What makes animation so special?
Is it the elegant simplicity? The bright colors?
The creative freedom to show impossible feats
and alien creatures?
That could be a part of it, but it doesn’t
explain why so many animated films
are simply down-to-Earth character dramas.
We now have live-action movies that show impossible
things with a blend of hyper-realistic CGI,
and while the popularity of 3D animation has
definitely overtaken traditional 2D drawings,
the fact is animated films are still around
and they aren’t all trying to look real.
The clue, I think, to this intangible specialness
is the association of animation and youth.
Before we’re beaten into conformist shape
by an uncaring machine that prohibits fun,
the simplicity of a cartoon frame stimulates
our minds by leaving the rest to imagination.
When a robot, alien, and you all appear equally
real,
it empowers you to empathize with those unlike
yourself.
If science fiction is the domain of allegories
that reflect on social issues,
then animation is the accessible children’s
version of those allegories.
So that’s where we’re going to start.
First on the agenda: Futurama.
“Insane In the Mainframe” is a 2001 episode
of the sci-fi satire Futurama.
Season three (3), episode twelve (12).
In this episode, the transplanted-from-the-past
Philip Fry and his robot friend Bender
get caught up in a bank robbery orchestrated
by the craaazy knife-lovin’ Roberto.
Fry and Bender get tried in criminal court
and found guilty of being insane.
Bender is sent to a psychiatric prison for
robots, and Fry also goes to the same robot prison
Judge Whitey: "Mr. Fry, I sentence you to
the Home for Criminally Insane Humans."
Bailiff: "Your Honor, that facility has been
full ever since you ruled that being poor
is a mental illness."
Whitey:"Just send them both to the robot loony
bin and let's go."
This is the turning point for the episode’s
main story, or “the A plot” if you’re
into screenwriter lingo:
Fry’s experience as a human in a robot prison.
It’s also where the cracks start to show
in this insightful social commentary.
You see, Futurama has a tendency to flirt
with social issues,
but then abandon them for the sake of the
episode’s future gag or for a cheap one-liner.
The recurring example is the sewer mutants:
The sewers are the slums and their inhabitants
the oppressed lower class,
yet all the jokes including those from the
mutants’ perspectives are about how ugly they are.
In this episode, we find a backdrop of social
commentary in the prison, and the abuses it
commits against Fry.
Visual gags make reference to strip search,
lobotomy, and electroconvulsive therapy,
but that’s all they are: little inconsequential
jokes tossed in by the animator.
There’s a very overt reference to “One
Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, a robot
Nurse Ratchet,
who does one thing and is of no consequence
thereafter.
Bender plays somewhat of a McMurphy role,
having fun with his personas and acting mad
on purpose.
Fry on the other hand insists that he doesn’t
belong there, leading to the best line of
the episode:
Dr. Perceptron: “You were admitted to this
robot asylum. Therefore, you must be a robot.”
That humorous construction of absurd troll
logic is also uncomfortably true to real life:
No one in a psychiatric prison really gets
any evaluation of… anything.
You happen to be here, therefore you belong
here.
At the same time, it kind of misses the point.
There shouldn’t be any score you could get
on a test that makes your existence illegal.
Yet Futurama seems more interested in falling
right in line with the mainstream perspective
that some people deserve it.
Among those framed as falsely convicted, we
have:
Norm, who is right about picking up radio
transmissions from the CIA
and shouldn’t be deemed mad because he’s
right.
Frankie, who is right about being a lunch
worker
and shouldn’t be deemed mad because he’s
right.
And Fry, who is right about himself being
human
and shouldn’t be deemed mad because he’s
right.
Hey, did we forget about the part where Fry
is not only innocent of being a robot, but
also of the crime he was originally tried
for?
Rather than leaning into the dark comedy of
institution life, the writers pull their punches.
They undercut any moral by focusing on the
error that a human was sent to a robot asylum,
as if sending Fry to a psychiatric prison
for humans would be just fine and dandy?
