Granted, humorous cartooning is not supposed to be lifelike or sophisticated. But the current trend of what I call “grunge” cartooning seems to have begun in 1989, when the cable television channel Nickelodeon (now part of the Viacom empire) started producing its own animated programs. Not long after the debut of Rugrats and Ren & Stimpy on Nickelodeon, TBS countered with 2 Stupid Dogs and Disney produced the un-Disneylike Shnookums & Meat. Over 15 years later, Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network have more original programs than acquired programs, and they are so similar in visual style as to require another esthetic offense: static logos in the corner of the television screen. I have even seen cartoons of the grunge style on Sesame Street, so preschoolers are very likely being taught to accept ugly drawings as part of learning the alphabet and numbers.
Print cartoonists seem to have followed the example of television animators. Even those comic strips with generous lead times, such as Garfield, are offensive not in being poorly drawn, but in recycling a limited number of gags with little, if any, character development. Editorial cartoons can be the ugliest of all, being drawn on a week-to-week basis in response to current events, usually political in nature. If your daily newspaper carries editorial cartoons from the Newspaper Enterprise Association, as The Brookings Register does, you may have been revolted by the work of Drew Litton, Ed Stein and especially Jerry Holbert. I do not know, however, which would be more tolerable in cartoons, whether animated or in print: attractive visuals with poor writing, or masterly writing with horrid visuals. By far the worst esthetic offense any print cartoonist or animator can commit, in my opinion, is the omission of an attractive feminine face. Blondie Bumstead, for instance, appears so infrequently in her own comic strip that it is a potential violation of truth-in-labeling laws.
All this may be due not only to practical constraints on both print cartoonists and animators, but also to the widespread but mistaken notion that the only purpose of comics and animated cartoons is to entertain children (see this Toon Zone article). Yet for adult animation we have the likes of South Park and Family Guy, neither of which I consider esthetically appealing. Even CGI animation has its turkeys, as demonstrated by the feature films Shark Tale and Ice Age (did the latter really need a sequel?).
The current trend of translating TV cartoons to feature films, whether they stay animated or are converted to live action, cannot compare to Hey There, It’s Yogi Bear! or The Man Called Flintstone. This is most likely due to consolidation within the media, as at present the bulk of U.S. media products come from only seven companies: Bertelsmann AG, Walt Disney Studios, NBC Universal, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., Sony Pictures, Time Warner and Viacom. I have revised my Animated Black Family Sitcom (ABFS) project in the hope of distinguishing it from Disney’s The Proud Family, Nickelodeon’s Fatherhood and Cartoon Network’s The Boondocks.