Are Cartoons for Kids?

I love animation. I really do; to me, animation is the medium; it’s a perfect blend of visual artistry, sound design, music design, and voice work. There isn’t really any other medium that integrates so many different forms of artistry into one end product. There’s so much you can do in animation; you are unbounded by the physical restraints of the real world. Character design can be so creative, and as long as you can suspend the viewer’s disbelief, almost anything is possible.

All these positives lead me to immense levels of confusion at the disdain that society seems to project onto the medium I hold so dear.
“When my kids were little I used to be much more up to speed on this category, but now I’m not, so I’m sitting it out.”
This is an anonymous comment from a voter for the 2025 Oscars. Now this really annoys me, even ignoring the fact that one of the films nominated that year was 18+ rated, Memoir of a Snail, which I certainly wouldn’t show to children. This is someone who has the immense privilege of helping bestow the most prestigious award in cinema, and they are completely disavowing a whole medium, not just a genre they don’t like, a whole medium of the entire industry.

I do think the treatment of animation as a genre is part of the problem. Prejudice against the medium is often shown when people describe a film they went to see as an ‘animated film’ - compressing a medium into something more of a genre. The same isn’t the case for live action films: no one would ever say ‘I went to see a live action film today’. People act as if saying ‘I saw an animated movie’ is the same as saying ‘I saw a horror film’; it’s a conflation of genre and medium. This treatment adds to the idea that all things that are animated are the same and fit into a specific idea of something that is family-friendly, or an easy watch, or even something of poor quality. I’ve already mentioned one film in this article that doesn’t fit into this category, and I’m yet to mention the large swaths of Japanese animation that are aimed at adults and the increasing amounts of adult animation projects such as Family Guy or Love Death + Robots.

Looking just at animated projects aimed purely at adults misses the point a little though. Culture dictates that animation studios (particularly in the West) make stuff for kids as that’s what is popular and sells well, but the people making these shows are often incredibly talented creatives with a love for the medium and for storytelling. This is important to recognise because it helps the realisation that just because a show or film is aimed at children doesn’t mean it is a piece of art undeserving of critical thought and doesn’t mean it cannot be enjoyed by adults. Look at my top four films on Letterboxd: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Klaus (which I would argue is the best Christmas film of all time) and Howl’s Moving Castle. All four are animated, all four are arguably aimed at children (although perhaps different ages of children), and all four are incredible works of fiction (in my humble opinion) and are worthy of analysis and thoughtful watching. I truly believe they can be enjoyed by people of all ages.

Photo by Kouji Tsuru on Unsplash

I’m not the first to rant about this, and I’m sure I won’t be the last, but the stigma around animation certainly doesn’t stop me from watching it, so why do I care so much? I do believe this misconception does have an adverse effect on the industry as a whole. We have sat and watched as massive corporate studios have pissed out so-called “live-action” remakes of beloved animated films (cough cough Disney cough). The Lion King remake wasn’t even filmed with cameras; it was just a change in animation style that lost all the character and style of the original film, but I digress; this is just one example of how the stigma around animation has affected what end products we get to watch, but what else is there?

I’ve already mentioned it once, but funding being funnelled into children’s animation for profit’s sake means there are projects that aren’t being funded fairly that could be as good as The Godfather or Interstellar, just animated instead. Consumers are essentially being robbed of the potential cinematic masterpieces that would thrive as an animated project whilst creatives and filmmakers are either forced down specific paths or left without funding due to greedy execs and market capitalism.

That was a lot of doom and gloom from me then, and I did keep having to stop myself from falling down a rabbit hole of ranting about market forces and annoying things people say; that’s all without me mentioning the travesty that is the replacement of voice-actors with celebrities. I do think things are improving though; the breakthrough of anime into somewhat of the mainstream in Western culture has certainly improved outlooks on the medium as a whole, and there does seem to be more funding than there has been going into animated projects. Things certainly have a long way to go, and I will keep ranting about it until it either gets better or I die. I do hope anyone reading this article who wasn’t an animation fan before looks less disparagingly on the medium now. And to anyone else like me who loves animation, please champion it as much as you can; don’t be afraid to talk about your favourite films and shows, and perhaps one day we will see a world where saying cartoons are ‘just for kids’ is a thing of the past.

Thank you for the editing efforts of Grace Bailey, Meredith Emerson, and Sakura Doody.