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Mar
9
Classic Characters
Filed Under animation, character development, writing | View Comments
I’ve often read that what makes a classic cartoon character is the character’s ability to fit into any time and space. Bugs Bunny could walk the streets of France, sing an opera, and run away from a (rather inept) hunter. The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles can face the Shredder in modern-day New York, New York of the future, and cyberspace. Mickey Mouse can drive a steamboat, enchant brooms, and still find time to court Minnie Mouse.
It works that way in books, too. Look at the Nancy Drew books. Nancy solves cases all over the world, and has for decades. Children’s picture books like the Arthur series feature similar timeless characters who can move naturally between very different situations.
These characters are strong in their own personality. They’re defined more by what they do and how they do it rather than by where they do it, and that gives them a flexibility that allows them to draw viewers or readers in and drag them along on their adventures. That, in turn, gives them a timelessness that allows them to reach out to different generations, making them truly classic.
Jan
26
Reverse perception
Filed Under animation, character development, writing | View Comments
Last week, I focused on the messages media can inadvertently send girls. And that’s where a lot of people stop: “Oh, no! Look at what media is doing to our girls!”
Yeah, well, girls aren’t the only ones affected. Look at action/adventure cartoons with a mostly-female cast, and then look at the token guy. Yep, I said it: token guy. It’s like someone decided that the only way you can create a girl-centered action is by inverting the boy-centered action cartoon structure. A bunch of strong girls and a wimpy or subservient guy.
Really, what happened is that they wrote the base of the cartoon with the characters in their “traditional” gender roles, and then just swapped the genders of all the characters. (I want to say I’m kidding, but I have actually seen this technique recommended. I can only hope no one has ever taken it seriously.)
Assuming that there’s even a hair of truth to it, though, male characters don’t have to be weakened to make the female characters around them look strong. In fact, to do that creates a whole new problem. It starts sending the lesson to both girls and boys that it’s okay to turn the tables rather than find equal footing, a mindset that has failed repeatedly throughout history.
Why can’t we promote characters who are strong and capable, regardless of their gender? Why does one side have to be put down so the other can be promoted?
Jan
9
Indulging My Inner Tween
Filed Under animation | View Comments
The Challenge: Do something that is typically seen as inappropriate for someone of your age.
My mother tells this story (I actually remember this) about taking me to see Star Wars when it first came out. I sat in the backseat of our Buick and played with my action figures and bubblegum cards while we watched, matching the scenes on the cards with what was happening on the screen.
A couple of years ago, someone brought me a pile of toys he’d rescued from being thrown out. Most of them were Pokemon figurines, but a couple of them were action figures. He didn’t recognize either of them, but I did! One was Will from W.I.T.C.H., which I enjoyed while it was on a station I could see. That other was the Dark Magician from Yu-Gi-Oh, which I happen to be watching right now.
Watching cartoons (outside of anime and shows like The Simpsons and Family Guy) is generally enough to make any kid look at you like you’ve lost your mind to begin with, but I decided to really have fun today. I pulled out Dark Magician (who usually lives right beside my Yu-Gi-Oh manga). He’s sitting on my bed watching this morning’s episodes (which happen to have been my first exposure to Yu-Gi-Oh several years ago because I didn’t turn the television off quickly enough after Jackie Chan Adventures one afternoon, and also happen to be among my favorite episodes). I was watching with him up until I decided I should probably upload pictures and write this post.
Sadly, I can’t seem to get a good picture of Dark Magician and the episode for documentation, but hopefully this will work for now!
For those curious, I ended up watching because Kaiba fascinated me. He’s still my favorite thing about this show and the manga.
Jul
29
Informal learning doesn’t have to be declared
Filed Under animation, content development, education | View Comments
If I’ve learned one thing from being an animation fan my entire life, it’s that a cartoon doesn’t have to be educational to teach you something. I think it’s important to remember that when debating the “usefulness” of watching cartoons.
This isn’t meant to belittle the educational cartoons, either. I’ve spent many an afternoon watching Arthur and Cyberchase. To this day, the animation/live action-hybrid Blue’s Clues is still a favorite show. They’re all three well-done shows where a learning outcome is clearly displayed, regardless of whether it’s a lesson about friendship, math and science, or exploring the world around you.
The E/I rating (as near as I can tell) helps identify cartoons that aren’t necessarily educational in nature, but fit a certain criteria to be considered “educational enough”. More recent examples of this include Magi-Nation, which offered interesting and relevant moments of math and science instruction interspersed throughout the storyline, and Winx Club, which encourages girls to develop strong, positive characters.
