Can/Should Adult Animation Move Beyond Comedy

How about sponsored animation?

Like if a gun company (who the mainstream media has worked to bar from "normal" ad venues) paid the ~140,000 USD (which is cheap for an ad campaign really) needed for a Japanese animated one-shot that was an extended commercial for their products.

I can see that happening in Japan but not in America. You would need to convince the businesses that it is worthwhile. Not just because of the cheap cost as you mentioned but because of the animation as well since they may look down on animation.

Looking to get banned again?

yes
no. not anytime soon.

Sure, it's possible, but that's not going to mean it's that executives are interested in funding animation like that any time soon. At first I was going to point out that animation is typically more expensive than just doing a live action shot especially if you're doing mundane shit, but after some googling it seems to contradict that, cable and broadcast shows typically have a budget of 2 million USD per episode. Minimum. Looking around nickelodeon cartoon episodes are about 600-700k per episode, but I don't know if that mean for each 13 minute shorts or both together since they're typically paired together as they aired even in reruns. Even if you double it, that's still cheaper than the average live action tv show, by a half a million. So you can make an argument there to make at least a 30min timeslot maybe an full hour time slot drama if that 600k-700k budget is for a half hour timeslot. There's also the fact the average episode of an anime is about 100-200k USD, so that make a 12 episode show about 2.4 million USD at most. A single episode for a liveaction show. However they do extreme cost saving measures, like the animators would be better off working in a fast food joint and anime's framerate is really low as fuck as well, and god awful CGI, so you pay for what you get.

So since cost isn't the problem is it that the CEO's are lazy fucks?

Punisher animu when?

FTFY

They already did that. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avengers_Confidential:_Black_Widow_&_Punisher

It already has. For decades, you twit. This is some "can video games be art" bullshit and comics are already fucked as it is, we don't need cartoon versions of gone-home.

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isn't that where this road leads? I mean if I'm wrong I'd love to hear it, but we've seen where this "Can X be more adult" reasoning and it always ends in some 2deep4u bullshit.

Considering right now we're getting literal toilet humor from every direction that would be an improvement. Besides, every medium is filled with 2deep4u bullshit but that doesn't mean it'll become the standard.

Yup. She should have been a nude Loli Catgirl.

There is a thing called fine taste you idiot. Not everything is about jerking off

I'd rather have some cheap but honest toilet humor than pretentious "artistic" bullshit, if those were the only two options.

This. "Art" media is just a form of masturbation for the artist and the handful of people who "get it".

Groovy music… What's the name of this?

It can, it should, in Japan it can be said it already has, but it's not going to because the people who greenlit Jack are being told it's doing well because it's a reboot of a cult classic, not because it's animation for a grown-up audience that isn't South Park or the Simpsons yet fucking again

Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment.

No, there is a thing called american prudishness and censorship.

No one is asking for a close up of her open dripping pussy, you moron. It's a fucking butt.

Man you fucking prude, it SHOULD have been full on pussy action.

ANYTHING LESS THEN MY OWN ARBITRALLY DEFINED LEVEL OF SEXUAL REVEAL IS PRUDISHNESS!

his webm is domin tank police
its got a good english dub too, also mines that explode into giant inflatable dicks with enough force to flip over tanks

Never, western animation has already been taken over by the idea that it's gotta play it safe with kid's stuff, family friendly stories, and adult trash toilet humor, and the toys and merchandise, makes me wish Ralph Bakshi's works were popular enough to break the trend, but nowadays you'll only find it as a rare diamond in a sea of same old shit and also, Adult Swim rely's on their dubbed anime for that.

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They're not particularly wrong buddy.

They're not entirely right either, and since they think that it's the reboot factor instead of the fact that it's both that and a non-child-oriented cartoon that isn't obviously derivative of South Park or The Simpsons, it's going to set a trend of rebooting cult classics rather than having cartoons for people other than kids that aren't South Park or The Simpsons or both, but that's an even longer shot

/thread!

If you include shit like Memories, NeoTokyo, and Angel's Egg, sure.

Alan Moore isn't American though.

Samurai Jack isn't even a reboot. It's a continuation of the show.

Despite the films being made in North Korea they're actually very good and almost entirely follow the original series scene for scene.

How's the new PPG series doing? That seems like the perfect contradiction to an exec claiming that "Series returns are in".

Last I heard it was god fucking awful.

are you being willfully dense or are you just fucking retarded?

Hope is also the first step on the road to success.

No, inspiration is. There's a difference.

You'll never get anywhere if you keep hoping it will happen.

You'll never get anywhere if you never hope it'll happen.

You have to act on desire in order to enact change.

I guess you could say the will to act.

Inspiration is a drive, hope is a way of maintaining peace of mind, something which is often counter intuitive to change and action.

What if you have no desire?

I'm surprised that no one's brought up Heavy Metal as an example of fantastic adult animation.

