Ralph Banski: "First Adult Cartoons"

[Lucky_Bob]

One thing I've never gotten:

Ralph Banski is most well known for his "adult" feature films like "Fritz the Cat" and "Heavy Traffic". He is considered to be the first, along with Tezuka, to make "adult" animated films.

But weren't cartoons like Betty Boop and the Tex Avery cartoons and Looney Tunes made for adults? The humor in those are definantly adult and some are even blatantly sexual in nature (ESPECIALLY Betty Boop) but didn't push it to the point of being graphic like "Fritz" and "Heavy Traffic"

My point being: it doesn't have to be rated "X" to be an "adult" film. You can make an animated film that is for adults without gratuitous (sp) sex, drugs, and violence.

Thoughts?

James

P.S.
Banski fans: Please don't kill me!!

[starlac]

Most of the Looney Tunes and Avery’s MGM cartoons were essentially made for general audiences, both kids and adults alike. Although the studio’s crews tended to make films that they themselves enjoyed, rather than bend to corporate pressure, which they mostly didn’t suffer from.

The only “classic era” studio I readily consider to be solely concerned with children's entertainment was Famous Studios in their post-war years (After they lost Popeye as a character). Watching their “noveltoons” is mostly a dull experience, it lacks the edge that Warner’s, MGM and other studios had.

Some Looney Tunes also tend to have references to (at the time) popular culture, Bugs reading a popular magazine and so-on. which would have gone over children’s heads (and go over the heads of people today who have no idea about these references). Betty Boop was pretty much designed solely for adults with it titillations and innuendo; at least until the Hayes code came into force in the mid 30’s.

Sex, drugs and violence are some of the more sordid aspects of human nature and are, in some ways, easier to do. Part of some of the more extreme animation (i.e. South Park) made in today’s market may be a sort of reaction to the Smurfs and other merchandise led cutesy and less cutesy cartoons of the eighties and the cutback quality of the sixties-seventies (although the sixties at least had more consistent, better written scripts).

Besides it depends on what we mean by Adult:

Personally I’ve found films like The Iron Giant or the Triplets of Bellville, or the works of Tezuka and Miyazaki to be more mature than many number of animated shows that make use of what might be called adult.

[lupercal]

Agree with Starlac's last para.

A lot of the pre-code Betty Boop stuff is very suggestive and clearly aimed at adults. She has virtually non-existant clothing, and it's well known her figure was modelled on Mae West (even if she started out as a dog). Similarly the 20's Felix shorts made no attempt to disguise the for-adults content of plenty of their gags.

I think the difference between these and Bakshi's cartoons of the 70's is that Betty Boop was never subversive, in the sense that there was a huge marketing phenomenon with both her and Felix, with every bit of Boop or Felix paraphrenalia for sale - like Garfield in the 80's. Conversely, you would be unlikely to stroll into a mainstream gift store in 1976 and pick up a 'Coonskin' wristwatch or a Fritz tumbler set (though maybe if the films had been hugely successful you might. Doubt it, though. Because to be hugely successful they wouldn't have been subersive. ipso facto. The fact that South Park could pull this trick off in the late 90's is a blip I'll leave to sociologists)

So, to me, the real difference isn't how adult they were, but how mainstream they were. Bakshi's early work positioned itself as a threat to the mainstream, and the mainstream predictably responded by pulling up the drawbridge - whereas the mainstream embraced Betty and Felix, which probably never presented themselves as more than fun, even if they were adult.

There is one other factor. In the 20's or even early 30's we didn't (I'm kind of assuming) have a tradition of cartons being kids, which would produce the sort of 'think of the children' response which Bakshi could get after 35 years of Disney features.

Loop

[Lucky_Bob]

Thanks for the replies :D
James

[MonkeyFunk]

Halas and Batchelor's Animal Farm was considered an adult cartoon, I think. I saw a documentry showing an American newspaper with the headline "CARTOON NOT FOR KIDS".

As a side note, Osamu Tezuka's movie Cleopatra was meant for adults, and I think it came out the same year as Fritz, didn't it?

[MahouTragicQueen]

Cleopatra came out in America two years before Fritz. I just checked. Tezuka tried and adult film before that called "Arabian Nights" or something like that. I don't know if it was ever released oversees though.