What’s A Cartoon Has A Shaky Definition

Time to divide the readers of this article: is a movie that’s almost entirely CGI just a cartoon with real-life actors in the middle of it?

I realize the knee-jerk reaction to that idea is “no, surely not,” but, well, let’s explore this out a bit, shall we? Think it through. When you have a movie that’s set on another planet or something like that, and almost every single frame of it is animated—then what’s the difference?

Is Who Framed Roger Rabbit a cartoon? It has fully animated characters and has scenes where nearly everything was animated in a computer or drawn—or whatever the method used was—and that would in any normal context be considered a cartoon.

Perhaps The Most Contentious Thing About Cartoons, Is What Even Counts As A Cartoon?

In other words, what percentage of a movie needs to be animated to be a cartoon? Does it need to be 100% of all the things on the screen to count? Where does The Amazing World of Gumball’s few live-action characters fall? What about David Hasselhoff and the novelty store in The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie?

Sure, it’s pedantry at its finest—but when you see superhero movies or sci-fi movies, and the entire movie was basically filmed by having real actors stand in green and blue rooms, and have all the stuff added in digitally, that’s not really live-action, now is it?

The Cartoon Rabbithole Just Keeps Going Deeper

Social media got really into this with the announcement of The Lion King. At the least, the remake of The Jungle Book had a real person in it, but The Lion King is entirely CGI animals.

I’d say it’s a cartoon by all metrics: there’s no live-action aspect to it. Sure, it’s high-quality animation—some of the most impressive we’ve ever seen—but it’s a cartoon.

I’m not disparaging cartoons with this. I adore cartoons. But the strange aversion to just fully acknowledging requires we either make a new term, or there’s nothing else to call it but a cartoon.

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