What do you think modern adult animation?

[JMTV]

Thinking about comics, if forums existed in the 1980s, I imagine this kind of discussion going on, "Hey, that Alan Moore dude is elevating comic books to artistic heights never seen before. Surely now comic books will soon be seen as a legitimate artform and we can read them without being branded as social outcasts." We are in the year 2024 and the comic book medium has still not lost any of its stigma. I guess dramatic cartoons will still have stigma 40 years from now. At least it seems like animation has one advantage over comic books, in that there is an exception to the stigma in adult comedy cartoons. Animation has The Simpsons, Family Guy, South Park, Bob's Burgers, and Rick and Morty, but there aren't any comics that it's okay to like. I guess the lesson is, as badly as animation is taken as a medium, comics have it worse.

Sure, I can understand from your perspective.

 

[aegisrawks]

I dont think the current cartoons should change but I DEFINITELY AGREE MASSIVELY with Fone Bone and Goldstar, there should be WAY more choices available. People who love the current trend of cartoons SHOULDNT MISS OUT just because they dont appeal to me, but there should be more variety period, and this is as someone who LIKES Rick and Morty and Final Space.

 

[The Overlord]

There is one factor not brought up here, and that is that kids like the gory content and are watching gory cartoons. Japan can make something like Demon Slayer, which is a very graphic and very silly cartoon for children. That is what I hear today's kids are watching. I do know that battle shonen stereotypically has brooding angst, and many modern series like Jujutsu Kaisen still have that angst, but Demon Slayer feels tonally like a bright and cheery kids show. America will never make a gory kids show, but that is what I hear this generation of kids wants.

I feel like there would be a feeling by adults and corporate executives would treat violence in a glib manner and would warp kids' minds. Really a few splashes of violence you saw in Owl House or Amphibia would likely be the closest thing to a kid's show with violence in it.

One thing I am wondering about is if dramatic adult cartoons will ever lose their stigma. Action cartoons, be they kid or adult seem to be stigmatized as nerd stuff. I remember in high school a lot of my friends said they hated anime because much of it was serious and they believed cartoons are supposed to be funny. Now that non comedy adult cartoons exist, they seem to be in the same boat adult comic books are in, ignored and shunned by the mainstream. Normies love the Walking Dead when it's a live action TV show, but not as a comic. Would these cartoons need a live action adaptation to be seen as legitimate? Like a live action Primal?

Is that stigma there? If it was, wouldn't stuff like Invincible or Arcane or Castlevania have only lasted one season?

I dont think the current cartoons should change but I DEFINITELY AGREE MASSIVELY with Fone Bone and Goldstar, there should be WAY more choices available. People who love the current trend of cartoons SHOULDNT MISS OUT just because they dont appeal to me, but there should be more variety period, and this is as someone who LIKES Rick and Morty and Final Space.

You do have more variety than in the 90s and 2000s, not everything is a Family Guy clone. The issue is you do only stuff aimed at the 18-49 male demographic. But here is a question, what kind of dramatic animated series could you do for women 18-49 that wouldn't just be cheaper to do in live-action?

 

[Leviathan]

IMO, Hazbin Hotel and Smiling Friends are the best things to happen to mainstream animation in literal YEARS.

They're unabashedly rude and crude, but they're not heartless. The adult content is used in the service of good storytelling and likable characters.

I really can't go back to kids cartoons after watching them. At some point, you have to realize those shows aren't made for people like us, and that really handicaps their storytelling ability and potential.

 

[Leviathan]

As an aside, what's killing adult animation is that no one is watching the good stuff.

People will complain about the Family Guy-come-lately du jour and say that adult animation is "nothing but sex, violence and swearing", but when shows like Undone, Pantheon, Scavengers Reign and Carol and the End of the World come along, no one watches them and they die quick unmourned deaths in obscurity.

How is adult animation going to grow and improve if people aren't encouraging growth and are only complaining about the negative?

 

[JMTV]

I feel like there would be a feeling by adults and corporate executives would treat violence in a glib manner and would warp kids' minds. Really a few splashes of violence you saw in Owl House or Amphibia would likely be the closest thing to a kid's show with violence in it.

Well, last time I checked, I watch Dragon Ball Z Kai when I was 10 years old. So, I can handle the violence just fine.

IMO, Hazbin Hotel and Smiling Friends are the best things to happen to mainstream animation in literal YEARS.

Yeah, Smiling Friends is definitely the best animated show this year for me.

They're unabashedly rude and crude, but they're not heartless. The adult content is used in the service of good storytelling and likable characters.

Yes, Smiling Friends can be crude and chaotic, but it has a charm to it, and did it in a way that wasn’t being cynical about it.