Y’know it’s kinda like in real life when
a trans woman gets put in a male prison
and instead of saying anything about confinement,
restraint, seclusion, forced drugging, strip
searches, electroshock,
the solution that liberals jump to is
“Hey! You should restrain seclude drug strip
and shock her in a women’s prison!”
Problem solved.
I do appreciate seeing that, much like in
Cuckoo’s Nest,
it is the experience of the mental health
system that actually drives our prisoner mad.
I just wish I could see a character already
hearing voices
or having big moods, or actually being multiple
characters,
and still getting by just fine until psychiatry
intervenes.
Roberto does not scratch that itch.
He’s contrasted with Fry and Bender as being
actually insane.
He’s one of the violent ones, who inevitably
end up as farcical caricatures,
not because it’s a comedy show, but because
there is no real life counterpart to base them on
Presumably we’re supposed to accept violent
madbot Roberto
as justification for why societies need psychiatric
prisons,
despite the writer admitting just a minute
ago
that those prisons commit atrocities against
their prisoners
and really have nothing to do with rehabilitation,
any more than mainstream prisons do.
Roberto ends up Fry’s convenient new cellmate,
but not a moment too soon
Fry jumps through a time portal in the commercial
break and is released,
having been “cured” of his “delusions
of humanity.”
Once again we have an opportunity to lean
into dark comedy,
by addressing Fry’s post-traumatic stress.
We could have seen a joke about a box of donuts
frightening him by resembling the medication discs,
or an awkward logistic puzzle sending him
and Bender on a delivery mission when he can’t
be around robots any more,
all the while Bender accuses him of being
robo-racist.
Instead, none of those things happen.
Instead the only thing wrong with Fry is that
he thinks he’s a robot,
and the butt of every joke is that he tries
to do robot things
but is too weak and stupid because he’s
Fry.
There’s a bit of a “have cake and eat
it too” problem going on here.
Let me illustrate by example.
A microcosm of it can be found in the same
episode:
The professor makes a sexist joke, and Amy
slaps him for it.
It’s easy to imagine how this may have played
out in the writer’s room…
Writer: “Dude, what if Leela says that thing
about being a woman,
and then someone tells her to do his laundry?”
Second writer: “Aw yeah that’s so funny,
but wait, isn’t that really sexist?
And won’t people think WE’RE sexist for
putting that in?”
First writer again:“Nah bruh,
we’ll just have another character slap him
for saying it.”
The problem here is, okay, you lampshaded
the comment, but it was still commented.
Someone had to write it, hand it to the voice
actor, and keep it in the final cut.
We know that real people did those things.
And the lampshade really feels like an afterthought.
Amy doesn’t even get a line, just an animation
and a sound effect.
There’s a real possibility that Amy being
in the shot at all
was added extremely late in the process, as
a last-minute save.
The show wants to make sexist jokes, but not
face any consequence for it.
The show wants to have a plot where characters
get arrested,
sent to a psychiatric prison, and are different
upon release,
but this light and fluffy Sunday night serial
can’t get too deep
lest the average viewer stop laughing at it,
and everything has to reset by the end of
the episode.
So Fry gets snapped out of his delusion by
a single piece of contrary evidence,
and story ends.
Roberto reveals that his violent tendencies
may be the result of childhood trauma
which is not remotely how that works, but
okay, fine, I guess robots are different
and then instead of giving him any sort of
catharsis or rehabilitation,
it turns out to be a throw-away joke line.
He literally exits the script by throwing
himself out the window.
The newer episodes kick him down even more:
Bender’s Game reveals that there’s actually
no reason for Roberto being the way he is,
he’s just programmed to be insane. He can’t
help it.
He has the robot equivalent of a biological
brain disease.
Bender, like he does in most episodes, learns
nothing.
You can almost take that as a commentary in
itself.
Maybe this show is actually self-aware.
Maybe the writers tried to do something real
but got censored.
Bender is sprinkled throughout the episode
as the willing psych patient.
He thinks of the prison around him as a vacation,
sees nothing wrong with how it’s operated,
and is blissfully unaware of the privileges
he gets by holding this view.
