Adult cartoons domesticate the blurring of cinema and animation caused by digital fabrication

Evidence

The unnerving phenomenon of adult cartoons also evinces genre fluidity. While the history of animation has always involved material addressed to adult audiences, the 2010s saw a marked increase in mature themes and explicit language on the coloring page. Hits like Bojack Horseman, Undone, or Rick and Morty have encouraged producers already enthusiastic about the ever-improving cost ratio of evolving animation technology to live action. Profit motive aside, the prevalence of adult cartoons evolves from the pressures on the medium of film that we’ve already named; as Lev Manovich argues, “Cinema can no longer be clearly distinguished from animation. It is no longer an indexical media technology but, rather, a sub-genre of painting.” This blurring of pro-filmic and animation is important for this genre, wrought by the stretching of images beyond original aspect ratios through digital editing and enhancement or 3D fabrication. Adult cartoons can be thought of as a domestication of this blurring, the elevation of content within the old form that is another side of the coin of the formal transformation of conventional dramatic adult fare. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 235

Categorization

• QUESTION: Kornbluh treats adult cartoons as a symptom of genre dissolution under immediacy — worth interrogating whether animation for adults might instead be a limit case that resists her collapse-of-mediation thesis.
• ADDENDUM: The claim that digital image manipulation erodes film’s indexicality sharpens the ‘Ontology’ chapter debate about which aesthetic features instantiate immediacy and which resist it.