Everything Is A Cartoon
As someone who’s favorite movies and TV shows are all animated, I’m feel somewhat vindicated by the fact that newest unfathomable blockbuster is basically a cartoon. Avatar is a very realistically animated, but it’s animated none the less. It just happens to have some filmed humans inserted into it’s computer generated scenes. I’m a little bit sad that part of what it took to get a cartoon into the forefront of our national culture was for it to be marketed as something else, but I can deal.
Most of what counts as real-life fare these days is basically animated. The comic-book movies that are being put out year after year have license to go as wild as they want, populating their movies with brightly colored characters. I don’t think I have ever seen a romantic comedy that showed people falling in love in a place where people actually meet. Documentaries really only show things that are extraordinary, and I’ve seen a lot of them pile on camera tricks so we can see things in a different light.
I really think that it would be best to think about all of these different visual forms the same way we think about cartoons. Everything in a cartoon had to be drawn, and everything in a movie or TV show is constructed. Sometimes literally built, other times even put together in a computer. A lot of shows don’t actually film shots of actors walking down a street actually on a street, instead shooting them in front of a green screen and adding in what’s behind them later. Although they are using shots of the real word to make the visuals in their shows, they are as carefully controlled as any animated production.
News reports alter reality in a different way, picking and choosing what they show in order to illustrate a point. While these shows aren’t strictly news, a good example of this is a joke that bounced around places like the Daily Show and late night talk shows that ape the style of news. A speaker at a Tea Party convention claimed that it was illiterate people who voted Obama into office, which segwayed nicely into shots of tea party protestors holding misspelled signs. It’s a little bit absurd isn’t it? The fact that a few tea party protestors made spelling mistakes does not mean that the Tea Partiers are all uneducated.
That’s not really the point though. The reasoning behind these jokes is to illustrate how ridiculous the anti-intelectualism in a lot of what they say is, an entirely reasonable point of view. News works the same way, reporters hearing of something and choosing the facts to report in order to express this idea. It’s similar to the way that cartoonists work, thinking up characters and worlds basted on things that actually exist and then drawing them out. Of course it’s not that simple, as the expectations and audiences that are associated with these kinds of media are entirely different. Still, it’s important to remember that, even though they end up in vastly different places, both cartoons and the news are created by people living in a reality who want to express what they see. Or something like that.
