![]() ![]() It had been years since I’d read them, but now I saw them everywhere. In a country obsessed with highbrow culture and intellectualism, comics had earned a place of prestige. Among the earliest cultural surprises was the fact that most students still read comics- les bandes dessinnées, or BDs-without any sense of embarrassment. If animation really was juvenile, I’d happily dive into literature to prove my maturity.Ī few years later, I was studying abroad in France as a sixteen-year-old who only spoke basic French. I decided teenagerhood was an opportunity to prioritize my love of reading. It was easier to give up on TV altogether than fight for after-school anime privileges, or seek out bootlegged copies of Atlantis. If my parents happened to catch my brother and I watching Pokémon or Yu-Gi-Oh, there often came the reprimand: “You’re too old for this.” Even though I had a younger brother, our boxes of VHS animated movies gradually disappeared, donated to our toddler cousins. At home, the situation was similarly dire. But the popular students now watched live-action shows like Lizzie McGuire and The Real World. It was still socially acceptable to like newer CGI stuff, like Shrek, with its pop-music soundtrack and famous cast. Even my ultra-religious aunt, when we visited her house, resorted to saccharine animated stories of the saints to keep us occupied.īut around sixth grade, the year I got braces and became editor of my Catholic school newspaper, it became evident that cartoons-especially hand-drawn animation-were only for kids. Comic-strip characters like Snoopy leaped from newspaper to screen. Elsewhere, commercials featured cereal-box mascots with their own jingles. On certain special days in elementary school, teachers would wheel in a boxy TV and play episodes of Schoolhouse Rock in lieu of a lesson. ![]() Is any art form tied to childhood more tightly than cartoons? Even in my family, where TV was strictly limited and my parents eschewed cable until I was in high school, I managed to absorb the zaniness of the Animaniacs and memorize most of the songs in Aladdin and The Lion King. ![]()
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