Top 25 animated shows

[angus]

They're covering too many genres in on fell swoop.  It's like saying Bohemian Rhapsody is a better song than Spring from Vivaldi's "The Four Seasons."  Sealab was edgy in its time.  Archer is now.  Both are decent.  Avatar and Adventure Time are good, if you're nine.  KOTH and Futurama are good if you're thirty-nine.  Daria is worth mentioning, but what about the original suburban Dallas kids who gave rise to Daria's spinoff existence?  Also, it is artificially selective--where's Ren & Stimpy?  

(As an aside, I'm a little disappointed with your analysis of Rocky.  What about Fractured Fairy Tales?  Or Peabody and Sherman?  And who could forget Boris and Natasha?  That show was a bed of morality, sociology, and physics wrapped in wisdom and spiced with magic, wit, and humor.  It was a veritable chimichanga for the senses, but with entertainment as the main condiment instead of of pico de gallo.)

Anyway, it's a fun list, but it is neither complete nor systematic.



  

[angus]

Ah, yes, Ren is there.

I agree with you totally regarding The Critic and Robot Chicken, but you should give Gravity Falls an open mind.  Sit with your fourth-grader sometime and watch it with an open mind, fourth-grader style.  It's actually not bad.

Bear in mind that cartoon fashions come and go.  There are mainstream cartoons now that are seem so bigoted and insensitive by current sensibilities that we have a hard time imagining that they were even allowed on screens back in the 30s and 40s, but if you watch them with an FDR-era open mind, they're pretty damned entertaining.  Of course, those stupid anti-Nazi Donald Duck patriotic pieces were stupid, even by the standards of their time, but at the time they probably seemed very nationalistic by their producers.

I think a better attempt would be to take on each as a genre.  The best patriotic cartoons, the best surrealist cartoons, the best teenage-children cartoons, the best pre-teen cartoons, the best cartoons of the pre-politically correct era, the best anti-communist cartoons, etc.

Also, Bob's Burgers is a good call.

 

[angus]

Why anime in general is frowned upon makes no sense frankly. I mean, can you seriously say Cowboy Bebop is a horrible show no matter what side of the Pacific Ocean you live on?

I never cared for the "anime."  It took me years to figure out what that meant, by the way, as the word looks like a misspelling of a class of nitrogen-containing compounds.  About 15 years ago I finally figured out that "anime" was that Japanese-style drawing with big creepy eyes and rounded faces and little pointy noses.  Then it clicked.  Speed Racer was anime.  It was the only anime show that was on when I was little (very early 70s).  I remember that I never enjoyed that show, but my brother loved it and it came on between other shows that I liked, so I always caught snippets.  That monkey was far more scary than any of the monkeys on the Wizard of Oz.  The whole thing strikes me as very fascist.  (I had neither the words "fascist" nor "anime" in my vocabulary at the time, but I'm sure that it was how I felt.  Tense and a bit frightening.  Rigid.  Big, scary eyes.  Exceedingly large mouths--the head opens like a huge garbage can when they scream.  Unrealistic body movements.  And it's all so rigidly structured.  Even the surrealistic creatures have a certain pattern that is strictly followed by all the artists.)  I guess I can appreciate most other styles--the digitization style of The Critic, the sketchwork of the "Take on Me" video, stick figures, even Simpsonization--but anime is annoying. 

Ah, to each his own.  I never cared for Jackson Pollack's work either, although I understand that people pay millions of dollars for some of his paintings.  Nowadays, I've learned to stomach a little of the "anime" because many of my son's favorite cartoon movies are the Hayao Miyazaki movies.  They're actually pretty good stories, but the characters still look tense, rigid, stilted, and generally creepy to me.

[angus]

To be fair, the main character of the show that he's referring to looks like this:

Of course that changes everything.  No pink backpacks and automated dancing machines in Kara'oke bars?  I studiously avoided any specific mention of the show because I haven't seen it, but the mariachi brand gives him a bit of the manliness.  (Jose Cuervo's Japanese brand, I suppose?)  Double bonus points for the ashtray full of Marlboro butts.

Maybe I should be more open-minded about anime.

[angus]

Spike Spiegel (yes, his name is Spike Spiegel) is one of the manly protagonists of late-nineties popular cultures, at least in circles that know of him. I think you'd like Cowboy Bebop. It's got spaceships, gunfights, mobsters, and manly plot and thematic elements like a disgraced ex-cop trying to deal with his dark past on the force and Spike seeking revenge on...spoilers, but rest assured that he's seeking revenge. The animation and art style are generally naturalistic and if anything slightly too fluid, the 'morals' of most episodes are life lessons like 'don't leave stuff in the fridge', and the soundtrack is almost entirely jazz.

Okay, I watched the first episode.  Very engaging.  The entire episode was packed with action and featured a decent body count.  Spike is a cross between Clint Eastwood and Captain Kirk, equal parts exploitative opportunist and heroic icon, imperfect but with an angel on his shoulder.  The bad guys were no more or less likable than the good guys.  I respect that.  I especially enjoyed the fact that the beautiful brunette died horribly, but only after killing her violent, drug-abusing boyfriend with a gun at very close range.  Wholesome family entertainment.  Two thumbs up.