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Ever since I discovered that I would be writing a research paper in the spring, the big question that's been looming over my head like a proverbial sword of Damocles has been "What am I going to spend an entire quarter researching and writing about?" Although I still can't quite say at this point that I have a clear answer to that question, I definitely feel that I have much more direction than I did in the fall.
For some reason, animals that appear in cartoons, like these bears from the show We Bare Bears, are often anthropomophized.
I've been exploring options that I find genuinly interesting because I belive that it will, hopefully, translate into a more facinating paper for my readers. Of course an added bonus is that it makes the research and writing processes a bit more enjoyable for me as well. At this moment in time, I am hoping to write about something that relates to animals in animation, more specifically children's cartoons. Animal characters are very common place in modern children's cartoons and animation in general. This isn't a new phenomena as many early animated characters were animals like Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny. Through my research, I would like to explore the reasons why animals have been such a staple in animation as well as why they are often portrayed in anthropomorphized forms.
At this point in the research process, being confined to my house because of the stay at home orders is not too big of a deal. I have mostly been using online resources in my research and I should be able to find online versions of cartoons fairly easily when I get further into the process. So far, I've been utilizing the many academic databases that are available to students through the UCI Libraries' website. During my research, I came across one secondary source that I think is quite interesting. It is called "The Neural Correlates of Work and Play: What Brain Imaging Research and Animal Cartoons can tell us about Social Displays, Self-Consciousness, and the Evolution of the Human Brain" by Charles White Head and deals a bit with the way some cartoons' humor relies on people's implicit understanding of the differences between humans and animals. This implict understanding of the boundary between humans and animals is contrasted with the scientific community's inablility to actually define said boundary
In his paper, Whitehead briefly discusses how the cartoonist Chuck Jones utilized his audiences innate knowlege of human-animal boundaries. The sheer absurdity of the anthropomorphic actions of his animals (like these two coyotes who watched a cigar smoking Bugs Bunny strut on by while they ironically look back at each other as if to say "Did you see that too?") were played off for laughs.
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