[Perry] Cartoons for Grown-Ups

Largely speaking, there tends to be a bit of a schism between East and West when it comes to animated features.

I watch a lot of cartoons.

It’s a love that began with Tom and Jerry when I was little and it has continued unabated ever since.

I’ve been thinking recently about the divide between asian and american cartoons though. While I’ve run into many asian cartoons that were clearly directed at a more mature audience, I’ve rarely seen that same demographic targeted by western animated features.

It can be argued (quite convincingly) that the likes of Spirited Away or Princess Mononoke can be enjoyed by viewers of all ages, but there are many shades of meaning to those films and I find myself wondering if the younger viewers really appreciate the depth of these stories.

On the other hand, western cartoons tend to mainly target the younger audience with the occasional embedded nod to the older viewers, primarily in the form of innuendo.

Every now and then though, you run into something that breaks the mold.

Recently, I’ve run into two such examples.

The first was Batman: Under the Red Hood which I saw for the first time last year.

Now I’ve never really followed the comics all that closely, so the story was new to me. It had been recommended to me by a friend after a conversation where I lamented the fact that though I wanted more serious and darker superhero tales, all I had available were the saturday morning DC cartoons that had been a mainstay of my childhood years.

This was when I was introduced to the movie and I wasn’t disappointed.

The movie itself opens with a scene of the Joker beating the current Robin to death with a crow bar and honestly? It just gets darker from there.

The violence in the story is used to a point though, and a damned strong one at that.

There’s a lot more that I want to say about this movie, but I really don’t want to spoil it at all. All I’ll say is that if you were a fan of the grittier feel to the recent Batman remakes, “Under the Red Hood” is definitely a story you should check out.

Oddly enough, the second example is also a Batman story. The Dark Knight Returns is the animated version of the graphic novel of the same name by Frank Miller.

It’s a story about what happens to heroes past their prime. Batman in his old age has been ‘retired’ for the past decade, but the relentless rise of crime in the city pushes him to don the cape one last time.

It’s a story of staying true to one’s ideals. It’s a story about a world with no more heroes, and how quickly they’ll turn to tear apart the individual brave enough to make a stand.

Those who’ve read the graphic novel will be pleased to see an almost panel by panel recreation of the story. The only things missing in this animated version are some of the thought bubbles that were present in the comic but on the whole, it doesn’t seem that large a loss for such a powerful tale.

So in my years of watching cartoons, these were pretty much the only two that have stuck around in recent memory as western cartoons meant for a mature audience.

If there are any others out there that you guys would like to recommend, I’ve love to know about them!

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