The music's good, the animation's great, but half of the stories are kind of retarded. Then again that's pretty representative of the magazine, amazing art with questionable writing.

To be fair, the anime that was being put out in Japan wasn't much better (granted this changed towards the end of the 80s).

Heavy Metal's art, OTOH, was a lot better, IMO.

I think it was a good first effort for mass appeal, but sadly, it never caught on in the US. I blame DIsney and moralfags.

Oh yeah, definitely. Anime never got close to that until the sci-fi OVAs of the late 80s/early 90s.

A thousand times yes! I'm sick of every animated show made for adults just being a Simpsons ripoff.

Maybe if Rock & Rule had a real release instead of being shitcanned for years. Maybe if Titan AE had been released by a company that knew how to market it. Maybe if the Aeon Flux movie had been animated by Peter Chung. Maybe if Ralph Bakshi had been left alone to make Cool World his way. Maybe if Xombie had been picked up.

No, too many assholes in Hollywood like to stick their dick in the pie for even a talented animator with a vision to accomplish anything. Even if it's made, the release will be screwed. Hollywood wants everybody to eat mush because babies can't chew steak.

Nice Mark Twain quote.

Twain was one quotable mother fucker.

Of course it should. Is there any argument why "adult" animation should ever remain South Park tier level?

Now can it? showed that executives are going to do everything to fuck it over.

So are France and Japan the only hopes left? The best big budget production we've got from the U.S. in last ten or so years was Rango.
Other than that it's pure comedy, and a rare indie animation that looks decent, but it's usually a drama, best out of them probably being A Scanner Darkly and Anomalisa.

I think adult swim should go back to their roots and start airing more anime.

When AS was creative and actually cared
vube.pk/watch?v=o8FjK8N5VC8

Speaking of [as], anyone else checking out those comics their hosting? I like the Paul Kirchner one but the others kind of suck.

mfw USAnimation doesn't like serious cartoons cos of people who never watch it complain loudest about it (eg. fundie christian moms)

You mean back when they literally just used Licenced japanese shows and didn't make anything of their own?

Nah, I like some of their new shows, and I don't think they should stop making some of them, but they really need to bring back some adult or other interesting anime to fill out some of their silly rerun spots.

As if Hollywood and normalfags would ruin this "serious" animation

At the very least they had a part in getting more Big O made. Better than nothing.

Back in the 90s, Teletoon in Canada aired shorts that were absolutely gold. One in particular was called "Lolita Lolita".

youtube.com/watch?v=UaOoz0bD-ik

Can you literally fuck off

A film director and animator who makes films largely aimed at children
A comic book writer. An English comic book writer at that
Yes, decades

Huh, it seems like some posts got removed…

Yes, it's time to move beyond the current industry.

They should sign ZONE up to officially make extrathicc.swf.

Go suck your priest's dick gayboy.

user, nobody takes them seriously more these days. They fear feminist backlash and the press bloggers more than anything.

this kind of pretentiousness killed videogames, it should diversify that's for sure, but animation has it's roots in comedy and that should never change.

People nobody has seen or heard from nor have been relevant in decades. Way to prove that guy's point. Western Animation is like a brain damaged patient where the only parts that function are the stem and the temporal lobe.

Thats a good point

How about stuff that's just plain grim and depressive? Would be a nice change of pace. Are there even any cartoons like that?

Yeah but the good ones are about as rare as you expect.

Unless your a deeply shallow person "GRIIIIIIM and DEPRESSIIIING" shows are just about the worst things ever. Nothing is worse then tryhard edgy.

There's plenty worse than edgy. Also I hate the term tryhard, it's very inaccurate to what it describes, which is something that feels forced because of how blatant and unsubtle it is.

Anyway, most truly grim and depressing stuff is short independent stuff. Nobody is willing to finance long lasting depressing animation.

Can you think of any examples?

Well what are you kinda looking for?

Like a Graphic Rape scene or what?

I don't know. Not really looking for anything graphic like that though. Actually, now that I think about it, it doesn't need to be violent at all. It just needs to have the opposite of a happy ending as far as I am concerned. That's my main pet peeve - happy endings everywhere. I want sad endings. The setting itself doesn't need to be grim.

Well happy endings are usually there for Catharsis purposes. Even if you find a Sad ending refreshing, they can feel like out of left field unless the story arc was structured around failure.

Most sad stories just don't really have endings. An alcoholic remains an alcoholic and doesn't reconnect with his family. The end.

Yes.

Does this work for you?

Yeah, happy endings are the vanilla ice cream of the entertainment industry.

I've seen it before. Not bad. I feel like the tone of the story and the animation style lessen the impact though. It starts out pretty high on the grim scale, then it gets a bit more grim, and then shifts towards ridiculous. And that's fine. It's definitely not bad. I guess I'd just prefer more contrast. Not a story soaked in grimness, but one that makes you drop your guard and then kicks you in the nuts.

