Cartoons have made me who I am today. From watching endless amounts of Bugs Bunny shorts as a toddler to meticulously analyzing Bugs Bunny shorts frame-by-frame as a nerdy high schooler, I can’t imagine life without animation. Cartoons have made me funny. They’ve taught me good storytelling. And most importantly, they’ve made me a curious person, always trying to learn more about how films work and why. 

I can remember seeing the opening credits to a Warner Brothers short as a child and wondering, “Who are these guys?” As a 1st grader, I spent more hours than I can remember flipping through animation history books. For some reason, I was never as interested in learning how to draw as much as I was in learning how the best cartoons were made and what they could teach me about life. Over these past 17 years, having become a well-informed animation superfan and historian, I’ve learned thousands of things from cartoons. Some are straightforward facts, but some are bigger ideas that I believe everyone watching cartoons should know. 

So what are some of the most important things I’ve learned from enjoying animation? First off, cartoons were never made for kids. The best cartoons were originally made for everyone, and that’s not to say that they were G-rated. Cartoons came into existence at a time when there were no MPAA ratings; programs curated at local theaters had to fit what mom, dad, and junior liked. Because of this, the best cartoons entertained anyone from 9 to 91. The way that animation has been marketed in roughly the past 60 years makes it seem as if the art form was always meant for the kiddoes; this is not so. 

I found this fact particularly fascinating when I learned it as a preschooler enjoying Road Runner cartoons at my grandfather’s (GD) house. I was fortunate enough to grow up around GD, who was a huge cartoon fan himself, having grown up in WWII America. He asked me how I liked the shorts that he had put on for me. “This is the best kids show ever!” I said with a smile. GD laughed and told me about how, back in his day, he went to the theater with his mom and dad and watched 20 cartoons for 20¢ in one sitting. The best part was that his parents always laughed harder than he did, and he loved cartoons. I was shocked. Cartoons were so colorful and exciting that it seemed as if they were targeted to my age group specifically, but GD told me of a time when adults didn’t restrict themselves to violent, gory, “adult” entertainment and liked Daffy Duck just as much as they liked James Cagney or Jimmy Stewart. 

Even more fascinating, if there ever was a target demographic for these cartoons, it was adults. Classic Disney, MGM, and Warner Brothers shorts were written for a specific audience, and that was the co-workers of the writers behind the cartoons themselves. When GD and I watched a documentary on the making of The Flintstones a few months after I learned this fact, I heard the word “primetime” being thrown around. GD told me that The Flintstones was originally aired at night during “primetime,” when all the kids were asleep but all the adults were up and ready to be entertained. If the show was meant for the younger audience, networks would’ve put it on when their targeted age group was awake. 

What’s more, I realized that the best cartoons became even better for older people because there were hidden jokes and gags that only adults could understand. One of my favorite cartoons as a kid was An Itch in Time, an old Warner short about a flea annoying a dog. There’s a gag when the flea irritates the dog and makes him scratch his butt across the floor, running around and yelping in pain. But the dog freezes after dragging his privates around, winks, and says to the camera, “Hey! I better cut this out! I may get to like it!” To 5-year-old me, this was just another funny-sounding line in another funny Warner Brothers cartoon. But when I got older and revisited the short, the line blew me away. Most of the best cartoons are like that; they’re enjoyable for all ages, but some are more enjoyable for others specifically. That’s the beauty of the art form: when done right, and written with the right people in mind, cartoons really are for everyone.

Another big thing I learned is that animation is a medium, not a genre. There are a thousand different ways with which people have approached making cartoons and a million more that haven’t been discovered. Animation at its best resembles all good art: it’s touching, funny, tragic, thrilling, and entertaining. I was fortunate enough to be exposed to a variety of cartoons as a kid and learned at a very young age that the art form had an incredible versatility to it. 

For starters, one of the first cartoons I ever saw was Porky’s Railroad. Being an early black-and-white Warner cartoon, the film was directed by Frank Tashlin, a man who really hated working with Porky Pig and wanted to direct live-action films instead of cartoons. His solution? To make cartoons as dramatic and gripping as possible, to allow himself to feel as if he was directing a feature with Bogey and Bacall. Porky’s Railroad features quick cuts, weird camera angles, music in a minor key, and a variety of other techniques and trademarks of a typical Depression-era action movie. This short shocked and almost scared me as a kid because it was so powerful and different from the typical Tom and Jerry or Woody Woodpecker cartoon. I had already learned that cartoons could be funny; now, I learned that cartoons could be thrilling and exciting. 

In second grade, our class watched Pinocchio. I had been exposed to Disney features quite a bit as a kid but there were some that my mother never let me watch. Pinocchio was one of them, and my mom told me and my siblings that it was too scary for our precious eyes. I didn’t know how anything animated could be as bad as she described; after all, Warner Brothers cartoons made me laugh, so what else could be done? A lot more, as it turned out. Pinocchio’s directors made use of typical live-action techniques, not unlike Tashlin, using silhouettes, fast cuts, and even live-action references to animate some scenes with a particularly lifelike feel. When Lampwick painfully turned into a donkey on Pleasure Island, I burst into tears. I’ll never forget the shivers I felt up my spine that day when that scene came up onto my school auditorium’s projector. Now, I learned that animation could be as terrifying as it could be funny. Already, it became evident that the art form could be incredibly adaptable. 