I like to think of Bender’s attitude here
as a stand-in for the audience,
an observation made all the more accurate
the less they realize it.
I of course didn’t realize it either because
I was like seven (7) years old when this episode came out,
and because the important satire is tucked
away in one-liners and visual gags,
while the main plot says something different.
Futurama shows us horrible practices carried
out in future prison,
and the lesson we learn from the allegory
should be “don’t imprison people.”
But it’s not.
By leaning heavily on the false conviction
trope,
our focus is directed to the fact that our main
character was misfiled,
leading to a much weaker takeaway:
“don’t send your prisoners to the wrong
prison.”
“Phineas and Ferb Get Busted” is a 2009
episode of, no surprise, Phineas and Ferb.
Season one (1), episode forty-five (45).
I didn’t quite grow up with this show.
I was in my teens when it came out and closer
to twenty (20) when I actually saw it.
Luckily, Phineas and Ferb is one of those
children’s shows
written with the knowledge that adults may
watch it too.
Except in this case it was accomplished by
being clever, interesting, and fun
rather than by making coded sex jokes.
There are lots of formulas driving this show.
In most episodes, Phineas and Ferb build or
invent some outlandish big thing,
their older brother Kevin tries to show
Yes his name is Kevin. The zebra can see his
true self, that’s why he calls him that.
Too late, it’s canon now. Protect this beautiful
trans boy
he tries to show the big thing to their mother
Linda,
but for some reason it disappears before mom arrives.
And Perry the Platypus thwarts the latest
evil scheme of Dr. Doofenshmirtz.
Phineas and Ferb also has episodes that purposely
defy the formula, and this is one of them.
Kevin brings Linda to see the big thing, and
it’s still there.
The boys are caught in the act.
In response, Linda shares some disturbingly
unhealthy attitudes
towards her children and her role in parenting them,
which I don’t think the person who wrote
the dialogue saw that way.
She offers one serious objection to the tower
being “dangerous”,
but then her main concern seems to be that
they didn’t get her permission to build it.
As if granting or denying permission isn’t
about the reasons behind it but an end-goal in itself.
She also admits to collecting her older son’s
stories
with a long-term goal to make fun of him in
a stand-up comedy routine,
and she only apologizes for it because he
was right and she was wrong.
Oh hey it’s like a motif or maybe the writers
grew up with the same cultural biases or something.
In their anger, Lawrence and Linda send the
boys away to a reformatory school,
which if you know the history of reformatories
is not actually a deceptive label.
The Tri-State Penitentiary fakeout gag turns
to be not a fakeout after all.
This is an act of paternalism, in the most
literal sense of parents exercising unjustified
legal power over their children,
and also in the psychiatric sense of committing
violence against a person,
in this case imprisonment, supposedly in the
victim’s own best interest.
Linda: “I’m sorry, but this is really
for your own good.”
P & F are of course children, somewhere between
the age of seven (7) and twelve (12),
so some degree of parental control may be
necessary.
While I will say outright that eighteen (18)
is the wrong arbitrary cutoff,
exactly how young we should shift legal power
is fuzzier and debateable.
However, the portrayal of these inventors
clearly isn’t just as naive children,
any more than secret agent Perry the Platypus
is just a pet.
So despite the artifice of character age,
the depiction of a prison bus does ring true
for captive adults as well.
The Smile Away Reform School isn’t a mental institution per se,
rather it is stylized like a criminal prison
and run by a military school drill sergeant.
This was probably to be more relatable,
on account of our culture having established
stereotypes
of how prisons and armies are supposedly run.
The parallels are not difficult to draw though:
you’re imprisoned - not allowed to leave
-
you have to follow a rigid schedule, the goal
is conformity,
any original thought is severely punished,
and all of this is allegedly for your own
good.
The episode hits a few prison and army tropes
like the pickaxes and the yelly drill sergeant,
while also finding some notes of realism that
seem as if they must have had psychiatry in mind.
Most of the prisoners look like they’re
only following the rules because their spirits
have been crushed.
