Through Into Dreamland: What If Children's Media Was Art?

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What if children's media was art?

Well, I guess we live in a world where that's sort of a settled question, isn't it? It's cool to watch kid's movies, and tiktok is full of recommendations for the next big Young Adult book. We live in an All Ages World.

But ok, dream up a world for me where children's books aren't considered literature, children's animation isn't "for adults too", and so on. Imagine everyone agreed this stuff was not art. Then imagine you, contrary to everyone around you, do hold it in artistic esteem and want to rally others to your cause.

 

What would that actually mean for how you relate to children's media? What kind of criticism would you do in this imaginary world? 

Zenshu: What Is The Soul Of Sakuga?

Zenshu, one of the standout animes of last season, positions itself as a love letter to animation. But under all the smooth movement and beautiful effects, what does it think animation really means?

Culture Kept In Its Coffin: How The Netflix Model Buries Our Media History

Classic anime like Revolutionary Girl Utena could get a new lease on life if released serially in the present day... but Netflix and its many competitors aren't in the business of preserving or selling art. What do we lose when our media history becomes #Content?

2x2 Girls: Queer Mirroring in She-Ra

She-Ra and the Princesses of Power ended on a high and very gay note, but the show's queerness goes much deeper than the flashy finale. To understand how the show is constructed around its central lesbian relationship, though, we have to be open to learning the techniques it uses to tell their story.

 

Happily Ever After Never Ends: Steven Universe the Movie and Serial Narrative

Where does a story go after the end? It's a strange question for serial narratives grapple with, and a major one for Steven Universe The Movie. Caught between the status quo and a grim cycle of trauma, the film finds a new kind of happily ever after.

Save Spidey! Into the Spider-Verse's Failure and Promise

Can Spider-Man matter outside of the Marvel Cinematic Universe? Sony, Disney, #SaveSpidey, and Into the Spider-Verse.

Eve Laughed At Their Decision

Yes, the Christian symbols in Neon Genesis Evangelion mean something. Rei Ayanami is the key... but does the word of her creating god give us enough room to find our own meaning?

Content warning for discussions of rape, abuse, medical abuse, and heresy.

I Want To Connect (But It's Hard To Understand) Part B

Complex shows like Sarazanmai and Revolutionary Girl Utena use powerful techniques to connect to their audience. But the most powerful tool might be the audience itself and the connections we make to each other.

I Want To Connect (But It's Hard To Understand): Sarazanmai Part A

For an anime all about connections, Sarazanmai, with its musical numbers, kappa mythology, and formal experimentation sure can be obscure. But its unique symbols are an inventive communication tool, one rooted in the unique power of cartooning.

Let's Pop Together Part 2

Is what Pop Team Epic does to everything it touches that different from what Ready Player One does to The Iron Giant? After you flatten pop down, break it apart, and repeat it to the point of meaninglessness, can you find a way back to sincerity?

Let's Pop Together: Part 1

What is it that makes today's Pop Team Epic's so different, so appealing? And can it explain why people hate the marketing for Ready Player One so damn much?

Back to the Past: Why Samurai Jack Season 5 Was Great; Why The Ending Failed

Samurai Jack finally got back to the past. But why has the ending left so many feeling let down, and what does the show's brilliant animation reveal about the narrative's fatal flaws?

My God, Steven Universe is Full of Stars!: SU and Golden Age Sci Fi

The most recent Stevenbomb introduces five episodes of golden age pulp sci fi adventure... but what does the recontextualization of old narrative techniques in this new interconnected narrative form say about golden age sci fi, about Steven Universe's quest for the truth, and... about the fandom's understanding of the show?

Video Killed The Yurio Star: Why Is Yuri On Ice's Soundtrack So Weak?

The homoerotic skating anime Yuri On Ice places great importance on the choice of music for performance. But can its soundtrack live up to its own implicit standards? And what does that say about the rest of the show's creative direction?

Crazy Noisy Bizarre Town: Mob Psycho 100, Diamond Is Unbreakable, and... Post-Shonen Anime?

Mob Psycho 100, like comicker One's previous work One Punch Man, has a premise that seems to undermine core aspects of Shonen narratives... or even action narratives in general. Coincidentally, the current arc of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure, Diamond Is Unbreakable, has developed in ways that also disrupt traditional storytelling. Might we call these two works post-Shonen? And what can a 1961 short story by Kurt Vonnegut tell us about what these shows are trying to do?

