I found this show on Netflix the other day and I’m hooked - the short lived Uprising is, IMO, better than either of the Tron movies, with jaw droppingly gorgeous animation (in spite of the character design, which I’ll politely call unfortunate) and fantastically original action and fight scenes. I’m actually pretty shocked that no one seemed to be following this show back when it was still being made. Yeah, Tron is a throwback, but a good show is a good show.
But back to the point - I haven’t watched many animated kids movies in the last 15 or so years - I’m from the era when Wolverine wasn’t allowed to use his claws, and Batman beating people up was dark and edgy. In Tron, people actually get cut in half and have holes gouged in their midsections. One character is cut in half at the waist and drags himself along the ground with red glowing inners (okay, pixels, but still) spilling out onto the ground. A main character is strapped to a table and tortured by *having his eye cut out with a circular saw. *
I get that having characters that bleed little glowing red and blue cubes will let you get away with a lot more, but jeez! They still scream in pain when they die! Are all kids action cartoons like this today? Not that I’m complaining, the blunt violence is part of what I like about the show, I’m just amazed they got away with it.
ETA: You should all really check this show out, it’s awesome.
Pretty sure Road Runner/Coyote is still the most violent cartoon. That being said, The Clone Wars series was extremely violent. Of course, it did take place during a war.
This is it. As soon as you establish that your characters are not human, you can do practically anything. Witness the explosions and decapitated Foot Soldiers in the old TMNT cartoon or the way Transformers got knocked around in Transformers.
Just Googled it - yeah, that was pretty bad (along with being a phenomenally lousy Tom and Jerry rip off). Still, no one’s eye was gouged out.
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This is it. As soon as you establish that your characters are not human, you can do practically anything. Witness the explosions and decapitated Foot Soldiers in the old TMNT cartoon or the way Transformers got knocked around in Transformers.
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Weren’t the Foot Soldiers human? Did they get decapitated? I haven’t seen that show since the early 90’s. Perhaps I’m misremembering my childhood.
Weren’t they robots? Maybe I’m the one misremembering, but I thought they were made robots for the cartoon specifically to avoid violence-against-humans problems.
Robots aren’t sentient and don’t feel pain, though. The characters in TRON usually scream or cry out when they get cut open. There’s also often a reaction shot of other characters watching in horror.
That’s one of the things that always bugged me as a kid, too. I mean, aside from the censorship or the nerfed violence, which I found eyerolling even back then, but the “it’s okay to hurt them, they aren’t ‘human’” attitude—even on the occasions when the robots were demonstrably thinking, sentient beings.
Maybe it’s because I was more into science fiction than usual, or the hugely non-religious upbringing, or me just being weird…but I couldn’t help but marvel at it, a bit aghast. “Well…yeah, Bob the Killbot isn’t a ‘human,’ but that doesn’t mean he’s not a person. What’s the big difference between the hero and him? That his brain isn’t made of meat?”
Y’know, I was always fine with them using catastrophic violence against the bad guys because they were the enemy, but…just because of what they were? It seems more than a bit racist. Or specist. 'Always left a bad taste in my mouth.
Oddly enough, it was the supervillain groups that often seemed more fundamentally egalitarian…everyone was expendable scum, except for the most vicious people who bashed their way to positions of power. Who might in fact be robots themselves.
That was actually kind of the point I was making - it doesn’t mater if the characters are human, it only matters if they act human, and the characters in TRON are as close as a character can get without actually being human. They look human, act human, have friendships and romantic relationships, and most importantly to my point, scream and panic when they’re injured. The Foot Soldiers from TMNT, to my knowledge, fit almost none of those thing. The Transformers fit at least most of them, IIRC.
You may call it Fantastic Racism, but the closer a character is to human (or to an organic form that humans care for, like Tom the cat, or Brutus the dog), the more violent it seems when they are harmed. How closely we can imagine or relate to the violence matters too - for example, it’s hard to relate to a laser gun shooting the metal frame of a Transformer. It doesn’t exactly make you flinch. Now, picture a circular saw cutting through a person’s face while they whimper in pain. A little easier to relate to, no?
Actually, in TRON, it’s the reverse of that. - the villains are trying to perform an act of genocide on the Isos because they’re “unnatural - they weren’t written, they serve no purpose,” while Tron wants the grid to be free for everyone. The other hero, his eventual successor, Beck, doesn’t seem to care one way or another about Isos or their freedom. He just wants to end the totalitarian rule in his city.
For me it was Star Blazers. Whole ships and crews destroyed, planet bombs wiping out cities, and it even had a suicide in one episode (when they captured and released that enemy pilot).
