[Recording Start]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: Why are cartoons smoking like that?
Rick Rosner: Okay, so a question I’d want to start with is why are cartoons legible to us because when we look at the world we look at things in all their details as you know a person is a person. When you’re looking at a person from close enough to see most of the details of that person, you understand you’re looking at somebody, you understand you’re looking at a car or a building because you’re seeing them fully as part of the world. So then you have to ask why are cartoons legible because they don’t have much detail, they’re just abstractions and the answer has to be that our brain in order to understand stuff breaks information down into meta units or abstractions that are easier to deal with informationally in the brain.
When I when I took LSD in college it fucked up my brain’s ability to do the processing that it normally does on human faces and the faces hit my mind only semi-processed and they looked weird and polygonal and lizard-y. These half processed faces looked fucked up and it did freak me out a little bit but I also understood that my brain was fucked up so I didn’t freak out that badly. I just wanted the LSD to be over. Don’t take LSD, it lasts way too long and sometimes they cut it with shit and anyway… don’t. If you need to have a psychedelic experience just to do mushrooms, they last much less well; it’s a much shorter trip. So the faces we see, that we normally perceive or the process or the product of much processing in our brains and there’s a lot of smoothing I think.
I think that it’s a problem in video games too. The most efficient way to render curved shapes but anyway the brain is turning raw sensory data into abstractions in various categories as it assembles the raw sensory data into discernible phases and because our thinking is built from abstract shorthand symbols, we don’t perceive the symbols as symbols but when you take raw sensory perception of a face and break it down there is, I guess let’s not use symbols, it’s just you’re dealing in abstractions that are reassembled so we have a kind of a tacit understanding of what human faces are like but it’s built from simplifications. The whole thing allows… I’m not talking about it or thinking about it well, but it allows the way we process information, the way any system basically that actually understands stuff consciously I guess is going to deal in shorthand abstractions and that lets us perceive cartoons. The cartoons kind of ride in on the way we’ve learned to process stuff.
You could make a similar argument by saying well we know like your brother or your wife from two feet away but you also might be able to recognize them from a hundred feet away even though you can barely see their individual facial features just because there’s something about maybe the way they walk or the way the light strikes their hair; you’ve got this catalog of potential hits in your brain that if that person a hundred feet or 100 yards away hits a couple of these short-handed abridgements or divots in the landscape, a landscape of perceiving your wife or brother, if enough balls drop into enough divots of the thousands you might have if you’ve been married for 10 years, maybe you get three balls in holes in this landscape and it says yeah that’s probably your wife. So, a cartoon can drop enough balls into our landscape of what a human is that we can appreciate the cartoon as a representation of a human and anthropomorphic cow or whatever.
One of the things that annoy me about cartoons and a lot of graphic novels is the shittiness of the art and/or the ugliness; The Ren & Stimpy-ness of the creatures, the grotesquery. When I look at cartoons I want to look at stuff that’s appealing. In cartoons I kind of like sexy lady cartoons and that’s kind of the opposite of a Ren & Stimpy cartoon because Ren & Stimpy are fucking ugly and part of the joke is how ugly they can get. A part of the joke of cartoons is how exaggerated you could make representations of things in the world and still have enough balls rolling to divots of recognition that you understand what is being represented in increasingly grotesque and goofy ways. So, why do we like looking at cartoons? Because cartoons can give a supercharged and let’s say for the sake of this discussion that I’ve seen some cartoon pornography and that I like it because when you’re working at it you could come up with images that might drop balls into the holes of what makes you or me horny even more effectively than images of real people.
We’ve talked about how the filthier the porn, the on average the less attractive the people in the porn because if somebody can be a supermodel they’re not going to do porn. They’re going to earn like Gisele Bündchen; Tom Brady’s wife makes more money or used to at least make more money than Tom Brady did. Tom Brady the greatest pro quarterback in history and his wife is bringing home hundreds of millions of dollars being perceived to be one of the most beautiful women in the world. She’s not going to do porn; she doesn’t have to do porn. And then as you move down the porn ladder from Playboy Centerfolds where a sufficiently beautiful Playboy model might just show her boobs and butt, wouldn’t even have to go full frontal and then you move down the ladder, people who do anal and that whole pecking order has been messed with in recent years because porn is less shameful than it used to be.
The deal is that with porn there’s still images of people in all their imperfections but if you’re going to draw your porn, if you’re going to make cartoon porn or the stuff that’s called 3D porn which is just images of people who’ve made it out of The Uncanny Valley. The Uncanny Valley is now a 30-40 year old term for how creepy people look in computer animation. There was the Tom Hanks movie Polar Express from 25 years ago where the people looked close enough to human, they looked fairly realistic but still fucked up enough that they looked like creepy humans. Now we’re beyond that. CG animated humans can look hyper real and not creepy. 3D porn makes hyper real porno images of people and somebody who’s willing to put in the time can make people look as beautiful as you want.
And so they’ve escaped the porno pecking order of the things you do, the more likely you are to be not Gisele Bündchen because you’re doing entirely made up people. And how good they look just depends on how good your tech is and how much time you’re willing to put in. So you can get images in this 3D porn that is super powerful for people who like animated porno. It’s more powerful than images of real people because it goes right to the heart of what might make you horny if it’s you know flawless skin, facial symmetry, muscle tone, I don’t know… somebody might be into big boobs on somebody who otherwise has eight percent body fat. Animation can do that.
Similarly for non-porn uses you can get animation to do whatever you want. One of the problems with science fiction movies until Star Wars was that there was no way to make it look real enough. Everything sucked. Either you had to do science fiction stories that didn’t involve… Star Wars was the first movie that had realistic looking fights in space among spaceships. When they made Star Wars, the original one – ’77, they looked at footage of dog fights for movies from the past 60 years of movies and then just moved the dog fights into space and made it look good via high tech and before that you had shit that was fucking plastic models on strings being whipped around and it looked like shit.
Well, I mean then we’re splitting into two issues which is why do we like cartoons. Well, one reason is I just talked at length about is you can make a shit look amazing but the question you’re asking is what about shit that doesn’t look amazing, shit that looks half-assed or obviously a cartoon; why do we like that? The answer is still it gives us what we want, it drops enough balls into the landscape of recognition of what’s funny, what’s absurd that it hits enough targets of what we like and what’s legible to us that we like it.
[Recording End]
Authors
Rick Rosner
American Television Writer
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
In-Sight Publishing
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Rick Rosner 