Then you have the cartoons that are either built around a trendy toy or game (card or video). Because they’re really trying to sell something, they get written off. The cartoons are often shorter than cartoons in the educational or E/I categories, and the writing can get downright insipid at times. That said, though, the writers on these cartoons take advantage of the nature of the world they’re writing in to slip in mini-lessons from science and social studies. I can even think of a couple of cartoons that promote literacy simply by having the characters read frequently. My favorite cartoons tend to fall into this last group, and I can’t tell you how many things I learned from those cartoons in the 80’s are still with me now as an adult.
Just because something isn’t “educational” doesn’t mean you can’t learn something from it.
Jul
27
When Dinosaur King first showed up a couple of years ago, I almost turned it off because it sounded like another Pokemon. Once I got past the voice actors, though, I found that the cartoon actually reminded me of my favorite childhood cartoon, M.A.S.K.
In Dinosaur King, a paleontologist’s son and his friends travel all over the world looking for modern-day dinosaurs. They’ll be tracking down a dinosaur, and then find that a team of adults is also trying to catch the same dinosaur. It becomes a race where each group’s dinosaurs often have to battle (and the good guys don’t always win).
In M.A.S.K., a philanthropist and his son would be somewhere in the world where the philanthropist was usually conducting business. Then, whatever they were supposed to be visiting would go missing or they would see the bad guys trying to mess with what they were supposed to be visiting, and the philanthropist called in his team and fireworks would ensue.
What caused me to draw the connection between Dinosaur King and M.A.S.K. was the globe-hopping. While the characters in either cartoon are on their mission or in the build-up to the mission, they’re exploring the location. When I was a child, I loved those parts of M.A.S.K. because it was a chance to learn about somewhere far away from where I lived, somewhere I probably wouldn’t get to go on my own. I see the same thing in Dinosaur King, a chance to expose a child to small facts about life around the world in an engaging setting. Even if all they’re doing is following the dinosaurs, they’re bound to pick up something.
Over the weekend, I had the opportunity to watch an episode of each together. It was the best hour I’d spent watching television in a while.
Feb
10
Reacting to an adaptation
Filed Under animation, content development, gaming, reading, writing | View Comments
Last week, a coworker loaned me the first second Death Note movie after she found out I’m a fan of both the manga and the anime. It was subtitled, which I don’t enjoy, so it took me most of Sunday to get through it. What I found really interesting was how they took elements from all along the manga and compressed them into this movie. I couldn’t stop myself from thinking, “Wow, this is a very creative adaptation.”
On Saturday night, a friend patiently sat through my tirade on a Wired article about Warner Brothers revitalizing the Tomb Raider franchise roughly a year and a half after completely giving up woman-led action movies. In my ranting, I ended up professing my love for the first movie because I felt it was a strong adaptation of the games and condemning the second for being little more than trendy. I’ve known other Tomb Raider fans who’ve felt the same way.
Books and video games have been adapted to television shows, cartoons, and movies for decades now, and fans are quick to scream when the adaptation doesn’t reflect their own impression of the book or game in question. A well-done adaptation can be shredded by the fans because a beloved character was left out, or a setting doesn’t look the way the fan artists have drawn it. We’re quite vicious about it sometimes.
Sitting there Sunday night, adoring the actor who brilliantly played the rather inhuman character L, I realized I’ve heard very few complaints about this movie. But it is an adaptation, and I’d fill up a page of notebook paper trying to list everything that was changed. But no one really seems to care.
I wonder…is our search for a close adaptation a cultural thing?
Sep
27
Learning from cartoons
Filed Under animation, teaching moments | View Comments
On Dinosaur King this morning, Rex defined “savannah” in a way that was reminiscent of Magi-Nation. Seriously, what is keeping that show from the E/I label? (Best guess: episode length)
It did make me think about M.A.S.K., as it often does, and I got to wondering about what I learned from episodes (not the PSAs at the end of each episode- I really liked preachy cartoons, didn’t I?). It was things like- apple seeds contain trace amounts of a poisonous substance, how two-way mirrors work, bullet trains are the fastest on earth.
You know…useful stuff! *grin*
May
9
Will there be Spiritbenders?
Filed Under animation, anthropology, symbolism | View Comments
I was watching Avatar: The Last Airbender episode “The Puppetmaster” tonight and thinking about how Avatar’s writers seem to approach the elements. While they present the four traditional elements- air, fire, earth, and water- they seem to work with them in a nearly Chinese way at times.
For example, Earthbender Toph can also manipulate metal, something not really covered by the classical elements. It makes sense, though. Metals (as we work with them) as mined from the ground and galvanized or blended with other metal ores. It’s just interesting to note she can bend both earth and metal, and that it’s been presented that way.
Waterbenders, as you find out in “The Puppetmaster”, can draw their water from anywhere, including plants and animals. It’s this universal way of thinking that ends up being truly disturbing by the time Avatar is done exploring the possibilities of waterbenders controlling the people around them simply by bending the water inside them.