But I was just getting started. I had only learned about hand-drawn cartoons, mostly done in the early-mid 20th century. After guys like Tashlin and Walt Disney set the bar for what animation could achieve, their successors attempted to raise it even higher. As a kid, I immersed myself in the Wallace and Gromit series. This was animation, but not like the classic shorts; the characters were real, photographed on film and sculpted in clay, but not actual people, though they seemed like they were. Even more confusing to me, Pixar films like Finding Nemo and Ratatouille combined the clay/3D look with the grace and beauty of hand-drawn animation. In middle school, I watched Spirited Away and “oohed” and “ahhed” at the beauty that Japanese culture brought to the animated film. I even saw animation done in a simpler, rougher form that still maintained entertainment and beauty. Student films like 2 in the AM PM and Bring Me the Head of Charlie Brown made me laugh and realize that animation was to be admired in any form, no matter if it was colorful or black-and-white, bright or dark, real or not, or created on a computer or out of an artist’s pencil. Browsing the latest animated movies on Verizon and seeing “Animation” listed as a genre annoyed 5th-grade me. Animation was more than just a category of films. It was a whole new way of expressing beauty and bringing entertainment. Of all art forms, animation is the most expansive. 

Another big idea, and perhaps the one that I learned the most as a kid, is that the best animation evokes life. I don’t mean that animation evokes life when a stick figure crosses the screen and waves to the camera. I mean that animation evokes life when it resembles real life more than humans do and is drawn by someone who studied real-life subjects extensively to create the scene. I figured this one out at a very young age but to this day, I almost refuse to believe that cartoon characters seem more real and exciting than an actual human person does; it’s a brutal fact to accept but it’s completely true, and it becomes painfully evident the more you study and watch thousands of cartoon as I have. 

As a kid, after finishing a cartoon, I’d get excited and giggly and then try to run around and act like a character myself. When I’d watch a particularly funny Warner short in grade school, I’d memorize the best lines and go into class and deliver them as if they were my own. Kids loved it when I walked into English class reciting Director Von Hemberger’s lines in a thick German accent, or with Bugs Bunny’s Groucho Marx back-bent-at-a-90-degree-angle walk, or reeling off WC Squeals’ plea to the rescue dog carrying the brandy. I grew very popular as practically a cartoon character myself, with people bringing several friends over to me and asking me to recite the same lines I said to them earlier. People were satisfied with my jokes, but I wasn’t. Somehow, I wasn’t matching up with the characters as I pictured them in my mind. It was an odd complaint to have, but I just felt like I wasn’t as funny or interesting as the actual characters were. Over the years, I tried to find the answer to this question but failed frequently. 

In 8th grade, I learned the truth. After watching a particularly beautiful shot of Bugs Bunny coming out of the Warner Brothers’ shield and reading a line to the camera, I became determined to see if I could match up with the beauty of Bugs by pulling out my phone, mimicking his actions, and watching back the footage to see if I compared at all. After several takes, I found out that I didn’t come close. Bugs just moved more, was subtler, expressed emotions better, and was funnier. But why? How come these two-dimensional drawings seemed more “real” than an actual real and live person? 

The truth was that animation brings an instinctively beautiful intangible quality to itself. The artists behind the art form aren’t rookies, either. The animator of the scene I was studying was Ken Harris, a skilled artist who had been studying real human movement and expression for about 30 years by the time he animated this particular shot of Bugs. In fact, one of the most famous photos of Harris shows him studying his own expression when doing a drawing of Bugs. The best animators just seem to know more about emotion and human qualities than any other person does, even the most skilled of painters or sculptors. They’ve gone to art school to study the beauty of the human figure and how to draw, and they know more about how humans behave and act than other people around them do. When they bring those qualities to their work, their characters become more alive and realistic than any actor or person could ever wish to seem. Their work is quite literally larger than life. This quality contributed to my continued fascination with animation, and now, one of my favorite things to do when watching cartoons is to play scenes back frame-by-frame to study what specific moves the animator made in showing us the character. 

And finally, perhaps the most important thing I’ve learned is that the best cartoons are considered the best because they are sublime in all possible aspects. With great drawing, music, visual effects, sound effects, timing, gags, writing, plot, or characterization, well-crafted cartoons invite viewers to revisit their favorite titles several times over just to find more to appreciate. An entertaining cartoon isn’t just that way because it’s funny; it’s that way because of a thousand other things that it brings to the table. If you watch good cartoons, like the classic Warner shorts, you’ll find that over the years, you’ll be naturally revisiting the shorts just because so many of them are just so darn solid from any perspective. 

