Animation Age Ghetto/Quotes
Critics who treat "adult" as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adults themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence....When I was ten, I read fairytales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man, I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.—C. S. Lewis, On Three Ways of Writing for Children
A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest.
"Do you see any Teletubbies in here? Do you see a slender plastic tag clipped to my shirt with my name printed on it? Did you see a little Asian child with a blank expression outside in a mechanical helicopter that shakes when you put quarters in it? No? Well that's what you see at a toy store, and you must think you're in a toy store because you're here shopping for an infant named Jeb! Now one of us has made a gross error, and wasted the other person's valuable time. This is an art gallery, my friend, and this is a piece of art."
"OK, we're back. You grown-ups can leave the room."
CNN and news media in general... if you're going to write a story titled "Biff! Bam! Kapow! Comics aren't just for kids anymore!" please rename it to "Patronizing Thoughts On A Medium I Only Know Stereotypes About Which I Happened To Acquire Decades Ago".
Mr. Nick! What are you doing watching Kids' Masterpiece Theatre? You should be watching shows for your own age!
"Animated movies are not just for kids -- they're also for adults who do a lot of drugs."—Paul McCartney, presenting the Golden Globe for Best Animated Feature. This also has not passed without comment.
"Both those who make cartoon films and those who love them tend to have a certain immaturity to them"—Hayao Miyazaki, Thoughts on Fleischer
"Saying that anime is for kids because a lot of animated movies are made for kids... is like saying that the entire state of California should be given to children because there are a lot of children in California."
I do not make films primarily for children. I make them for the child in all of us, whether we be six or sixty. Call the child innocence, although buried deeply it might be. In my work I try to reach and speak to that innocence, showing it the fun and joy of living; showing it that laughter is healthy; showing it that the human species, although happily ridiculous at times, is still reaching for the stars.—Walter Elias Disney to people who miss the point of Classic Disney films.
"Everybody knows live action is better than cartoons!"
"Benjamin Kirby Tennyson, don't even think about it!"
Animation and film in this country really started back in the day with two different styles of performing: Melodrama (if you look to your classical black-and-white silent films, The Birth of a Nation, D.W. Griffith stuff) and vaudeville (Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin); and if you look at animation, it's pretty similar. The Warner Bros, Looney Tunes stuff tends to be the vaudevillian, Daffy Duck-fall-on-his-face kind of thing, and Disney tends to be the melodrama. But Disney was obsessed with doing childhood fantasy, and that became sort of the dominant theme for animation. So, animation in this country sort of got equated with one genre; the entire medium of animation in America kind of got associated with this one genre- "for children," and that's pretty much because of Disney. The only alternative, then, is the Looney Tunes sort of "irreverent animation", which then turns into South Park, Family Guy, and The Simpsons, where it's going to be very adult, Satire sort of storytelling, and there's a wasteland in the middle.
You're dead if you aim only for kids. Adults are only kids grown up, anyway.
Cartoon Network. All cartoons, all the time. The TCI survey notes that the channel offers "the best-loved cartoons for kids of all ages." Translation: Adults watch this stuff. In fact, a third of the audience is over 18. They think they're over 18; they ran out of fingers to count. One.—John Carman, in a San Francisco Chronicle article on a survey by cable provider TCI
"Grownups -- and this includes those of you who work as film critics -- must stop watching children's movies and pronouncing them entertaining for adults as well."—Daniel B. Kline, on Pixar's Up. Thankfully, this has not passed without comment here in Troperville (including this very article).
When people make an animated movie, they know that they're making it for kids. They wouldn't be making an animated movie otherwise, because they know adults wouldn't see it. So obviously they are aiming for a young audience.
"japanese are stupid..animation are for kids but they make them for older people this just bulshit here"
"Honey, they didn't have any Digimon stuff, so I got this thing called Legend of the Overfiend. Is that okay?"
"There are shackles with the budgets and the profit margins. You want to compete with what they’re doing at Pixar and DreamWorks. There’s a price tag with that just in terms of achieving that quality level. What happened to the Ralph Bakshis of the world? We’re all sitting here talking about family entertainment. Does animation have to be family entertainment? I think at that cost, yes. (...) What I’m saying is we could make animation that’s not for the kids to see, too. I don’t think you want to say, “Hey, bring your family to this movie that’s inappropriate.” But animation can be so much more if we let those boundaries loose."
"The thing I really hate the most is the total emersion that some anime fans get into -- "dedicating" every corner of their lives to it by buying all manner of posters, books, magazines, studying Japanese just to be able to read the comics or understand the videos, buyng Japanese versions of popular video game systems just to play anime-oriented video games, and intellectualizing the plot of a cartoon as though it had some deep, heady philosophy imbedded into it. If you are doing almost all of these things listed, and not just one or two, you have a serious peoblem. I can't stand people like that, because being around them is like being around a mentally ill person who is trapped in their childhood."
"Let's face it. Japanese animation is juvenile, insipid, and endless in it's artistic, thematic, and storyline incestuousness. Every character looks like they came from the same artist - an artist who himself is obsessed with impossible body figures and puppy-dog eyes. The plots are always borrowing from each other -- I swear I saw over 100 different anime shows that had the same plots, characters, and sound effects. I mean, what makes a 35-year-old adult want to watch shows that are intended for a 12-and-under audience is beyond me..."
-- some guy named Phsycho Dave in an article called Dave Dumps On Japanese Animation Geeks