Girish asks:
“Why is it that acts that would horrify us in real life instead evoke in us shameless, uncontainable joy when encountered in a cartoon?”
Girish’s post is part of the Friz Freleng Blog-A-Thon by Brian Darr at Hell On Frisco Bay.
The first person to have tried to answer Girish’s question was Aristotle in Poetics when he said (I am providing two alternative translations):
- Objects which in themselves we view with pain, we delight to contemplate when reproduced with minute fidelity: such as the forms of the most ignoble animals and of dead bodies. –sourced here. [Aug 2005]
- for we enjoy looking at accurate likenesses of things which are themselves painful to see, obscene beasts, for instance, and corpses. –sourced here. [Aug 2005]
More on Freleng:
Isadore “Friz” Freleng (1906–1995) was an animator, cartoonist, director, and producer best known for his work on the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series of cartoons from Warner Bros. He introduced and/or developed several of the studio’s biggest stars, including Porky Pig, Tweety Bird, Sylvester the cat, Yosemite Sam (to whom he was said to bear more than a passing resemblance) and Speedy Gonzales. He was a contemporary of the better known Tex Avery.
The theme of this post reminds me of an article at Wikipedia, called cartoon physics and maybe by analogy there is also such a thing as cartoon psychology, in other words the psychological realism (and here and here) of Hollywood?