When I was growing up, my favorite cartoon was “Hey Arnold!” The show focused on the titular protagonist, who lives with his grandparents in their boardinghouse, and his fourth-grade friends and the boardinghouse’s other residents. Many of the show’s characters defied common character tropes, such as Helga Pataki, the schoolyard bully who lived constantly under the shadow of her prettier and more successful older sister.
Though the show’s characters were distinctive and offbeat, at the end of every episode, misunderstandings were resolved, sickness was cured and love was never gained, as if someone always pushed the reset button back to the status quo. And as we grew up, Arnold and Helga would remain in their fourth-grade selves, never changing, never learning and never growing.
Since the end of the 1990s, however, a number of shows have broken the monotony of the episodic format as well as the dichromatic shades of racial and cultural representation. “Avatar: The Last Airbender,” released in 2005, was one of the first and most successful children’s Western animation series to feature a storyline that built upon itself for three seasons. It was also one of the first American cartoon series that adapted various Asian and Native American cultures, which either had been ignored or mediated by gross stereotypes in popular media, and displayed them as something more.
Five years later, Cartoon Network’s “Adventure Time” came on the air. The show’s primary setting — a seemingly saccharine candy kingdom set a millennia after a nuclear holocaust that wiped out most of humanity — precludes it from the most obvious forms of cultural representation found in “Avatar: The Last Airbender.” But one of the most striking things about “Adventure Time” is the range of difficult topics it explores, albeit not without humor. Unlike some of the troubles that Arnold faced, the tribulations that “Adventure Time” characters go through are sometimes real, long-lasting or permanent, like the dissolution of a relationship, an unplanned pregnancy, parental abandonment, dementia, loss of a limb or the death of a loved one.
Many members of the “Adventure Time” creative team have made their own cartoons, such as former storyboard artist Rebecca Sugar, who became the first woman to create a show for Cartoon Network with “Steven Universe.” The cartoon follows a boy and a team of intergalactic female warriors, and the show is not shy about offering visual gags of its inspirations, such as the work of Hayao Miyazaki, Final Fantasy, Legend of Zelda and Revolutionary Girl Utena. The cast of characters demonstrates a greater racial diversity than what is found in most other children’s cartoons. For instance, two of four main characters — Garnet and Amethyst — are British-African and Hispanic, and Steven’s potential romantic interest is of Indian heritage.
The genre of children’s cartoons has grown up to engender more diverse cultural representation as well as topics once considered to be too sensitive. Characters have begun to embody a more diverse racial palette, and creative teams have demonstrated that they are not afraid to tackle more weighty issues.
As the media and our cultural definition of diversity continue to develop, cartoons will more and more reflect the problems and the demographics of the viewers themselves. And although I will always fondly remember the cartoons that we grew up with — “Rocko’s Modern Life,” “Rugrats,” “The Powerpuff Girls,” et cetera — the newer lessons and characters may hopefully better prepare the youngest audience members for the variety and the vagaries of life.
