The urban cartoon
C.B. : We have talked about the fact that there is a collective imaginary of the built space, of the mythical zone, which we would identify and recover. This collective imaginary would contain some recurrent images such as: the palace, the castle, the grandmother’s house, the witch’s hut, the fireplace…
M.S. : The journey, the road…
I.P. : Well, but all these are no longer to be found in the latest cartoons.
M.S. : Yes, they are, they always are.
C.B.: But it is true that the newer cartoons, of Cow&Chicken type are more urban.
C.G. : Cow&Chicken is in fact the typical American family. It resumes the type of the film in which the American worker stays at home and watches TV; it is a kind of bringing back to Al Bundy, if you like.
C.B. : Which is a new mythology…
I.P. : For children this time.
C.B. : The American teenager’s bedroom comes along, as in Cow&Chicken and Dexter. It is an interior which appears in an endless series of films. I can not imagine that all American teenagers
live in the same conditions, as we do in our block of flats; that everything is standard. The cartoon has the power to extract the common image and to promote it because it needs that common place, it needs the very essence of the castle or bedroom in which any child could recognize his/her own. It functions as a filter
I.P.: I very much agree with you. I said that the themes which appear or come back are very different from the castle, the grandmother or if they are in question, it is a complete new connection.
C.B. : I think that the myths are being recreated now. They are urban myths, they have a very important urban component.
The Castle
C.B. : We can try to see which is the vocabulary, which are the recurrent images and where they come from: filiations, migrations. Part of them come from fairy tales, part of them from reality, maybe from films, too. As meeting place is quite interesting, due to this extraordinary capacity of abstracting(things). Are the images conceptualized ? They work directly with the concept of the bedroom, not with the bedroom as such.
C.G.: They reduce it to essence or to some very specific signs, as in the case of the castle. For instance the gate appears. Radu Negulescu noticed that the gate is invisible in reality, it must be hidden. In cartoons it appears as a sign of qualifying accentuation for the castle. So do the battlements and so on; one works by reducing to essence. “One does no longer operate with the elements of a multitude, but with the multitudes themselves.
I.P.: I would call them abridgements of communication. In a communication with a man you’ve just met, you have to launch a quite long chain of messages in order to introduce yourself or to find out something about him/her. Everything is done step by step. But when there are some codes, the fairy tale codes begin to disappear and the urban ones take their place and launch some abridgements to you. You do not address any longer as in a discourse. All you need is to use a code in order to say what you want.
G.H.: I also think you are right, especially that it has to do with the idea of speed. You don’t have time to communicate, to form a chain. So you resort to certain signs which shorten your road a lot. And, as you address a common sensibility- children or a determined category- you have to choose, not to conceptualize, you have to communicate fast and easy, especially when it comes to castle and this kind of things which are usually used as background. They mustn’t become too obvious by all means.
I.P. : I think that this kind of message has, at least now, both an advantage and a disadvantage. The latter would be that you don’t have the time to refine it very much.
G.H. : It depends on what you want to convey. The code as such is subdued to communication. <Communication> with or without inverted commas. I mean the image, the drawing, and so on, are, or at least I think so, subdued to the subject, to the events; and of course the style plays an important role. As you have said that they are ugly. This feature belongs to the character: this guy with the glasses is ugly and has a complex. It matters a lot for his definition as a character.
I.P. : I meant something else: if you work with a castle, then the castle itself is no longer in question. You have no time to put questions about it. That would be a loss, the fact that you don’t refine, you don’t any longer call the code into question. The gain would be , let’s say so, the ability to skip among codes very easily. You don’t operate any longer with the elements of a multitude, but you operate with multitudes. You don’t operate any longer with the detail of a castle window, but you operate with the castle and the laboratory which are multitudes of signification, not only one signification. ? It is a global image which includes many, many details.
“the exception to the inhabiting norm”
G.H. : It is interesting what we tangentially touched: the problem is whether these things are really recurrent. If we go beyond a stage and enter the next , the urbanizing one , a specifically urban message, isn’t the recurrence somehow put in danger ? Won’t one somehow give up the castle? Or, are they simply so integrated in our being that they will also persist under the conditions of an urban landscape?
C.B. : This issue will be answered in the next time topic which is called: luxury. The castle is obviously something eternal, it is something that won’t disappear.
G.H. : Can you say that about us which are a people with still strong rural connections? Even if we want it or not, the castle, the mountain and the forest have powerful echoes. If I were a guy who has lived for three or four generations in town, would I still see the things in the same way?
