I was scrolling through responses to a WordPress prompt when I read a sentence that stopped me cold:
Cartoons aren’t good at nuance.
I’m sorry. What?
I kept scrolling, but the sentence came with me. I wasn’t interested in arguing with the person who wrote it. People have opinions, and the internet has supplied us with enough opportunities to tell strangers they’re wrong. I was interested in the idea itself, because it seemed to be carrying several other ideas around in its coat pockets.
That animation is for children. That stories for children are simple. That a bright color means a shallow thought. That if a character doesn’t explain an emotion in grown-up words, the story can’t possibly be saying anything complicated.
We may need to unpack the coat.
Animation is a medium. It’s a way to make a story, not a promise about what kind of story you’re getting. A camera can film a children’s comedy, a war movie, or a documentary. Nobody watches one silly live-action film and concludes that cameras aren’t good at nuance. Yet people will look at drawings and confidently announce that the whole form has a limit.
I suspect part of the trouble is that we’ve confused looking serious with being serious. We know what a profound story is supposed to wear. Muted colors. Grave expressions. Perhaps a long pause while someone stares out a rain-streaked window.
If it has a talking animal, we’re suspicious.
But let’s not even begin with animation made for adults. We can go back to movies made for children and see whether the argument survives contact with a baby deer.
In Bambi, his mother dies. The film doesn’t need to show us her death to make us feel it. Bambi calls for her. He searches. She doesn’t answer.
The absence does the work.
A child watching can understand that something terrible has happened. An adult may also see the fear, the abrupt end of safety, and the terrible fact that the world keeps moving when yours has stopped. The scene doesn’t pause so someone can explain the layers. It trusts us to feel them.
That trust is part of the nuance.
Dumbo gives us a baby whose ears make him a target. He is mocked and put on display. His mother protects him, and they are separated. Then she reaches through the bars to hold him with her trunk.
She rocks her baby.
I could write several paragraphs about maternal separation, social rejection, exploitation, and what happens when a child’s difference becomes everybody else’s entertainment. The film gives us a mother who can barely reach her son. We understand more than anyone could usefully say in that moment.
Imagine someone standing beside the cage announcing, “Dumbo is experiencing the complicated emotional consequences of social rejection and separation from his primary caregiver.”
I would like that person removed from the cage area.
Sometimes explanation makes a scene less nuanced. It takes a feeling that has several meanings and pins a label to one of them. The audience no longer gets to notice, remember, or bring its own experience into the space the story left open.
That doesn’t mean dialogue is bad. Dialogue can be brilliant. It can complicate what we see, reveal what a character refuses to admit, or give us a sentence that changes our understanding of everything before it. The point is that words aren’t the only way to do any of that.
Nuance isn’t how many complicated words your characters say. It’s how much meaning a story can hold without having to explain every bit of that meaning to the audience.
And now, since the deer and the elephant have made their case, I’d like to call a house with balloons attached.
The opening sequence of Up introduces Carl and Ellie. They meet, fall in love, marry, make a home, and dream of going to Paradise Falls. They face the heartbreak of not having children. They keep living together. They save for the trip, and ordinary life keeps finding uses for the money. They grow old. Ellie dies.
Almost all of this arrives through images and music, with virtually no dialogue.
I have watched that sequence knowing what happens, and it still gets me. But the sadness isn’t all that’s there. Carl and Ellie’s dream doesn’t come true in the way they planned. They also build a life full of love. Both things are true.
Carl is grieving Ellie, but he’s also carrying the belief that he failed her. He sees the trip they never took. We have seen the years they did share. Later, the film returns to Ellie’s scrapbook and asks Carl to look again at what their adventure was. Something we already saw takes on another meaning.
That’s nuance. A story gives us enough to understand one thing while its character believes another. It lets us hold disappointment and gratitude together. It asks whether a dream deferred makes a life wasted, and it gives us room to arrive at an answer before Carl does.
