Warning: include(/opt/awn/public_html/mag/banner/mag/java.head.txt): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/awncom5/public_html/mag/issue4.07/4.07pages/gillespietoys3.php3 on line 11

Warning: include(): Failed opening '/opt/awn/public_html/mag/banner/mag/java.head.txt' for inclusion (include_path='.:/opt/cpanel/ea-php72/root/usr/share/pear') in /home/awncom5/public_html/mag/issue4.07/4.07pages/gillespietoys3.php3 on line 11


ANIMATION WORLD MAGAZINE - ISSUE 4.7 - OCTOBER 1999

Toys R Us' Fragile Cartoon World...
(continued from page 2)

Reversal
In fact, much of the innovation of the modern toy industry has been, in effect, to make toys more like cartoons. Once upon a time it was a wind-up robot that shuffled awkwardly across the floor until it fell, legs still swishing in vain. Today, the toys talk back to you. They sing. They watch you move with their eyes. Tigger bounces when you squeeze him. Lollipops spin inside your mouth. A Phantom Menace droid reacts when you've entered the room. Furbies learn your language, and teach you their own. Nearly every toy on the shelf begs to be squeezed so it can show off how "animated" it is. (Even the Spice Girl dolls, perhaps the most cartoonish of them all, have plastic buttons where their navels should be; when pressed, we hear Posh Spice tell us, "It's always the same, I never know what to wear.")

As Norman Klein points out, cartoons have always been the most extreme example of our fascination with the artificial, the automata -- the cartoon "has a life of its own, but that life is controlled by gears." (77) But here the fascination seems to have reversed directions. Rather than the cartoons being overrun by toys and fascinated by machinery, it seems the toy store and all its devices are trying desperately to become a bouncing, singing, laughing, shaking cartoon world.

Combine the current fascination with interactivity with the emphasis on the narratives so crucial to character toys, and Toys R Us itself becomes the most interactive toy-cartoon of them all. Of course, theme parks do it with more finesse and finance, and the theme park logic has already been imported into the world of shopping malls by the likes of Disney and Warner Brothers. But even here, in this fluorescent warehouse of color and clamor, the store becomes a simulation of a cartoon that you can walk into through the front door. It's an animated fantasy world inhabited by an array of nearly living creatures, characters constructed by the hand of man but somehow brought to life. That liveliness is all the more desirable because it's fragile, fleeting; we are reminded even as we walk in the door that characters often get canceled. Toys R Us increasingly offers up the magic of cartoons -- only this time the magic is not the way the film projector tricks our eyes into seeing motion, but rather a complex circuitry of motion sensors and voice synthesizers, along with a half-dozen AA batteries.

No longer is the world of animation being subjugated by the dictates of the toy industry. The toy industry has instead realized that it is cartoons that best capture the imagination, and the more closely they can approximate "cartoon-ness" with their toys, the better they can appeal to an audience whose penchant for playing with images and ideas may supersede any interest in plastic knock-offs.

References
Engelhardt, Tom, "The Shortcake Strategy" from Todd Gitlin, ed. Watching Television. New York: Pantheon, 1986.

Klein, Norman, Seven Minutes: The Life and Death of the American Animated Cartoon. London: Verso, 1993.

Further Readings
Jenkins, Henry, "Going Bonkers! Children, Play and Pee-Wee" in Constance Penley and Sharon Willis, eds. Male Trouble. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

Kline, Stephen, Out of the Garden: Toys, TV, and Children's Culture in the Age of Marketing. London: Verso, 1993.

Seiter, Ellen, Sold Separately: Children and Parents in Consumer Culture. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1993

Tarleton Gillespie is honing his academic skills in the Department of Communication at the University of California, San Diego. He teaches courses on children, media, and animation; his dissertation currently in the works focuses on sampling as a cultural technique and the implications for authorship in a digital world. An essay (co-authored with Chandra Mukerji) analyzing how its ambiguity in Animaniacs speaks to the cultural experience of childhood will soon be available in Symbolic Childhood, a forthcoming volume edited by Dan Cook.

1 | 2 | 3


Note: Tarleton Gillespie can be lovingly praised and roundly criticized at editor@awn.com.