I really can't go back to kids cartoons after watching them. At some point, you have to realize those shows aren't made for people like us, and that really handicaps their storytelling ability and potential.

I mean, that’s fair, but I do think that you are on to something. After Owl House and Amphibia, there is barely any new kids cartoons that I’m genuinely interested in seeing.

With the animation industry being in shambles right now, we’re not going to see a new kids cartoon that holds people’s attention for a while now until The Animation Guild gets a new deal since there is no pickups.

 

[Pooky]

We are in the year 2024 and the comic book medium has still not lost any of its stigma.

I don't think it true that comics haven't lost any of their stigma. I mean compared to the 50s and the era of Fredric Wertham? I think the dominance of superheroes in mainstream culture shows that comics have lost a lot of their stigma, as everyone knows where they come from, even if it sadly hasn't led people back to the medium itself.

I feel like there would be a feeling by adults and corporate executives would treat violence in a glib manner and would warp kids' minds. Really a few splashes of violence you saw in Owl House or Amphibia would likely be the closest thing to a kid's show with violence in it.

Not shows, but you do have fairly gory video games like the Five Nights at Freddy's series that are aimed at/marketed explicitly to kids. It's nothing new for horror movies to be popular with kids (e.g. the Freddy Kruger merchandising bonanza of the 80s), but a franchise like that being popular pretty much exclusively with pre-teens feels kind of new (arguably Mortal Kombat was kind of similar, thus both the Freddy's and Kombat movies had to try to work with a PG-13 ratings to reach their target audiences even though logically the adaptations would have been Rated R)

How is adult animation going to grow and improve if people aren't encouraging growth and are only complaining about the negative?

To be fair, I have literally never heard of any of the shows you've mentioned, and I'm certainly more interested in animation than the average person, so I'm not surprised people are missing them.

 

[The Overlord]

As an aside, what's killing adult animation is that no one is watching the good stuff.

People will complain about the Family Guy-come-lately du jour and say that adult animation is "nothing but sex, violence and swearing", but when shows like Undone, Pantheon, Scavengers Reign and Carol and the End of the World come along, no one watches them and they die quick unmourned deaths in obscurity.

How is adult animation going to grow and improve if people aren't encouraging growth and are only complaining about the negative?

To be fair stuff like Castlevania, Arcane, Invincible and X-Men 97 seem pretty popular.

 

[PicardMan]

Is that stigma there? If it was, wouldn't stuff like Invincible or Arcane or Castlevania have only lasted one season?

Something can have commercial success and still have stigma attached (see Star Trek franchise). Dramatic adult animation is firmly in the category of "nerd stuff" the same boats comic books as a medium are in.

People will complain about the Family Guy-come-lately du jour and say that adult animation is "nothing but sex, violence and swearing", but when shows like Undone, Pantheon, Scavengers Reign and Carol and the End of the World come along, no one watches them and they die quick unmourned deaths in obscurity.

I've seen Pantheon (well the first season. Season 2 never had a legal American release) and Scavengers Reign and they were both great shows. All the success stories of non comedy adult animation has been centered around the adult action cartoons, the adult drama cartoons have a tendency to flop even if they are really good like the aforementioned Pantheon and Scavengers Reign. Adult action has enough of an audience to keep it alive, but drama seems to be flopping and struggling.

 

[Silverstar]

IMO, Hazbin Hotel and Smiling Friends are the best things to happen to mainstream animation in literal YEARS.

They're unabashedly rude and crude, but they're not heartless. The adult content is used in the service of good storytelling and likable characters.

I've never watched Smiling Friends (I've basically soured on Adult Swim in recent years) but I keep hearing good things about it, so I may have to check it out. OTOH, Hazbin Hotel? Nah, seen that, not my kind of thing at all. That kind of stuff is just as bad as Family Guy and Big Mouth for my tastes, with the added touch of being pretentious and full of itself to the ninth power. That's a pass for me, dawg.

I really can't go back to kids cartoons after watching them. At some point, you have to realize those shows aren't made for people like us, and that really handicaps their storytelling ability and potential.

And yet there are far more online discussions about kids' cartoons than there are about stuff like Invincible. (Look how much attention Bluey gets to name just one example.) I've said this before, but for me it's not so much "kids' cartoons" that I crave, just general stuff that you don't have to be a pwecious toddler, a young Hot Topic shopping hipster or a Fortnite playing, DBZ fight loving, Batman-worshipping edge-lord to enjoy. Something like the Looney Tunes or the Cartoon Cartoons in their heyday scratched my particular itch perfectly. Why can't we have more of that?

