Ah, frere! Where do these kids come from? Are they manufactured and prepackaged by the lot in some multicultural version of Acme, Inc.? I have watched countless Cousteau specials and I don't particularly recall his crew being all that diverse. Most of them seemed to be intense, bearded males in wet suits with nary a Hispanic preteen female amongst them. Aren't these child spawn supposed to be in school? Who carries the liability for their perilous adventures, and do their parents and siblings (if they indeed exist) miss them at all? Do they do their chores and make their bunks with the same precision and alacrity that most children do? I can hear the Captain now, his lilting accent wafting down the ship's corridors: "Who has left all zees lights on, eh, do you think I am made of francs? Just wait unteel you haff bills of your own to pay!!"

Well, so much for this deep-sea doo-doo. I have a feeling that the kids will vote with their flippers and pass on this one, just as they do on most politically correct, pro-social programs pushed under their finicky noses. Just wait until they find out that Jacques Cousteau has no super powers mutant or otherwise, nor any notable robotic or extraterrestrial enemies (I do concede that I might have missed those parts of his TV specials during fridge and potty breaks). Bah. Let's have cartoons simply be entertaining and bereft of any other agendas, and maybe we can all just get along.

The Fresh
Among the more disconcerting generalizations I have been hearing of late is that American animation is stuck in a rut, that everything appears similar at best and undifferentiated at worst, that studios and buyers are looking for more of the same old thing, and that nothing really creative has come along in a long while. The first thing I wonder about when hearing these complaints is the relative meaning of "a long while." My next thought is a succinct, "Huh?" It seems rather that we are experiencing exciting times in animation, not stale ones. Even with the employment picture waffling and hundreds of projects in want of angels and buyers, 2002 is a great year for fans of the genre.

Cow and Chicken's lineup is an udder buffet of stars, but devoid of devilled characters. © Cartoon Network, Inc. An AOL Time Warner Company.

Well. Let's see, here. From the beginnings of American animation in the late 1890s there were probably three major innovations up until 1928: The switch from rice paper to acetate cels, the combination of live-action and animation, and the adoption of industrialized methodology to animation production. One could argue for the rotoscope, but this was an extension of live-action. This period of roughly forty years in which animation poised itself for the future was also its least interesting period in an aesthetic sense. Sure, there were master innovators, clever ideas, and exciting glimpses of what was to come, but let's face it -- this was a black and white landscape of humanized animals, nearly all of them poorly drawn and all far too similar to each other. The many men and few women who would bring anatomic accuracy and realistic movement to animated cartoons were finishing middle school. Most animated series were lucky to last five episodes if not backed by newspaper magnates promoting their own syndicated comic strips. With the exception of Max and Dave Fleischer's technical experiments and Otto Messmer's work on Felix the Cat, there was not much of interest to anyone but future historians. Perhaps this would have been a better time? After all, this is nearly half of American animation's history...

How about the limited animation and the neck-tied animals that came to television and stayed for decades after the studios ceased making shorts? How about the endless, dreary variations of superheroes of the past, present and future that battled some of the most inane and ludicrous villains ever to infest a storyboard? Perhaps you would prefer the "Night of the Living Toy Commercials" that followed FCC deregulation under Ronald Reagan? Might those who complain recall a time when Disney animation was virtually defunct and the only animated characters seen in theaters were little kids banging past your knees to get out to the popcorn stand? It wasn't all that long ago.

The honest truth is, this is perhaps the most creative and vital time in the field. There are more features, more series, more animators, more women in animating and executive positions, and more entertaining and offbeat ideas then there were even twenty years ago. I would love to have seen Maxwell Atoms, in just one example, trying to pitch Grim and Evil to one of the big three networks back in the 1980s. "Well, see, I've got these two kids who become pals with Death. And in the second part of my show, a criminal madman with his brain and guts transplanted into a decorticated bear tries to destroy the world." Uh-huh. Shall I go into the vast amount of cartoons that have run, are running, or getting ready to run via the Web, giving voice to a multitude of hopeful independents? Nothing new? All the same? There's no pleasing some people (especially, I suspect, the ones who can't get their projects sold), but don't let them spit in your latte. American animation is by no means moribund; it's alive and doing quite well. Let's enjoy what we have.