The Animation Studies Reader by Nichola Dobson Annabelle Honess Roe Amy Ratelle & Caroline Ruddell

Author:Nichola Dobson, Annabelle Honess Roe, Amy Ratelle & Caroline Ruddell
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781501332630
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 2019-11-28T00:00:00+00:00

14

TV Animation and Genre

Nichola Dobson

General audiences have only been exposed to one type of animation, that of popular, funny and usually American, cartoons, as if there were only “pop” music and no other kind (Halas in Langer 1997: 149)

As the part of this book in which this chapter appears indicates, animation can refer to a variety of forms, practices and formats. This multifariousness of animation extends also to content and subject matter. The quote from animator John Halas above implies, however, that the US cartoon format has come to dominate the perception of animation. This is problematic not only for those who want to produce and market animation that falls outside of this category, but also presents challenges for theorizing animation genre. By exploring the extent to which the cartoon continues to dominate the Western TV landscape, this chapter suggests that there is, in fact, a much wider variety of animation television genres than Halas’s quote, and, arguably, popular perception, would first suggest.

Animated TV

Steve Neale (2001: 3) argues that genre has a ‘multi-dimensional’ function, in that it can categorize and group similar work for creation and marketing and also for analysis. This categorization can come from the institutions which created the work, the theorists who analyse the work, and from the systems of understanding which audiences use to differentiate the work from other genres and from texts within the same genre. Each genre has a set of recognizable characteristics that enable categorization; these are repeated and reinforced through what Altman (1999) refers to as ‘cycles’ and can be seen in patterns in TV history. Cycles are not static or temporally discrete and new elements can change the genre to create new ones, or old ones can come back into favour (Altman uses the example of adding music to comedy to create the musical comedy).

As Halas suggests in the above quote, the Hollywood cartoon dominated the creation, and thus the industrial development, of the animation TV series and thus came to shape the audience’s ‘system of expectations’ that they bring to each animated ‘text’ (Neale 1990: 46). The history of animation, and in particular animation on American television, reinforces rather than challenges any expectations and the mainstream continues to present animation which is broadly categorized and thus understood as ‘cartoon’. The aesthetic of the cartoon, derived from the comic strip, remains commonplace and adds to assumptions of generic uniformity. Though the range of genres available within the animated form is as vast as that in live-action (TV and cinema), television is dominated by animated comedy, though within comedy this can take the structural form of the short gag sketch and serialized, sitcom formats. While each of these forms has different characteristics within them, they all fall under the generic dominant of comedy; they are funny and are intended to make audiences laugh (Neale 1990). This dominance is why it is easy to think of all of animated TV as comedy without perhaps considering that there might be variation within the genre, even while animation is used, for example, to satirize or comment on other aspects of genre.

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