotion removing all the unnecessary aspects and leaving the bare essentials to emphasize the emotion in question.
This is infinitely more emotion any real person is ever capable of
You can't be serious.
>Live-acting has pretty limited means of conveying emotion.
That's one of the things animation can't do justice, regardless of budget. Live-action emoting can procure the most subtle and powerful emotions if an actor is good enough. It's extremely difficult to capture subtlety in animation.
Special effects can get around all that stuff you're talking about.
>Live-action emoting can procure the most subtle and powerful emotions if an actor is good enough.
Subtlety in this context is just you projecting your interpretation/educated guess of what emotion the actor is depicting when it's not immediately obvious. I would even say overanalyzing individual facial features, but that's subjective. Which is exactly why you can apply that same logic to any drawn expression if you really wanted to.
I mean, if you're gonna say this slight 0.5 mm lift of the upper lip really highlights the subtle emotion the character is experiencing at the moment, then any kind of drawn face could also be analyzed for the slightest unevenness and have some sort of emotion projected onto it.
>Subtlety in this context is just you projecting your interpretation/educated guess of what emotion the actor is depicting when it's not immediately obvious.
No.
Call me reductive, but it is literally that. Unlike an emotion that's immediately obvious to your animal brain, perceiving subtlety involves conscious effort and rationalization. Which can be applied to anything, long as you're willing.
For subtle emotions to be properly depicted, you need high detail and a high enough framerate. It's not just the face, but the body as well. And these cannot be read off just anything, they have to resemble people very closely. This combination is not very doable in animation.
I mean, these are your own subjective arbitrary standards for perceiving subtlety. I would argue you don't even need a close resemblance to a human for subtlety of expression. Just some complexity.
If it's too unfamiliar, you'll be too busy trying to make sense of it.
Comedy tends to be funnier in live action, from my experience, though maybe because the creation of the images isn't as much of a factor and they have more time and freedom for the gags.
Live-action generally uses higher frame rate than animation is my point.
>if your cartoon's story can be told just as well in live-action, it probably shouldn't be a cartoon in the first place
Probably the most shittiest take in months.
Don't show me normal boring people in a normal boring world in cartoons. You already have live-action for that and it's better for that purpose.
Live action is inherently less boring than animation.
>normies
I think you mean “NPCs”
It is literally impossible for a lot of adults to emotionally connect with something that uses imaginative thinking beyond seeing a live human being. It is impossible to take something seriously without being able to emotionally connect. Drawings and computer images are just too much of a barrier.
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Ironically enough, the only adults able to connect with animation are manchildren.
old man execs and animation is too expensive to experiment with
They need schlock to provide discussion-fodder for npcs and conformity propaganda
Animation can do everything except horror. There's no possible way to make it truly terrifying to adults.
Wrong. If anything, horror is one of the genres with the most potential in animation. Your perception of horror is probably just limited to boring stuff like serial killers and monsters.
It plays into common American feelings about animation, as in, it's hard for a lot of adults to take cartoons seriously, so the idea of a serious adult cartoon isn't as easy a sale as a raunchy one. That isn't to say they don't exist, there were things like King of the Hill, Venture Bros, and The Boondocks, which while still comedies, had their share of serious moments. Honestly I think there's room for it, if done well, because even a lot of regular American adults are willing to say how they're moved by the serious moments in Pixar films.
you forgot to mention the popularity of anime, which is by definition all animated, and Avatar the Last Airbender being *the* definitive adventure series of an entire generation.
homie the only high-framerate live action stuff is soap operas, which are unironically less subtle and nuanced than political cartoons.
Because when something comes out like Carol and the End of the World nobody fricking watches it and everyone b***hes about it, or whines about the art style and doesn't actually fricking watch the show.
Ironic detatchment. A grown man can't be seen taking a cartoon seriously, that would lead to embarrassment.
No, you just grow out of it.
At some point, it stops being convincing, it stops entertaining you.
Yes, because of the CONTENTS, not the form. The content is made for children. The form itself doesn't require this, but it's just how it is. That's why animation for adults is always comedic in nature and intentionally crude, to allow for the ironic detatchment.
You can't grow out of the medium of animation, only of the worthless subject matter.
It's the form too. The subpar art, the choppy frame rate, the overt voice acting.
Animation does not by definition require subpar art or choppy frame rates.
That's mostly what it is, especially that last one.
Anon. You're being moronic on purpose. Stop that. Nobody benefits from this.
I'm just telling the truth.
No, you are being intentionally obtuse. Animation is not by definition bad, this is a choice made by the people creating it. Why? Money, mostly. But also because it doesn't matter to them. Kids can't tell the difference and adults watch intentionally crude shows so they can maintain their ironic detatchment.
This is not the fault of the medium itself, things don't need to be this way, it's not how animation works by default.
Budget is a big hurdle for the animation medium. It's so much work just to create the visuals, then they have to be synced with the audio, and the editing, and so on.
But yeah, the voice acting issue is the hardest to get around. All things considered, there's little in animation that can keep me entertained.
Main reason is that most people refuse to treat animated character drama as seriously as they do live-action performances. They're seen as "less real."
It's also WAY easier to advertise an animated comedy with hundreds of 20-second gags and jokes that can go viral on social media as opposed to a serial drama that can only be properly understood if one actually sits down and watches an episode beginning to end (which very few are willing to do at a moment's notice).
The serious ones get screwed over because the corpos think soulless family guy clones are the only shows worth investing in. Final Space season 2 suffered heavily from network meddling that tried to turn it into a generic adult animated sitcom. After Olan pushed back enough they let him have complete creative control for season 3, only to give it the worst time slot imaginable and make an example of it by writing it off for taxes. Final Space getting screwed over is the perfect example of why indie animation is the only way forward if you want anything serious and story-driven.
Watching animation requires imagination and the ability absorb yourself in constant visual abstract concepts. It's too difficult to get emotionally invested when all you think about is how unreal something is. People need to see a human and every single human subtlety and detail of a human without having to fill in any blanks the way animation forces you to.
>execs are all fives parading around as ones
sad
Very sad. It's a big reason why today's storyboard artists are pressured to do keyframe animation. Back in the day, pic related would've been assigned to a separate layout department or the vendor studio, but the executives in charge are incapable of "seeing how an episode's turning out" when it's in a rougher WIP form. Adult cartoons especially have the most detailed boards, with ALL the poses.