The writers, in effect, bend traditional interpretations to create their stories.
Edit: This was written before I learned the series was ending.
Mar
31
A definite theme
Filed Under animation, book love, reading | View Comments
I decided to combine this week’s link dump with this month’s book dump since April starts tomorrow. When I started gathering everything to enter it, I noticed an odd relationship between most of my links. Let’s see if you can find it.
We’ll start with the links…all two of them!
- College students making the grade online, in class- It’s great that educational technology is improving students’ grades in courses. My concern is, are they demonstrating any actual learning? I work with kids day in, day out. A crazy number of the kids are supposed to have some sort of short-term memory issue because they never seem to know anything (makes you want to raise a kid up here, just in case it’s the water). What’s really happening is that they’re cramming for tests, and then doing nothing to actually shift that knowledge into their memory at all. So we end up teaching the exact same topic (I often use the exact same material, just to make my point) to the exact same kid, and they have absolutely no clue they’ve seen it before. Grades are one thing, retention is something completely different.
- Cartoon Network has no plans for One Piece return- I’m sharing this one because I’m a jerk. 4Kids lost three properties in 2006- one it deserved to lose (don’t hate me), one that simply finished (4Kids does still control it), and one that was literally pirated away by another company that 4Kids has a distribution partnership with. Granted, One Piece often had fans yelling and screaming at 4Kids, but still. If you ever want to know how 4Kids lost this poor embattled property, google “Funimation One Piece”. It’s completely irrelevant now. After only six months of fans yelling and screaming about the new voice actors, Cartoon Network has decided to stay out of it. (You’d think after what happened with Pokemon, these companies would learn that moving away from 4Kids voice actors is never a popular idea.)
And now, after spending nearly every free moment in January and February reading, I kind of gave myself March off. The list, as a result, is short.
- Mamotte Lollipop, Volume 1- My students are overly fascinated with my love of anime and manga, so they’re always asking me if I’ve ever heard of titles. One of them, easily an otaku, came in a couple of weeks ago and dropped two manga on my desk. I hadn’t ever heard of this one, and could easily see why. It was scary looking (at least from where I was sitting). It was brightly colored and looked very girly. I don’t trend to to do girly, but the student insisted I read it, so I did. The story wasn’t much better than the cover, sadly enough.
- The Gentlemen’s Alliance +, Volume 1?- This one had been previewed in Shojo Beat not too long ago, and I wasn’t impressed with it then, either. It was far more readable than Mamotte! Lollipop, though. Because I didn’t outright reject it, the student intends to make me read the rest of the story. (Since she has the attention span of a ferret, I’m hoping she’ll forget.)
- Vampire Knight, Volume 4- One of my favorite manga at the moment. This volume was particularly…interesting. There’s a school ball, and you get a definite Yuki-Kaname moment. But the last half of the the volume…whoa! (It really got to me when I read these chapters in Shojo Beat, too.) The bonus story made very little sense, though.
- The Absolute Sandman, Volume 1- I’m not sure why, but I keep trying to read Neil Gaiman’s books. It’s like I’m terrified that my geek creds are in danger if I can’t find one I can actually get through. For the time being, though, I think I’ve decided that I’m just not in the right place in my life to appreciate his work, and I’m letting it go for now. If that makes me less of a geek…well…then it makes me less of a geek. There’s not much I can do about that.
All right, did you find the theme?
Jan
27
It’s a little bit funny
Filed Under animation, creativity, designs I like | View Comments
I know, I know. No link post last week. Last weekend was this weird little creature that I never quite managed to get a handle on. I think people around me were practicing for the full moon…and that was not an entirely easy to deal with thing.
This week, on the other hand, I have some links I saved just for today!
Some of my links are pictures, because pictures can be quite happy, inspiring stories in and of themselves.
- Star Wars gone Steampunk- And it’s all done in Lego!!!
- Starry Night Castle- This one would make a beautiful bookmark
- Winter Night at Pic du Midi- This one…this one. So far, I’ve wanted to make it my desktop wallpaper (which I recently changed), an avatar, a setting for some super-awesome sci-fi/fantasy story, my new home, um… Let’s just say I like this one, and wish I could have it as a print for my room and a smaller print for my design/inspiration notebook.
Then there’s the news that made me sad…
- Comcast pulling AZN in April- This was the station that introduced me to Descendants of Darkness, one of my favorite anime. I actually got to see a number of obscure anime I might have never known existed because of AZN. Then Comcast moved it to a higher tier and we didn’t get it any more. I’ve hated that. Now it will be gone all together, and that stinks. Oh, well. Maybe Sci-Fi and Cartoon Network will change up their offerings a bit and I’ll get more diversity in my anime.
And it wouldn’t be a good link dump without a cool quote!
- “A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.”- Herm Albright
Have a good week, y’all!
