Why Watch a Bad Mature Cartoon When You Can Watch a Good Children's Cartoon?

As an adult with adult problems, I want to enjoy media that portrays and treats its audience as much.  Characters struggling with complex problems regarding their own self-identity and their place in society.  Themes about clashing ideologies which show that no singular belief is right, nor wrong.  Stories that challenge me and that will often make me reconsider my own morals and beliefs.  Things that I would believe most of us would like in any of our stories.  There is a source for these adult and mature themes, in fact, and they’re called children’s shows.

Over the last year or so I’ve been watching more and more anime aimed directly at a younger demographic.  The Ghibli Fest, an event where a different Ghibli movie is aired each month in select theaters, is where this really began and was a turning point for my taste at large. While not a Ghibli movie, this change in taste came to my attention after watching Mary and the Witch’s Flower when I realized that the highest praise I’d given anything over the last few months was that it was charming.  Prior to this I had dismissed most children’s shows not for any negative reason but because I didn’t see enough value in them.  Why watch something with overly simplified themes when I could be watching the complexity of an adult’s show?  From this point on I began revisiting some of my old haunts of my childhood like Teen Titans, Samurai Jack, and Avatar the Last Airbender while also picking up Precure and more magical girl shows in general, especially during the dry spell that was Summer season 2018.  Now re-entering the seasonal anime world it’s come to my attention that shows aimed at a more mature audience simply don’t have the same weight nor nuance to them, highlighting my hubris in assuming adult shows were better at story telling.  It’s almost as if the creators take for granted that they’re making something for adults and just cut out the nuance and subtlety because they’re aimed at adults.

This is, of course, a massive generalization that is not true in every case, however I have definitely noticed there is a trend in this direction.  There are definitely children’s shows that have no real value and there are adult’s shows like Planet With where you could teach an entire philosophy class on it.  It’s hard to pin down why this trend is noticeable, especially because it extends to multiple forms of media.  One of my art teachers would read children’s picture books while he was getting his degree as an illustrator because the quality of art was just that much better than anywhere else.  As to why there are better artists working on children’s media, the only guess I have is that the artists care more about the craft that made them smile as a child and want to pass that on more than anything else.  There’s a much easier explanation for why there’s so much more subtlety and nuance in children’s media; there has to be.  Because the target demographic is children who don’t fully understand their world quite yet, the staff needs to explain these themes in an extremely simple and engaging way.  This leads to extremely well written and presented characters and worlds that still embody the same flaws and philosophies as a character or world made for a mature audience, just not as overt.

Overtness is my real problem with adult oriented shows.  As I mentioned earlier, the creators seem to think that because they’re making something for adults they don’t need to have any of that subtlety nor nuance.  They don’t have to hide any of these complex critiques or ideas under a PG rating.  Which is true, but that’s another sign for a lazy or inexperienced staff.  This is a case where not only you can have your cake and eat it, too, but you should.  When I finish watching something, I want to remember deep and complex characters that have real meaning and weight to them, not some villain I simply hate because the writer was trying to force the story in a dark direction.  In fact, that is a sure-fire way to make me less engaged in whatever you’re trying to sell me.  I do not want to hate this character on the simple grounds that the writer told me I’m supposed to.  Show me reasons that I’m supposed to hate this character.  Even then, all the villains I remember are, for the most part, ones that I didn’t hate or thought were justifiable to some degree.  Thanos, Yoshikage Kira, Light Yagami, Stain, Vulture, Gendo Ikari, Altair (from Re:Creators) these are all memorable villains not because they’re evil for the sake of being evil but because they are characters who just happen to be evil.

As an example, Go! Princess Precure is a wonderful show.  The entire premise of it is that these bad guys are locking away people’s dreams in order to get power and it’s up to our favorite magical girls to transform into their princess forms to fight the villains off and save everyone’s dreams.  Simple, yet extremely powerful.  There is extreme value in everything that happens in this context because it goes beyond a simple villain twirling their mustache as our girls win each battle with the monster of the week.  It goes into territory of discussing the worth of someone’s dream and deep into conversation about dreams and expectations.  Through this set-up we see characters struggling under the expectations of their peers, of their families and of themselves.  A constant struggle for Haruka Haruno in the early part of the show is her questioning if she’s good enough for the dream she has.  Is it something she could ever live up to, or should she find a more realistic dream?  This is a universal question that everyone has asked and can lead to some extremely beautiful development and progression.  As we move forward we see even more themes crop up, like how no one should be ashamed of their dream, no one should mock other’s dreams, one dream is no better or worse than another, you have to work to achieve your dream, people you thought were doing great in life are struggling just like you and that having flaws does not make you any weaker than anyone else.  Hell, we get practically all of those in the first episode.  And the villains are appropriately interesting, especially when Twilight enters the fray.  Twilight is the princess of the dark realm, working for her mother Dyspear.  All the same problems and themes apply to her, she must live up to not only her own expectations of herself but the expectations of her mother and her servants.  But then she fails to defeat our girls, shattering her own perception of what a dream and what a princess is, and more importantly, her own self-worth.  She is a deeply flawed and nuanced character, one that I won’t be forgetting anytime soon.

I explain all that to illustrate how powerful the writing in the show is.  The entire staff is great, and they deserve praise, but, for now I’m just focusing on the writers.  These are important lessons and themes being shown in extremely simple ways that are easy to understand by anyone from all walks of life.  Even children who may not catch the meaning at first viewing will have something to think about as they grow up and the show is entertaining enough that it will keep their attention.  These writers were able to give us all this without resorting to any obtuse, heavy-handed forms of writing and only with simple, well-orchestrated events, characters and character interactions as opposed to what amounts to bashing in one’s head with a hammer that has the word “THEMES” written on it.  Oftentimes adult cartoons opt to simply tell us their themes, rather than show us.  As an adult with any level of comprehension, I find this to be almost patronizing.  I expect more subtlety and nuance from a mature show.  I expect them to add layers upon layers upon layers to their characters, actions and plot points, not the opposite simply because they don’t have to hide the “dark” parts of their story because we are adults and can already understand the themes.  Add more nuance, add more complexity.  That’s how you make a dark, well-conceived plot for adults.

Children’s stories are an underappreciated part of the entertainment industry.  Far too often we openly dismiss them on the grounds that we’re too old, which is simply not the case.  To this day I still point to Percy Jackson as having some of the best written characters out of every story I’ve ever read/watched.  There is no shame in liking Precure, Star Vs. The Forces of Evil, Adventure Time, Disney, Pixar, or Dreamworks.  Some of the best talent in the world are/were working on these projects or for these studios and we should be holding “mature” creators to the same level of quality that the children’s creators hold themselves to.  We should not simply accept adult oriented shows as good or dark simply because they have gore and sex, quite the opposite.  This is not a foreign concept, I’ve mentioned Planet With already this essay but we can look at plenty of other shows that address dark or adult themes with subtlety and respect to the audience, shows like Land of the Lustrous, Princess Principal, Flip Flappers, Mob Psycho 100, Violet Evergarden, Devilman Crybaby, A Place Farther than the Universe, just to name a few more recent ones.

Thanks for reading, friends.  You might have realized this was not in fact an essay on watching classics and older shows via a modern lens like I said last week.  That’s because I really didn’t have enough to say on the matter, so I’ll be revisiting the idea later down the road.  At this point I’m not entirely sure what the next one will be on but I’ve got a few ideas on what makes a good villain as well as what makes something dark.  So odds are I’ll write something that has nothing to do with either of those.  See you next week.