C.B. : I think so. Looking at the biggest house in town, we can see the castle, the exception to the inhabiting norm. It will always exist something like that.
G.H. : Now we are referring to dimensions!
C.G. : Mihai suggested me something some time ago: the castle is an illusion. The castle subsists as an illusion of an own occultation, by grandeur, by force, expressed in front of the rest of the world. So, you need to live in an infinite space. When you say <castle> all you can see is something big, something which has a lot of rooms where you can get lost and where you know there is a very sophisticate ritual going on, by which you detach yourself from the others. This ritual is surrounded by a sort of fog which hides you; there is a distance between you and the world.
C.B. : And the hut which is at the opposite pole. It is minimal, it’s a mere gathering.
M.S. : Finally it’s a way of living. It’s seclusion, whether is castle, or hut, or town hall or else The Doges’ Palace , etc. There is an inborn need in the human being to detach from his/her group, when he/she surpasses his/her fear.
C.G. : There is, at one pole, Ceauºescu who walks in his sleep in his castle, and , at the opposite pole there is the Kafkian character who knows that the castle is somewhere.
M.S. : These are the two sides of the same idea.
G.H. :Now my question is whether the castle will not be replaced with a skyscraper.
M.S. : That is just what I am telling you: it doesn’t matter.
G.H. : For us it doesn’t matter whether it’s a castle or a skyscraper; what does matter is the fact that it connotes an affective content, it contains a need, an illusion.
A.C. : The castle is always placed on the top of a hill or a peak, and in all cartoons representations it is put on the top of a cliff, with a lot of space around it; you can reach it following a winding road.
C.B. : This is the castle come by German channel, it is the image of an architecture coming from Romanesque and refined in the Romantic, eclectic period. Why was this successful? We don’t know exactly.
M.S. : Because it is a myth of Europe.
I.P. : I was wondering whether this kind of symbols we’ve been used to and we are still referring to are substantially changing now. I mean this thing with the castle, Snow-White and the seven dwarfs has something hospitable and nice, it is full of a lot of nice things. It leaves you space of contemplation, refuge or illusion, compared to the present cartoons which move on multiple surfaces, without allowing you to breathe, to draw back or to fantasize. You don’t have the space any more.
A.C. : I have the feeling that precisely that blurring leaves space for illusion; I am thinking of the children of that time cartoons and those of nowadays ones. I would put this Cow&Chicken series of cartoons under the sign of an exposed truth. Yes! The children play, gambol, trundle and do all kind of things…
I.P. :It is a story about pragmatism.
C.B. : It is also about fundamental things: death, happiness, love.
M.J. : Maybe that’s the way nowadays stories should look like.
C.B. : I think that the symbols and the old stories don’t disappear, they suffer both an attack and enrichment. Many things appear and superpose on those fundamental things. The story about murder and love is kept, about the love Cow would wish. Maybe he/she reaches it more slowly and it takes place in a garbage bin, but the essential is still there: the need for happiness, the fear of death…
C.G. : I think that the fundamental symbolical repertory changes.
I.P. : What does essential mean? The essential erodes and even if I agreed with you, I would say that this enrichment supposes an equally rapid erosion. Fantastically rapid changes are taking place; in the way to render the symbols, in the way of drawing, in the thematic register.
M.S. : I didn’t understand until now; what does fundamental change in symbolism mean ? Is it a change of the symbolic register? What does “fundamental” mean? Because in the symbolic register the passage from a thing to its opposite is perfectly coherent and meaningful and so on. I mean, I don’t see as a major change in the symbolic register the fact that before there were nice cartoons and now there are ugly ones.
C.G. : Society has other values and they are very well reflected in cartoons. I was thinking that there would be a difference in the fact that the new cartoons are very much inspired from daily life, but I remembered Perrin who described a real story; how his grandpa died and was covered with earth, etc. I think we are confronting with another society and with another receiver.
M.J. : The receiver is more important. In Dexter’s case, the receiver is identified with the child himself who, raised with computer, wishes a laboratory. Bugs Bunny and the others had a very specific receiver. I’ve always thought it is very specific. For example in that one “What’s up doc?” you was amused, but if you didn’t know too much about Wagner, you missed a lot of things. This sort of cartoon has a privileged receiver. A target public very well defined.| index | top | sumar | | @ |