People will complain about the Family Guy-come-lately du jour and say that adult animation is "nothing but sex, violence and swearing", but when shows like Undone, Pantheon, Scavengers Reign and Carol and the End of the World come along, no one watches them and they die quick unmourned deaths in obscurity.

Yeah, see, I have literally no interest in any of those shows; to me they're just as big a turnoff as Family Guy type stuff. I don't watch live-action drama or horror shows, so why would I want to watch animated versions of them? Again, I'm not saying there shouldn't be a variety, because there definitely should be, but why does everything always have to fall into one of the fringe extremes? Angst does not equal depth. A show doesn't need to be angsty or edgy in order to be good or to appeal to more than children. We can have something like a Bloom County, which was provocative and addressed deep stuff, but was still fun and enjoyable or Bone, which was kind of epic and heavy without being an up-its'-own-butt downer. Your Pantheons, X-Men '97s and Carol at the End of the Worlds can and should exist if there's an audience for them, but why can't we also have good shows that are just entertaining and aren't trying to out-HBO HBO or win some kind of artsy-farsty award?

 

[PicardMan]

The fact that Adult Swim has phased out drama anime when they rebranded to Toonami from Adult Swim Action seems to indicate the world has not yet accepted drama cartoons from America or Japan. I used to see people on the Toonami board complain about the lack of drama anime, but they seem to be a tiny vocal minority and I think there would be more complaining if we did see a drama cartoon show up on Toonami. Adult cartoons have gone from having one successful genre to two, so progress, I guess.

 

[Leviathan]

To be fair, I have literally never heard of any of the shows you've mentioned, and I'm certainly more interested in animation than the average person, so I'm not surprised people are missing them.

To me that's a failure of animation fandom. There's a million YouTube video essays on how terrible and atrocious Velma is, but few if any on Scavengers Reign, even though they're both on the same service and one is closer to what animation "fans" say they want adult animation to be like.

 

[Goldstar!]

Well, I can only speak for myself, but I have little to no interest in animated drama. I'm OK with a cartoon having the occasional dark or sad moment, but the whole show being dark or sad? Forget about it! Cartoons don't need to be dark or edgy in order to be enjoyed by adults. They just need to be good.

I couldn't care less about the so-called Vulgar Wave (a term that I've never even heard of until a few months ago on this very forum). Something can be adult without having to cater to "dude-bros" specifically. Something along the lines of Bloom County or Mission Hill would suit me just fine.

 

[PicardMan]

Cartoons don't need to be dark or edgy in order to be enjoyed by adults. They just need to be good.

The thing is that Pantheon and Scavengers: Reign were good, artistically brilliant. It's just that the genre of drama cartoons is extremely niche.

 

[Fone Bone]

Well, I can only speak for myself, but I have little to no interest in animated drama. I'm OK with a cartoon having the occasional dark or sad moment, but the whole show being dark or sad? Forget about it! Cartoons don't need to be dark or edgy in order to be enjoyed by adults. They just need to be good.

I couldn't care less about the so-called Vulgar Wave (a term that I've never even heard of until a few months ago on this very forum). Something can be adult without having to cater to "dude-bros" specifically. Something along the lines of Bloom County or Mission Hill would suit me just fine.

Drama does not have to be dark and sad. At least not all of the time. People making it so exclusively are doing it wrong. In the right hands drama can be uplifting and wonderful.

Edit:

One of my favorite issues of Gilda And Meek is called "The Apple". It's not about punishing the reader or making them feel bad. It's about the characters talking out their problems like adults and getting to a place they understand and can love each other. That's what drama means to me. Yes, there is dark stuff in my work as well as sad stuff. But it's the moments of people talking to each other and being real which is what it's all about for me.

 

[JMTV]

I've never watched Smiling Friends (I've basically soured on Adult Swim in recent years) but I keep hearing good things about it, so I may have to check it out.

Go check it out, dude. It's really good.

 

[PicardMan]

Drama does not have to be dark and sad. At least not all of the time. People making it so exclusively are doing it wrong. In the right hands drama can be uplifting and wonderful.

Pantheon was more emotional rollercoaster than the grimdark story assumed. There were plenty of uplifting moments in the show. It seemed to fail because it's in the adult animated drama genre. America has still still yet to have created a commercially successful adult animated drama (excluding action cartoons).

 

[Leviathan]

Pantheon was more emotional rollercoaster than the grimdark story assumed. There were plenty of uplifting moments in the show. It seemed to fail because it's in the adult animated drama genre. America has still still yet to have created a commercially successful adult animated drama (excluding action cartoons).

More than that, Pantheon had the misfortune of launching on a lower-rung streaming service, AMC+, just as the streaming bubble was bursting.