To grapple with Ted Turner's 24-hour cartoon network, you must address childhood, not because the classic cartoons on the channel are childish, but because beings a child is so cartoon. When you're a kid, you're tripping all the time. Objects warp, animals rule, and funny noises abound, while the speckled beasts of dream are always lurking under beds and popping out of closets. And intensely violent. Nonetheless, projecting their own literalism onto the metaphoric jungle of the animated young mind, droves of parents have worried and complained about toon violence.
Matter is always magical in cartoons.
Few ceremonial magicians would disagree. But while the connections between cartoons and the magic of fairyland are pretty obvious, folks forget about the other traditions toons keep alive. Watching the backgrounds of Merrie Melodies mutate over the years, and tracking those increasingly stylized lines as they migrated through Mr. Magoo and The Jetsons into the abstract backgrounds of The Pink Panther , I absorbed the development of modernism by having it etched into my retinas. The Abolition of Work . You expect coconuts to fall on their heads, but it doesn't happen.