Ok, when asked what my favourites cartoons were as a kid, my list isn’t the most light and fluffy. In fact the darker the better as far as I was concerned!
Like everyone else I grew up on Tom and Jerry…..the violence of it was just accepted as normal. Tom dicing Gerry into little pieces was expected. Of course nowadays you can’t show these kind of cartoons, everything is a lot more squeaky clean and definitely wouldn’t have appealed to the sadistic youngster I used to be….and most kids are for that matter.
As far as TV series went you couldn’t have done better than Ulysses. Let’s face it; it had comatose bodies floating in a near-deserted space ship that travelled endlessly lost in a vortex of space and time…..creepy as hell! What’s not to love?! And don’t get me started on He-Man and Thundercats….any type of living mummified corpse/skeleton as a bad guy was fine by me.
When it came to films….I liked them even darker. The Lord of the Rings cartoon was one of my favourites, I literally wore out the tape watching it over and over again. Besides the very abrupt end (I only found out after reading the books that the cartoon ends part way through the second volume! They ran out of money it seems) this film kicked ass. I’ve heard since so many people slamming it…the animation sucks…blah blah blah. So much so that I’ve never watched it again as an adult in case I click into animation mode and start seeing all the flaws (some movies are best thought of nostalgically) But as a kid ‘The Wraiths’ in this cartoon made Darth Vader look (and sound) like a fluffy bunny with a chest infection. When I saw the new ‘Rings’ Trilogy I still thought the animation over live action used to depict the ‘Wraiths’ in the cartoon was way eerier.
‘Watership Down’ was another favourite in our household. And even though suffocating bunnies and fascist killer rabbits unnerved myself and my siblings, we couldn’t get enough of it.
Likewise ‘The Black Cauldron’ was the Disney animation I remember most growing up. It was dark and scary and totally cool! I don’t think they’ve gone that dark before or since. Imagine my surprise when I discovered in Art College that my favourite Disney was a box office flop! The injustice of it all! Though not an animation, the ‘Dark Crystal’ was another gem. The ‘Skeksis’ looking like inside out giant chickens were freakish! Also the giant soldier beetles snatching elves…oh the scariness of it all! I didn’t want to look at these creatures as a kid….but they drew you in like the best horrors
When I look around nowadays there doesn’t seem to be the same darkness to cartoons, sure there’s always exceptions ‘Spirited Away’ etc. But everything seems to be watered down, God forbid we unnerve some kids. Personally I think my childhood would have been a little less rich if the scariest thing I’d experienced on TV was Bambi’s mother dying. What’s so scary about that?…..I love veal!
2 comments so far
Im really sorry but you need to make aments to the tom and jerry part. throughout the whole seasons of tom and jerry blood and gore was never show on the cartoon it was only the act of the violence itself that people found offensive. That picture you are using is the only scene with blood in and the short clip is taken from the tom and jerry movie.
Apart from that I like your thinking.
19 December 2009
4:38 pm
What about Batman the animated series? It was the darkest cartoon available and I loved it. Today’s brave and the bold looks like My little pony compared to it.
5 May 2010
9:04 pm