Archive for July, 2019

Disney’s new animated show, Amphibia, is weirdly inconsistent. It feels like an amalgamation of a lot of other popular cartoons: it has Adventure Time’s idyllic-but-dangerous-beneath-the-surface world-building; it has Gravity Falls’ dark, understated secrets from characters and locations alike; it has Steven Universe’s sense of gradual, revelatory pacing. It suddenly will burst into Spongebob Squarepants levels of absurd silliness, or utilize a children storybook-like essence akin to the late, underrated Harvey Beaks. Amphibia wants to be a lot of things other than itself, and while it is possible for an animated show to explore an assortment of thematic ideas, styles, and genres, Amphibia struggles because its premise–a young girl finds herself magically transported into a world of frogs–never congeals into something specific. In other words, if you randomly caught an episode, you probably would never guess that Anne even wants to go home.

Amphibia’s weird inconsistency creates a number of issues (since there’s no wifi, Anne just must have a shitload of TV shows on her phone), but one concern I mentioned over on Twitter is that she doesn’t possess a real drive to get home, nor seems to want to figure out any information on how she got to this frog-filled world, nor desires to find out what this frog-filled world is all about. When she, Hop Pop, Sprig, and Polly (the latter three being the frog family she’s currently living with) head to The Archives to do research, finally, she absolutely dreads it. Instead, her attention turns to Sprig’s idea, who gleefully, excitedly wants to go off onto “an adventure”. This adventure, whatever it may be, is purposeless. It’s just more exciting than boring ol’ reading. Sprig’s desire to go off into a random, dangerous adventure is so strong that he literally sabotages The Archives itself, trapping everyone inside it, so they are forced to figure out how to escape. Even in the nutty, anything-goes vibe of the show, this is a pretty messed up thing to do. But it’s also a good example of an overall trend in cartoons these days: just finding adventure for the sake of it has become overused, a somewhat lazy replacement over actually creating a plot or goal through which adventures should occur.

I tweeted about this while watching the new CN cartoon Mao Mao: Heroes of Pure Heart, about a stylized, chibi-esque, heroic cat who wants to become a legend among his already legendary family of heroes. (The tweet got a bit of pushback, which prompted me to clarify myself here.) Mao Mao wants to prove himself. To achieve this goal, he needs adventures. He values those adventures. He even has list of four elements every adventure must have to even be considered an adventure. His need for said adventures fit his personality, an oversized ego of speed and power, a modern-day Darkwing Duck, who wants to live up to his family’s legacy. I can’t say the same for Adorabat, the soft-voiced, ambitious sidekick who cries for the need for adventure… because she’s bored? She wants to train under Mao Mao, but for no specific reason other than it looks cool and she can be awesome, and, like Sprig, she also conjures up a nonsensical, unstable situation so she can force an adventure on her mentor during a moment of self-doubt.

Characters “wanting to go on an adventure” or “learning to be an adventurer,” whatever that even means, solves a lot of narrative problems. It sounds concrete enough to be a strong character motivator, but just vague enough to allow for almost limitless number of situations to structure an episode around. It’s also silly enough to allow writers to open up a lot of winking, self-aware jokes about adventuring in general. Sprig’s desire for adventure is, as quoted: “Wouldn’t we be better off preparing [for adventure] by diving headfirst into deadly situations?”. Mao Mao’s list of things every adventure must have is also a good example. And DuckTales contains so many episodes that were “about adventuring” that it arguably hurt the first half of its first season. Dewey’s desire to be an adventurer like his uncle Scrooge is, if you think about it, meaningless; far more interesting is Dewey’s desire to connect with Scrooge on a deeper, more emotional level through adventuring, which ended up being better handled with the search for his mother instead.