The overall theme is that Phineas and Ferb
keep finding creative ways to subvert their instructions.
which reminds me of my own institution experience
copying each other’s attendance signatures
to mess with the staff.
What I found the most important commentary
was over too soon:
The boys are shown painting on canvas, but
with everyone drawing identical boring squares.
There you go, reformists. There it is. There’s
the problem with art therapy:
You can imagine a healthy expression of feelings,
but drop it in the hands of psychiatry
and they’ll ooze around it and crush it
and dole it out in meager portions
until it’s nothing more than a meaningless
series of commands,
one more compliance test in a series of millions.
Did I mention there’s waterboarding in this
episode?
Not sure how they snuck that one into a children’s
cartoon.
Anyway, Kevin hatches a plan to bust his brothers
out,
Hmm where have I seen that before?
He succeeds in the prison break, and manages
to snap them out of their programming
because, again, fun serial children’s cartoon,
no lasting trauma.
That apparently wasn’t enough though:
they had to solve the “mom knows about the
inventions” problem in order to get a full reset,
so it turns out the whole episode was a dream.
Oh hey, did you notice how I foreshadowed
that with the Inception music?
I thought it was clever. I’m sorry.
But it doesn’t end there.
In another twist, the whole thing was Perry
dreaming about Kevin dreaming-
which doesn’t even make sense like how would
Perry know about the talking zebra?
There’s so much padding at the end that
the whole prison thing winds up losing focus
in favor of wacky bait and switch gags with
no significance to the earlier plot.
Like the sudden recovery in Futurama, “Phineas
and Ferb Get Busted” pulls away
when things get too heavy.
I can’t tell if the padding is there to
stretch a twenty (20) minute story into
the full twenty-two (22),
because it also feels like emotional padding
to intentionally lesson the impact.
On reflection, I don’t know which message
is more dangerous,
that confinement in a psychiatric prison is
no big deal because it has no lasting consequence,
or that you just don’t have to worry about
it because it would never really happen.
“American Fung” is a 2015 episode of Republican
satire American Dad.
Season ten (10), episode seventeen (17).
This is the most recent episode we’re going
to cover today,
and appropriately to our theme of personal
history, the most… adult?
I hesitate to call anything from the mind
of Seth MacFarlane “mature”,
but at times it does get pretty dark, pretty
serious,
not very stylized and just presenting the
real world.
The story goes that husband-father-CIA agent
Staniel Smith
forgets his marriage anniversary with Francine,
and hatches a plan to buy himself time:
by getting her locked up in a psychiatric jail.
Bullock: “It’s a shame your wife is of
sound mind,
because if she were to be kept in a mental
institution,
it could buy you some much needed anniversary
planning time.”
Stan: “Wait a minute. We could just accuse
Francine of being crazy
and get her locked up on a seventy-two (72)
hour psych hold!”
Also, a Chinese billionaire has purchased
the show.
It’s racist and has nothing to do with the
main plot
so that’s all we’re gonna say about it!
Unlike Hal Institute or the Smile Away Reformatory,
this jail is simply titled “Fairfax county
psychiatric hospital.”
There’s no joke there.
When Stan comes to pick up Francine,
she figures out that he orchestrated the whole
thing and straight-up says “I hate you.”
Like I said, this fluffy cartoon comedy gets
pretty dark.
As in the previous two (2) examples, the jail
causes more problems than it solves.
The major difference here is that the writers
seem more interested in
rightly blaming the guy who sent her there,
who won’t acknowledge that he did anything
wrong.
The doctors almost seem reasonable by comparison.
Dr. Miller: “YOU seem to be Francine’s
trigger.”
Finally realizing his responsibility in creating
the situation (at least momentarily)
Stan vows to break Francine out.
Why does everyone think the most interesting
plot for a prison setting is to NOT be in
the prison any more??
Okay, in this case the breakout is a failure.
Stan and Francine wake up in an operating
room,
Stan gets a lobotomy, and the episode ends.
