Friday, October 14, 2011

Cartoon Calamity

Posted by Vulnadia on Dec 05, 2008 at 10:48 AM This week has been quite a learning experience for us as a family in the television viewing department! You see, my kids are very choosy on what exactly they prefer to watch on their television. There is even one show that actually seems to make them behave more when it is on the room that they are playing in..."The Backyardigans" does that trick, believe it, or not! I, too find that hard to believe, but whenever I put it on in the living room, Kaiden has less incidences of getting into trouble. Somehow the pass-thru remains empty, the dining room chairs all stay in their regular places and are used for their regular purposes (not step ladders) and overall the fireplace gets left alone as well (no sandbox playing!) But with the advent of the Christmas season upon us, I decided to give the Christmas programming a try and see how the kids liked it. Oddly enough, they are indifferent to all things Grinch, but respond well to "The Polar Express." Trains are our big thing right now, though, so that is little surprise, I suppose! In fact, Fox Family had the nice surprise of running "The Polar Express" back to back for me in one night, complete with a "Mater" cartoon in between that just made my trio's night. It made them soo happy, that they stayed up til nearly midnight over it...Yep, that's the downside of changing the programming on the bedroom television, it tends to incite all sorts of partying in the bedroom. The light gets mysteriously turned on, little horns begin to sound (a chorus of them,) and there is much jumping in bed from the noise we hear downstairs. There is even cheering and sometimes a chorus of "Choo choo!" Then one day during last weekend, they decided to run a marathon of Charlie Brown cartoons. That was when the big surprise came. My children are entranced with Peanuts cartoons, they really are. In fact, Kaiden stopped everything he was doing (& he is always doing something) and started watching it. He even stood there dancing to the music, too, which was kind of funny. And then it hit me. Even with all of today's fine and fancy CGI tactics and educational story lines that the networks strain to comply with, all it takes to make a child happy is something as simple as a Charles Schulz drawing. That's it,nothing else, really. A simple day in the life cartoon about a little boy who has more bad days than good and how he copes with it can make my 2 yr olds insanely happy and keep them entertained. There is something to be had in that discovery, actually. Maybe the big film companies and the major networks need to stop and step back a little and try observing the very demographic that they wish to cater to. If they did, maybe they would find that fancy computer generated animation and complicated convoluted story lines that are over-educational aren't necessarily the answer. Maybe cartooning is a dying art that deserves more respect and possibly resurrection from its current status in the background. Cartoonists observe the simple aspects of life somehow manage to find a way to express it in just a few barred segments that are given a small section of the newspaper each day, and in color each week. If they are lucky, and few are, their strip gets made into a small special for airing or a holiday movie special. Who remembers the wonders of Calvin & Hobbs or the trials & tribulations of Opus and His Wish for Wings That Work? Yet, the messages that these artists convey prove somehow timeless when I can show my three 2yr olds a cartoon that is several decades old and it somehow reaches through to them and entertains them in spite of its age and inspite of its lack of glamour and glitz that modern CGI companies present to us as animation these days. Maybe keeping it simple and more of an artform is the key, here, who knows. It might somehow put the art back into it and the perspective that current producers seem to overlook in this dying artform of simple animation. Maybe everyday occurrences are more educational than what the government has outlined for us for our Saturday morning cartoon content. So, the next time you are wondering what you could show your child that might interest them and captivate them, try something from your own childhood. After all, it's the simple things that can make us the most happy!

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