Take your butthurt out on the industry that wants to kill action and anything else that's outside the pigeonhole.

Quit hating on Japan for actually having good stuff.

If anime can pull it off, then Western cartoons should too.

And we should do better.

Sucks that what counts as Adult cartoons these days are jjust toilet humor that seems to be written by middle schoolers. Be nice if there were serious Western animations once in a while. Kid's shows like Batman the Animated Series and Gargoyles seemed more mature than shit like Family Guy.

We need to take notes from the gaming industry and how it's organized. Although it has problems of its own, the environment surrounding the gaming industry is much more favourable to creative works and creators, perhaps not in terms of writing or characters, but visuals, music and setting, and how that all resonates within gamers. Dishonoured, Horizon: Zero Dawn, Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, recent Mass Effect games, everything else coming from the cesspits of EA, Ubisoft and Activison; you might say that those games are piss poor when it comes to telling stories and even gameplay, but you can't deny that the visuals, music, setting, and character and world design is far richer than any cheap-looking talking head cartoon or overly raunchy Hollywood shit piece. Perhaps the publishers could learn a thing or two from them. In terms of creativity, compare the games with movies and cartoons released in the past five years, and you'll find that they're not creatively stagnant.

The reason games are far better off is that the gaming industry is decentralized. There isn't really a location you can call "the Hollywood of Gaming." Game studios and publishers work in many different locations around the world from Seattle, to Los Angeles, Paris, Stockholm, Tokyo, Montreal, Bethesda, Warsaw, Copenhagen and a multitude of many others. And let's not forget indie games. Nowadays, anyone with a team can make a great indie game without the financial support of a publisher. The decentralized nature makes it so that creativity is cultivated and fostered wherever creators might be in the world without the influence of outdated centralized networks and publishers that hold creators in their grasp from Hollywood. There's also the fact that games can circumvent the ESRB rating system through websites like Steam, eliminating the need to go through the christian dinosaurs who chair the MPAA and FCC who are gatekeepers to markets as well as being the biggest obstacle to talented creators who aren't Neo-Cal Arts marxists.

Combine decentralization with a lucrative transactional, or "pay what you want" business model, and you've got a multi-billion dollar industry with low barriers to entry.

But how can we apply all this to animation? We need to stop giving power to Hollywood and television and establish an online platform similar to Flix Premiere, but for animation, with a transactional model of course, and then attract studios, artists and visionary executives from all over the world to support and work with it. After that, there'll be enough capital for more expensive works to be made and we'll finally have a healthy and robust market for animation.

Television and subscription-based services like Netflix are unprofitable. Why do you think networks supplement their profits with toys and other merchandise? Because the shows themselves aren't that profitable from television. Netflix's strategy is similar to a shitty buffet. It doesn't know what shows to direct its capital towards, and customers have no way to vote with their wallet when it comes to individual shows.

To fix animation, we need to create a new system and stop trying to change the current one. No matter how many times we express our anger at the executives, they're not going to listen to anyone with the exception of very few amount. But until we examine the heart of the issue, we're just going to keep accomplishing nothing.

The reason the gaming industry is more creative is because the market for videogames is literally hundreds of times larger than that of comics. Also because it wasn't crippled by an organization like the CCA which limited publishers to one or two workable genres. Yes that was like 60+ years ago, but because of it(and people putting all their eggs in the direct market basket) the Big Two still pretty much control the industry.

But even comics are in far better shape than animation. With authors and artists self-publishing their comics online or on platforms like Tapastic, webcomics have circumvented, the big two and their centralized control, rating systems and other regulations and are more creative as a result.

Animation on the other hand, is centralized among a few major networks. All of whom have no incentive to compete with each other, as every one of their shows makes relatively the same amount of profit due to their outdated ad-based business model, it doesn't make much sense from an economic perspective to invest in more expensive yet creatively rich shows when the outcomes are the same. So, what you get are these shoddy cartoons consisting mostly of mundane visuals and talking, while neglecting the medium itself.

the best creative works almost never come from giant centralized publishers and networks, but from small studios who aren't beholden to committees or focus groups. Do you think some of the best and most memorable indie games like Super Meat Boy, Shovel Knight and Spelunky would have been made under the thumbs of Triple-A publishers? Developers took risks and made it big without having to work with publishers, and that's the decentralized environment we need in the animation industry. To hell with rating systems, television networks, and online subscription services. We already have the technology to circumvent archaic regulations and corporatist entities like the MPAA. And in the next decade, we might even have a floating city to circumvent copyright law as well. But it's only a matter of time. In fact, services like Flix Premiere, and Singular DTV the decentralized Netflix on a TVOD business model, seem like they're on the money. So it's inevitable for such a renaissance to occur.