And by “ends” I mean goes back to the
Chinese billionaire stuff for another three
(3) minutes and then ends.
I think the lesson here, at least what I personally
took away from it,
is that the world tries to paint over the
bad stuff with jokes and apathy,
but the bad stuff still happened.
It’s sort of like “Cabaret” but condensed
into a twenty (20) minute cartoon.
We can decide not to focus on what happened
and pretend everything’s okay,
but that doesn’t mean we don’t remember it.
The transitions between the episode’s two
(2) plots are very abrupt
and while I don’t have any faith in the
show writers doing that with purpose,
what I got from it was a theme of distraction.
Every time the mental health stuff gets a
little too real,
we pull back to a joke about product placement
or some diet racism.
Yeah, there’s atrocities happening to innocent
people every moment of every day,
but don’t think about that.
Like its predecessors, American Fung does
a decent job depicting
the reality of psychiatric incarceration,
but doesn’t have the balls to commit the
entire episode to it,
nor to follow through in its conclusion.
There’s important lessons to be found in
the cracks,
but it could have done more.
And that brings us back to the present, back
to sobering adulthood.
I’m sorry to say not a lot of cultural progress
has been made in this time.
The most optimistic thing I could say is that
people are more willing to share their labels?
Like when someone says they’re depressed
we don’t instantly think “lazy”?
We don’t assume a multiple system is going
to kill us?
There’s less stigma, I guess,
but at the same time we have organizations
like NAMI
calling to “end the stigma” against locking
people up and forcing drugs on them.
I set out to find stories about psychiatric
incarceration,
and I had to cast a net fourteen (14) years
wide in order to find three (3) examples,
all three (3) of which miss the point in some
way
and conclude on irrelevant distractions.
Our society really doesn’t wanna talk about
this stuff.
At least, not the ugly parts.
It’s easy enough to find a respected politician
or conference keynote or news anchor
euphemistically calling for “services”
to remove Scary Mental Illness from public view.
It’s nearly impossible to find one talking
in terms of human rights.
At the end of these three (3) stories, I feel
as if I just heard the same story three (3) times:
Innocent neurotypical is wrongly convicted-
as if declaring a person “mentally ill”
could ever be rightful conviction-
horrible stuff happens to them as it would
in any prison,
someone tries a breakout to rescue them from
these awful conditions,
you’d think healing from trauma would come
next
but no, nevermind everything’s fine
don’t worry your pretty little head about it.
The stories we grow up with as children have
the potential to inspire us,
to open up new horizons, and to teach us important
life lessons.
But in order for a story to do anything, someone
has to write it.
Animation may seem magical, but writers are
not. They’re just people.
They’ve grown up with the same cultural
biases that others around them have shared.
When a writer isn’t conscious of that, when
they think their value judgments are just facts,
the same bias and judgment seeps into their
work.
The life lesson we get from watching is to
hold the view
that the writer thinks everyone should hold.
I definitely don’t believe we can blame
all the sanism in the world
on a few twenty (20) minute cartoon episodes,
but they haven’t done much to challenge
it either.
Because they didn’t want to, because their
creators didn’t think it was important.
In my mind I can picture animators right now
crafting stories to teach their children
not to be scared of Muslims or immigrants
or trans people,
but Madness?
“Sorry, you’ll just have to wait your
turn.”
I’m not sure how we went from wondrous children’s
inspiration to ice-cold cynicism.
I swear I didn’t plan that.
Hey there all you girls, boys, and little
enby joys.
I want to thank you for lending me your time
and your listening ear.
Or maybe your eyes, oh yeah shoutout to my
Deaf peeps!
I also wanna thank Mikey Neumann at FilmJoy
for starting this whole animation - personal
story - community series thing.
And also in general, showing me how it’s
possible to analyze something you like
and be both insightful and entertaining. Well
I think I am.
As always I gotta ask for a like and subscribe,
or else the company hosting this video will
send me a wellness check.
And tell me in the comments what my next video
should be about.
Is this the part where the video actually
ends?
Yes. Yes it is.
