Beauty and the Beast announced that animation is now for grownups. © Disney Enterprises Inc. All rights reservered.

Disney put the capstone on the seminal year of 1991 with its November release of Beauty and the Beast. This romance greatly appealed to adults and garnered American animation’s first Oscar nomination for Best Picture. The meta-message behind all the shouting, however, was as important as the cartoons themselves: Animation is now for grownups. The question now — what direction would mature animation take? Sex, violence, obscenity and profanity had shown demonstrable limitations.

It was simply not possible to emulate the Japanese. Anime was not simply a matter of cels and storyboards. Much of what American audiences were seeing was the product of unique cultural factors that were not replicable in this country. While the Japanese, for example, had produced entire animated genres based on sex roles and mythologies developed over centuries, America had no such creative resources to tap. Some of the starkest anime had its roots in the psychological scars of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, wartime disasters such as Americans had never faced. The Japanese excelled at grafting their cultural themes into the animated science fiction, a genre that the U.S. had yet to develop to a serious degree.

By the time The Simpsons made its debut, some postulations were possible concerning what might constitute America’s version of mature animation. There would be some sexual suggestiveness and a reconsideration of the boundaries of violence, but some new rules began to emerge as well. Mature animation was far more self-reflexive and contained more referents to the greater culture and media than children’s shows. Shows that spawned a following by adults also tended to reference animated TV conventions of the past. At times, fondness ruled, but outright parody had its place as well. The third convention, one still in operation today, was the depiction of the outrageous and taboo with little regard for taste.

Often there was no (overt) sexual content. One can see many examples of all of the above in both early and recent incarnations of John Kricfalui’s Ren & Stimpy series. Still, Kricfalusi was merely on the right track, one eventually derailed by contentious dealings with Nickelodeon, and perhaps by Kricfalusi’s own broadening vision of wedding Bob Clampett’s sensibilities to modern narrative and convention. Kricfalusi was arguably best suited to take the next step in the development of mainstream adult animation, but that step fell to two playful auteurs instead.

Stone and Parker’s simple, disarming animation belies a strikingly subversive, very adult perspective. The four children are far from innocent waifs in South Park. © Comedy Central.

There actually is a South Park, Colorado, but a mythical version of the same town — and its inhabitants — was about to become part of animation lore. Creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker had been a comedy writing team since the early 1990s, producing an irreverent film musical before creating the now infamous animated “Christmas card” that eventually became Comedy Central’s 1997 series, South Park. Stone and Parker’s simple, disarming animation belied a strikingly subversive, very adult perspective. The four children that served as the show’s protagonists were far from innocent waifs; their scatological speech and antisocial worldviews realized every nightmare about how society and media might warp a child, producing the monsters so feared by conservative adherents of “family values.”

These bouncy brats resided in a culture virtually designed to ruin them. Their teachers were dysfunctional headcases, their parents (and nearly every other adult) were clueless paragons of ineptitude and their closest adult moral compass was the sex-obsessed school chef. One child, the hapless Kenny, originally met a violent death in each episode. Adults loved the skewed characters, the unrelenting bashing of celebrities and the topical humor that kept South Park fresh through numerous seasons. Less experimental and somewhat more cohesive than LTV, South Park was a credible guide to those hoping to bring adult animation to primetime television — and reap prodigious profits in the process. Stone and Parker’s series was the subject of much scrutiny by hopeful producers and the networks ready to throw money at them by the fistful.

Before they were finished, they would seriously cripple every effort toward mature animation in America.

Next month: 1999- present: The uneven road taken by adult animation in America wends its bumpy way along.

Martin “Dr. Toon” Goodman is a longtime student and fan of animation. He lives in Anderson, Indiana.