This all raises a question: what does “wanting to go on an adventure” even mean? It’s nebulous, non-specific, and open-ended. It feels character-defining, and in a way, a total, direct commitment to that concept could indeed be character-defining (Mao Mao’s thirst for adventure is based on that need to be accepted among his ancestors). Most of the times though, it’s not (Sprig and Adorabat only seems to want to do it cause they’re bored), and even with the cases that combine “desires for adventure” with “thrill-seeking personality” or “need to live up to legacies,” creators often downplay the depth of personality needed to sell that desire and instead overplay the comedic, winking, throwaway aspects of wanting those adventures. Mao Mao and OK KO both are literally structured as worlds defined by adventures around every corner; just existing in them means you will find yourself in danger everywhere you go. DuckTales is a bit more narrow, in that only members of the over-extended Duck family are constantly “trapped” in these adventurous situations, but considering the show is about them, any other consideration is rendered moot.

The self-aware desire for adventure has another inherent issue. In the tweet thread I made, I mentioned that it “killed the stakes,” which was meant to be tongue-in-cheek, but I do regret saying it in that way. What I meant was more that it removes the weight of life-or-death stakes when characters shrug off, or welcome, any threat that they could die from. And look, I am very much aware that very few, if any, cartoons will actually kill off its main characters, or even its secondary characters. In that way, being self-aware about characters wanting to rush blindly into adventure is hedging your bets; since you can’t really harm your characters, you might as well make fun of the fact you can’t harm them (Amphibia, specifically, hedged its bets early by dropping a lot of gags about characters literally dying or being killed, something that’s usually taboo among kids shows). Characters getting into dangerous scrapes but ultimately escaping them is a guaranteed part of the narrative landscape, so might as well just play the whole thing as a lark.

This sounds like harsh criticisms, but I don’t mean them to be; I actually quite like all of these shows (although Amphibia’s inconsistency feels like it’ll be troubling in the long run, and Disney dropping the entire first season in two months feels increasingly like a burnoff). I was just struck suddenly how many cartoons utilize this trope now, at least at some level. It’s fine, it’s fun, it’s cute, and often has enough oomph to carry a show, or at least a character, through the bulk of the narratives. It’s just becoming a bit too common, and I’m beginning to miss characters who are, you know, actually scared about dying during an adventure. Characters who are worried, concerned, scared, who have to dig deep to propel themselves through a dangerous situation, or at the very least, struggle through adventure on the way for another, more specific goal, other than the desire for adventure for the sake of adventure.

And there’s another, more “social” issue with this approach, which is trickier to explain. There’s something… specific about being confident enough to explore the world, everything that is known and unknown, knowing full well that you’re likely capable of surviving it, of getting through it with no consequences or trauma from the experience. It feels broadly false, or, more accurately, only conceivable to a narrow audience flush with the means to handle it. Perhaps its wealth. Perhaps its familial or communal support. Exploring or adventuring a perilous space with no interference from parents or authority figures, a developed education/skillset, an internal self-mastery in recovery, and so on… that the sheer breadth of adventures can even be treated as antidote to tedium, instead of the kind of palm-sweaty tension it should be, feels privileged, for lack of a better word. For another sect of young viewers, going on these kinds of adventures is dangerous, where police are all to ready to kill them and other adults treat them like garbage, where their lack of education and questionable health will leave them vulnerable, where hostilities are way too overwhelming than the vague beasts, obstacles, or traps that litter these so these adventures. To one sect of the population, just living life is an adventure. To another sect, living life is more akin to survival.

In other words, sometimes going on adventures is terrifying. Downplaying the fallout of a raw adventure makes good fodder for comedy, and it’s fine to play around with it in the basic, rawest sense, but even as the stakes escalate, there’s very little chance that the dangers, conflicts, and obstacles seem like they’ll be overwhelming, that maybe, things will go too far. (A rare exception took place in the low-key, intriguing Amazon Prime show Danger and Eggs, in which the excitable, adventure-seeking Danger suffers a near-fatal asthma attack in the midst of an off-book venture.) For the most part, sure, characters may scream, run, and sweat in a temporary fear, but the solution is always around the corner, and rare does any character actually, truly think that they may genuinely not make it back home. Admittedly, this would take a certainly amount of self-reflection and consideration, time that most shows do not really have. Still, these shows could make the time if that inherent fear was ever present, or the goals of such adventures were more personal, more meaningful, than simply the desire for life-threatening excitement.