Are Animated Films Too Adult?

Have the jokes in kids' animated films become too adult?

Very much so, according to The Guardian's Michael Hahn. Whether it's medieval stoners saying, "Don't bogart the frankincense and myrrh, dude," in Shrek the Third, Star Wars references in Flushed Away, or a "Whospace" gag in Horton Hears a Who, animators, in their haste to get adults laughing at their movies, ignore their primary audience: kids.

The Simpsons Effect: Animation gags aimed solely at adults

So when did animated films become more about entertaining parents than children? Hahn blames what he calls "The Simpsons Effect" for the problem.

"After 1989, a generation of film-makers - animators especially," Hahn writes in his blog, "saw it was possible to write and animate jokes that would make both children and adults laugh."

"Now, however, too many kids' film-makers spend too much time worrying about their adult audience, and make movies that pass the kids by."

Not even Pixar gets away clean. Even though 1995's Toy Story "was a sweet, straight children's fable, with a few baby-boomer pop-cultural references," Hahn feels the gang from Emeryville lost their way with 2004's The Incredibles and last year's Ratatouille.

"The Incredibles . . . won adoring reviews from adult reviewers . . . but do you remember the twitching from children . . . during the three-quarters of an hour in which it did nothing but pastiche the sitcom suburbia of the 1950s and 60s, a sequence that . . . required reference points that could only be known by viewing parents?"

Speaking as one who saw The Incredibles with a horde of kids aged 3 to 9, no. But Hahn does have a point. Many family-oriented animated films are so busy tossing in pop-culture gags for the parents that they leave kids cold.

Ten minutes into a screening of Surf's Up, one child turned to her mother and said, "I'm bored. Can we go now?" There was also a suspicious lack of laughter from kids at a screening of Bee Movie, which featured the comedy stylings of former prime-time TV star Jerry Seinfeld. Both films went nuts with the pop-culture gags and, interestingly enough, both films failed to make back their studio costs during their theatrical runs.

Classic Disney, Warner Bros. animation designed for adults

Where Michael Hahn's argument falls apart is when he says, "(animated) kids' movies, for so long dominated by Disney, were made for kids, with little effort wasted on entertaining those who took the kids."

Not so. Although those classic Disney films were handed G-ratings, there was plenty of material in there that wasn't for kids. Employees at Radio City Music Hall were forced to regularly change the seat cushions because countless children, while witnessing certain sequences in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, wet themselves in sheer terror. Walt Disney pushed the art of animation in many of his earlier films, arguably going too far when one considers that Fantasia and Sleeping Beauty bombed on their initial releases and were only hailed as classics twenty or thirty years later.

Looney Tunes, Betty Boop too racy for kids

Not only that, those animated theatrical shorts from Disney and Warner Bros. were initially intended for an adult audience, and ran in front of first-run movies of every stripe. In fact, before the 1940 Animators' Strike exposed Walt as just another union-busting capitalist, animated Disney shorts were as much a part of 20's and 30's hipster culture as jazz and Marxism.

It was only in the 1970s, when TV broadcasters tried to fill the Saturday morning schedule, that someone had the bright idea to repackage those classic cartoons for the under-12 set. Needless to say, many of them were either heavily censored for children, or never appeared on television at all.

No one ever intended Tex Avery cartoons and Betty Boop shorts to be seen by kids, and many Looney Tunes cartoons have never appeared on television in their original form, simply because they contained adult jokes that were far too risqué for Saturday morning.

And let's not forget that animation in other cultures isn't just for kids, especially in Japan where anime classics like Akira and Grave of the Fireflies regularly feature adult content.

Speaking of which, anime legend Hayao Miyazaki is a good example of a current animator who does well with both children and adults. Movies like Spirited Away and Howl's Moving Castle appealed to all generations simply by being great stories with powerful characters.

Yes, there is a problem with animators (and movie executives) making their movies more appealing to parents than kids. But is it all The Simpsons' fault? Look for Part #2, which goes behind the issue.

The Simpsons

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