One short through which I learned this fact is Book Revue, a classic Warner cartoon with Daffy Duck by cartoon extraordinaire Bob Clampett. The short revolves around a bookstore after-hours, showing us how books come to life when no one’s looking. It sounds like a boring Toy Story rip-off, but it’s actually one of the most energetic, thrilling, multi-layered films I’ve ever seen, and it’s often considered one of the greatest cartoons to ever be created. There’s even a theory that Clampett, the director, knew that his Warner contract would soon run out and decided to go all-out bonkers on his last few films to leave a noticeable mark on the studio. But I digress.

As a kid, I loved that unbridled Clampett energy. It seemed as if Daffy were on cocaine, jumping around sporadically and changing from pose to pose or persona to persona in a matter of frames. In fact, the cartoon was so wild that for half a second, in place of a wild take, Daffy turns into a giant vein-filled eyeball to express his horror at discovering his wolf adversary. I loved how energetic Daffy and the rest of the cartoons were, so I rewatched Book Revue frequently to try and capture Daffy’s energy and bring it to my interactions with others. If it made me smile so much, then why couldn’t I make others smile by using the same tactics?

As I grew older, I found so much more to love. After I had grown up and discovered the beauty of music through my mother, I became very interested in how Carl Stalling, the Warner Brothers cartoon composer, created Book Revue’s beautifully lavish soundtrack. I learned that Stalling used WB’s full symphony orchestra to record these soundtracks and pushed the musicians to their limits. In fact, the members of the orchestra claimed that recording a soundtrack for a cartoon was infinitely harder to do than recording a soundtrack for a live-action feature film. Stalling’s effort impressed me, and I listened to all the different songs that Stalling used even if just for a few bars in each scene. I became fascinated with how many popular and classical tunes Stalling combined into one coherent beautiful score, and I taught myself the history of music just to appreciate the cartoon more. After studying and rewatching Book Revue, I caught Stalling quoting “It Had To Be You,” “She Broke My Heart in Three Places,” Beethoven’s “Piano Sonata No. 14,” “Grandfather’s Clock,” “Carolina in the Morning,” and “In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree,” among many other tunes of all kinds. I was so enamored with this smorgasbord of music that through middle school, I often went on long runs with the Book Revue soundtrack playing on repeat in my earbuds. 

Later, when I became fascinated with the artists behind the films, I learned who drew each scene and what they brought to the table. Manny Gould, the animator behind the aforementioned eyeball take, was known for using exaggerated hand movements with the characters; in a Gould scene, Daffy talked as much with his hands as he did through his mouth, and suddenly, he became a very beautiful combination of a Shakespearean actor and a visual representation of energy. Bob McKimson, often considered the greatest animator of all time, made Daffy three-dimensional through two-dimensional drawings, showing the character from different perspectives and with a believable weight and grace to his movements and poses. In a McKimson scene, Daffy seems more real and moves with more life than you or I do. And Rod Scribner, along with his assistant Bill Melendez, was the craziest of all. These two drew characters way off-model, with added details to make them look weirder and funnier, like tons of wrinkles on all parts of their body and around their face. I learned all of these artists’ styles simply by watching thousands of cartoons over and over, Book Revue included. I learned that each artist’s style is their own signature – a new art form in and of itself. 

The other things I found wonderful about Book Revue could be covered in an entirely separate 10 pages. After becoming a book nerd, I began taking notes on each book title that appeared in Book Revue’s bookstore backdrop and looked them up to begin to understand the gags being made in the short. Once I became an appreciator of good voice acting, I studied Mel Blanc, the “man of 1,000 voices” who did virtually every voice in every Warner short, and what wonders he did to Book Revue through Daffy alone. And when I became a filmmaker myself, I studied Book Revue to see how things were done through a cinematic lens, analyzing how a scene was timed, how a shot was shown, how a character was introduced, and more. 

Book Revue is just one of thousands of examples of how much can be admired about one good cartoon. One bad cartoon, however, may have little to like about it; but “bad” by some standards means “excellent” by other standards. For example, the worst (by comparison) Warner shorts still have incredible animation, music, voice-acting, and sound design to them. But even not limiting ourselves to Warner Brothers, animation at its lowest can always have something to admire within it; it’s just a question of whether or not all shorts will be as rich and deep as Book Revue. For some shorts, the answer to that may be “no,” but for countless others, it’s “yes” and even more so than it is with Book Revue. 

And there, in heavily abridged form, are just some of the things to love about animation and how the art form can be appreciated from so many perspectives. I feel silly writing this, because as Stephen King said, “Words almost always fall short of meaning.” I haven’t even begun to describe the beauty of cartoons at their finest, but can anyone do that in a single piece of writing? I don’t think so. The best way to prove that is to go out yourself and watch cartoons. Study them. Enjoy them. Share them with your family and friends; remember that cartoons were meant to be watched in a theater full of people and not as a solitary experience. That’s perhaps the most beautiful part of the whole art form: that animation, at its best, provides entertainment and joy to all who choose to watch it, and oftentimes, more entertainment and joy than anything else that life has to offer.