Too Much Horseman: The Reset Button vs Continuity in BoJack Horseman

You enter the pub, as you always do, and find that, as always, Sam Keeper is sitting in your chair. They've been sitting in your chair rambling at you for years now about everything under the sun, but mostly media studies. Criticism may be a conversation but it's hard to get a word in edge-wise!

Nevertheless, that's the status quo, and the status quo doesn't change.

Well, except for the fact that there's a bunch of other freaks here now, including the infamous Lord Humongous, and a couple of unicorns. Oh and everyone's wearing horse masks today, that's new.

Not the unicorns, they just look like that. You think they... live here now?

Still. When you get right down to it, everything around here stays pretty much the same and oh, hey, Keeper has started talking about that very subject.

BoJack Horseman, the show that we're all dressed as because it's the 10th of Halloween, is fundamentally a sitcom, and as such it's characterized by stasis. It's a show that is really about things remaining the same over time, returning to their starting points. But unlike similar shows which might hang a lampshade on their constant use of a reset button at the end of every episode, this is a show where cyclicality is welded deep into the narrative skeleton.

The premise of BoJack Horseman is that there's people, and there's also people with animal heads. Like in the video for Blow! It's sorta... post-furry.

Within that very strange context, the actual premise of BoJack Horseman is to follow the attempts of a middle-aged washed up former sitcom star, the titular BoJack, to move forward with his career and interpersonal relationships. Much of the show focuses on his search for meaning in his hollow and decadent existence, as his life and the lives of everyone around him continually are propelled back into old habits and self-destructive behaviors.

It's a comedy!

So this is a show characterized fundamentally by a consistent return to the status quo. This causes problems in the final episode of season 3, due to the problem of continuity.

Ghost Sam Coper: Hah, of course an underdeveloped version of myself would think continuity is the big problem here. I remember when I was so naive!

Sam Keeper: Wow what the heck? You're supposed to be dead!

Oh, yeah, you guess this person IS supposed to be dead. This alternate reality version of Keeper tried to take over the blog and then was murdered by the original, much less well adjusted Sam Keeper. You really didn't expect that continuity to be relevant again.

Sam Keeper: I really didn't expect this continuity to be relevant again! Who could possibly have predicted that there might be consequences to my long series of disastrous decisions!

Ghost Sam Coper: See because unlike me, a person who constantly rises above my past faults, you're constantly bogged down by your unacknowledged mistakes! Just like the characters in BoJack Horseman, actually. See this is REALLY a show characterized most strongly by continuity, and it's primarily continuity that allows the final episode of season 3 to succeed! If anything, it's an over-reliance on the reset button that bogs it down.

Sam Keeper: Well that's just ridiculous.

Oh great. They're clearly going to hash this all out, with you as a captive audience.

Ghost Sam Coper: Clearly we need to hash this all out, since we've got a captive audience!

Sam Keeper: Absolutely. Let's start by digging into the main arc of Season 3.

Self Portrait as a Fused Gem: Steven Universe and 20th Century Art

I've been trying to find an angle on Steven Universe for a while now. It's basically tailor made for my blogging, but I've never quite been able to pull an argument together. This isn't because there's not enough to work with. Rather, there's almost too much to work with! It's an expansive show with a whole lot of complexity and nuance--more so than many of the ostensibly adult-oriented shows that I've covered here previously--and tackling any one subject directly has left me overwhelmed and frustrated.

Luckily, two recent episodes, Beta and Earthlings, gave me just the angle I needed to make headway:

They gave me the chance to talk about early 20th century art.

I swear, I'm not just sort of shoehorning this into Steven Universe as a way of tricking people into learning things. Yes, I have a background in art history from this time period, but my goal here isn't to just invent some thin pretext for babbling about Dadaism. It's actually totally the opposite: I think we can understand Steven Universe better, and in particular understand what's going on thematically in these two episodes, if we understand art in our world similar to the art created by Lapis Lazuli and Peridot!

Excuse me, the "Meep-Morp" created by Lapis Lazuli and Peridot.

And the major question the show is interested in answering is essentially: "what is the use of art within the context of war and trauma?"

What better way to answer that than looking at art produced after the First and Second World Wars?

I'm honestly considering writing an article just on this one gag image.

Cha-Change! Formal Experimentation in Adventure Time

I want to talk about Adventure Time, and the experimental direction that the show has taken, and the episode Food Chain in particular, but we're going to have to do some work before we can get to that discussion. That's ok, because it's a discussion well worth having!