Children were among the people invited to watch that movie. The filmmakers trusted them with infertility, aging, financial setbacks, partnership, death, regret, and the possibility that an ordinary shared life can be an extraordinary adventure.
With pictures.
And music.
But please, tell me again how cartoons aren’t good at nuance.
If we need more witnesses, they’re waiting outside. Studio Ghibli can bring entire worlds through the door, worlds where wonder sits beside fear, kindness beside danger, and growing up has little to do with someone giving you a lecture about maturity. WALL-E spends long stretches letting movement and silence tell us about loneliness, attachment, and a planet we’ve failed to care for. Inside Out gives feelings characters and then shows that feelings don’t stay conveniently in their assigned boxes.
And if someone’s objection is that these are still stories for children, BoJack Horseman would like a word. Animation has never been restricted to children simply because some animated stories welcome them.
But I don’t think a list of titles is enough. The more interesting question is why we keep asking certain kinds of art to prove they are serious before we will take them seriously.
Bright colors? Childish.
Fantasy? Escapism.
Comedy? Less important than drama.
A story you can share with a child? Surely it can’t have much to say to an adult.
Who decided that? And why have we kept their rules?
A child’s story can offer a child one understanding and an adult another. Sometimes the adult’s understanding changes with age. You return to a movie you loved when you were small and find yourself worrying about the mother instead of the child, or recognizing a grief you didn’t have a name for before. The movie didn’t suddenly grow more complex. You brought more life back to it.
That’s one of the pleasures of art that makes room for us. It can meet us more than once.
A funny story can do the same. Laughter doesn’t cancel pain. In the right hands, it lets us get close enough to something painful to talk about it. Fantasy can give shape to a fear that’s hard to describe in everyday language. A drawing can show us what a face tries to hide. A pause can ask a question the writer wisely declines to answer for us.
Depth doesn’t require solemnity.
I think about that a lot now that I’ve opened Sunstone Grove. There are coloring books here. Crystals. Cauldrons. Colored pens. Dogs with legal representation provided by an enthusiastic five-year-old. I might talk about mental health in one essay and pizza toppings in the next. You can sit down for a conversation about grief and find yourself laughing before the coffee gets cold.
None of that means the grief was pretend. The laugh isn’t evidence that I forgot what we were talking about. It means there’s room on the porch for more than one true thing at a time.
I know what it’s like to wonder whether people will take you seriously. For years I had things to say and hesitated to make a place where other people could hear them. I worried they wouldn’t like what I made. I worried I’d be too much of one thing and not enough of another.
Too funny for the hard subjects. Too irreverent for the earnest ones. Too fond of strange things to be considered sensible.
I’m less willing to let those worries choose my work now. The essay can be funny and pointed. The image can be lovely. A coloring page can offer somebody a quiet hour. A ridiculous dog story can open a door to a real conversation about love. People are welcome to find what speaks to them.
I don’t need every piece to put on a gray suit and announce its importance.
Maybe that’s why the cartoon sentence bothered me. It wasn’t only about animation. It sounded like an old rule I’ve spent years trying to unlearn: if something brings you joy, looks playful, or welcomes children, it must be less capable of holding truth.
I’ve seen too much truth arrive by those routes to believe it anymore.
Nuance often lives in what a story trusts us to understand. Bambi’s mother doesn’t answer. Mrs. Jumbo rocks her baby with a trunk through the bars. Carl and Ellie make a life while saving for another one. An audience watches and brings its own memories, fears, hopes, and questions.
Nobody needs to stand beside us and explain what we’re supposed to feel.
That’s the part worth defending. Not because every cartoon is profound, or every viewer must love the same films. Plenty of animation is silly, and thank goodness for that. The form has room for silly. It also has room for devastating, tender, strange, morally complicated, and quietly wise.
So does this porch.
Cartoons aren’t good at nuance?
Come sit down. We need to talk.
Leave a Reply