Sunday, October 08, 2006

Age of 'Innocence'



According to me as a child, there are only two things that satisfy the confused little soul – Chocolates and Cartoons. If there is not enough of one then there is always another to get hyped up with. I remember my Sunday mornings being filled with Spiderman, Tom & Jerry and He-Man features.

As a child if there was one safe place for me that was not my house, it was those incomplete and geometrically impossible landscapes of these cartoon worlds. The neatly decorated house where Tom would mercilessly chase little Jerry around in was a personal favorite. The well painted and spotless roads of Disney would be an immediate treat. I always wanted to live in that place with those characters. I also loved the fact that even if Donald Duck walked off a cliff he would still land safely back on earth with nothing much than a funny bruise. I also liked it when Jerry would bang Tom with everything from hammers, tree trunks, large metal balls or chainsaws and yet Tom would be fit and fine immediately! Yes. There was no death in those worlds, I thought.

But as an adult this feel fades away at some point. You continue enjoy watching them but no longer wish to be part of that world. This probably because you have realized they are all fake and that the reality you live in seems more soothing. With this realization comes another one. These 'cartoon representations' of life are so violent! I mean, can you really imagine chasing someone down the road with a lit bomb, catching up with him, opening his mouth and shoving it down his throat! Can you expect him to get a smoke out of his hair and faint clumsily as a result! I don't think so. While there is a good chance you might kill yourself in the process, the gallows is also a neat option that you have. I realized that there was no way reality can ever imitate what is shown in the cartoons. The other thing I also realized is these might be a good reason why kids these days are so violent. With time the amount of hate crime shown in these 'innocent' animations have only grown darker and scarier. Take the harmless seeming 'Happy Tree Friends' as an example. These innocent seeming creatures find the worse way to die at the end of each "chapter". Death, as it seems, is no longer a subtle option. It is a definite one.

But again, I might be wrong. With such meaningless action shown maybe we are grooming the innocent mind to mature faster than it should. Nevertheless, this is something to think about the next time you see Goofy dive into a waterless pool and crack his body into a hundred pieces.

--ShaKri

3 reflections:

mouna said...

probably, what u say is true. when we have kids falling from the second floor, hoping that shaktiman would save them. the thought by itself seems foolish, at the same time, they should be made to realise, that these are a part of fiction, created to simply provide entertainment.

another similar factor might be the playstations, which is the chant of today's upmarket kid.

apart from this, it may also harm the creativeness of a person.

ShaK said...

Thanks for opining mouna. Indeed. There is something quite off with these innocent seeming animatons. Something to think about.

Anonymous said...

hiiiiii ,i really liked ur way of treating the matter. cartoons and reality ,both working togather to mature the innocent mind of a child. Death ,the only Truth that ends everything and cartoons the only fiction that starts the journey of a child to this hell called............earth.

 
;