When a show gets as experimental as Adventure Time has, playing with different styles, metatextual elements, surreal explorations of sexuality, and so on, that show deserves praise. And I think it deserves praise that goes a bit beyond the initial "well isn't that neat" praise of pop culture journalism and digs into the weird alien guts of the thing to see how it all fits together, why it's significant, and what it all means. Which, of course, takes work, particularly when you're discussing an episode as odd as Food Chain, an episode where lead characters Finn and Jake metamorphose progressively through the forms and lives of different organisms as they experience the titular food chain first hand on a small desert oasis. The episode explores this philosophical journey through a dynamic and cheerfully--even gleefully--off model animation style notably different from the show's usual techniques. And in the process it makes it possible for us to discuss some of the odder recent offerings in Theory.

But let's not get ahead of things here. First, let's talk about why Adventure Time has the freedom to play around with form and narrative so extensively. The show has, over the course of five-and-change seasons, grounded the weirdness in remarkably sincere emotional relationships between the characters. And this sincerity is a gift that keeps giving as far as experimentation is concerned.

Pictured: Finn and Jake

Fixing Up Frozen

Let's talk about the most important song in Disney's hit cartoon Frozen.

Yes, indeed, let's talk about "Fixer Upper."

Alright, alright, claiming that this is the most important song in the whole movie is a little ridiculous, considering that this is a film that includes "Let It Go," which I'm pretty sure even strange frog people living beneath the seas of New England think is basically the best thing ever, but I wanted to start things out dramatically to effectively counterbalance the opinion I've seen expressed about this song before: that it's the least important song in the film, and should probably have been cut entirely.

In sharp contrast, I think the song has an important function within the narrative that makes its inclusion logical, even if the action and tone both take a hit as a result. In the process of picking this scene apart, I want to untangle, to some extent, what makes a particular narrative beat successful and how that success can come at a cost to other elements of a film. Every film is a bit of a fixer-upper, and the way we deal with the problems of this, and all other, art forms decides to a large extent how much we get out of our experiences.

Fluttershyness is Nice

Shyness is nice and
Shyness can stop you
From doing all the things in life you'd like to

I don't think that there's any particular contradiction between aiming a particular narrative at a younger audience and still imparting a slightly more complex, nuanced message, or in transcending the rote lessons that so many children's shows fixate upon. Generally speaking, I think this idea is getting generally accepted by writers on the better children's shows (and it's long been accepted by the best writers of children's stories, of course). Still, it's always wonderful to see a really well put together narrative with a nuanced treatment of what could otherwise be a quite trite issue.

And is there anything more rote, any lower-hanging fruit, than "character deals with stage fright?"

There's probably a few things, but it's got to be in the bottom ten at the very least, to the point where I remember getting quite sick of such episodes when I was a kid. The narratives are straightforward: character admits to having stage fright, zie has to go on stage anyway, zie learns that being on stage isn't so bad after all and sometimes you need to just face your fears head-on to fix them!

But look at the lesson, as relayed by Fluttershy, at the end of the My Little Pony episode "Filli Vanilli:

"Sometimes, being afraid can stop you from doing something that you love, but hiding behind these fears means you're only hiding from your true self. It's much better to face those fears so you can shine and be the best pony you can possibly be."

What a breath of fresh--wait, that's pretty much the usual cliche, isn't it?

In fact, it's a message that actually bothers me a lot, because there's an implicit character judgment in this message, a sense that someone's admission of discomfort or fear is this "hiding from your true self," a deliberate self-hindrance. Taken to extremes it implies that those suffering from more extreme anxieties generating their feelings all on their own, and they can just get over it if they really wanted to.

But I don't think that the message the show claims to be offering is the one that they're actually offering. In fact, I think this episode does a good job of illustrating how a stated moral might be belied by the actual content of a text--in other words, a text can say "This is the message of this story," and we as readers can say, "Yeah, but this that these and those elements of the story directly contradict this claim!" Famously, we could say, just like Blake does, that when Milton writes Paradise Lost and sets out a full explanation of why Satan is an evil, fallen being and God is right to cast him down, he actually ends up writing a story way more sympathetic to Satan than anything else. He is a poet, says Blake, and is of the Devil's part with out knowing it.

This episode, like Milton, is taking another stance (although I think everyone involved is quite aware of the text's implications!) and it's worth shedding some light on just what makes this narrative so different from the norm, what it's really teaching us, and how structurally that lesson is conveyed.

And I think the best way to do so is to frame the lesson not through Fluttershy's moral, but through a song by The Smiths.

My Little Morrissey: Sadness is Magic