Characters In Cartoons and Television

Cartoons, especially the ones you cite, are an altered reality. Homer is a buffoon for the same reason that he is yellow and that Marge has tall blue hair. The are not intended to be real people, but rather caricatures. Many cartoons are satire. They exist in a static world to lampoon reality, not to portray it.

DwayneA said:

The same applies to Peter Griffin from Family Guy, especially at the end of one episode where Lois says he's learned a valuable lesson and he simply says "nope".

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Also note, that I think this example is actually mocking this very trope.

I said much the same thing as Soccer Mom just said over in the last thread you started about television cartoons. Another point is that cartoons are not intended to be serialized, that is, to build one on another. Each "episode" is stand-alone. You could watch any half-hour show of Scooby-doo and have no idea when it was made, now or 20 years ago. The characters don't age -- are perpetual teenagers, in fact -- nor do they learn or change. They are caricatures, not characters.

Stop watching cartoons if the lack of character development bothers you.

Like their predecessors, comic books and comic strips in newspapers, very little character development and growth are witnessed. Gasoline Alley and For Better or For Worse are two examples that buck the trend, showing their characters aging, albeit slowly, with time. And like their predecessors, many animated cartoons are really just meant to tell funny stories. Not much character development or growth is required to do that.

You're confusing media here.

In the literary medium, characters usually grow and develop over the course of a book (series).

In film medium, depending on the genre, characters can grow and develop over the course of a movie (series). This isn't a mandatory thing to the medium. Such series as Bourne, Bond, the Transporter, Indiana Jones and other such action-oriented stories.

Both of these forms are limited times within the scope of these characters' lives and can handle the changes that growth will inherently bring.

TV series like you're talking about are usually comedic in nature. Comedies in general don't benefit from character growth because that messes with the chemistry needed for humor. They also don't deal with a limited time period, so it's far more difficult to keep character growth consistent and relevant and maintain the goal of the presentation--which is humor.

Every medium has its inherent strengths, weaknesses and viewer/reader expectations. To hold one medium by the standards of another is just setting the comparison up for failure. It's the old apples and platypus deal.

Hope that helps.

As someone who spent her childhood Saturday mornings watching the Bugs Bunny/Roadrunner Show, I can answer your question. Half the fun the TV cartoons was the lack of change. I didn't watch the Roadrunner shorts to see if the Coyote would finally catch him or if he'd wise up and buy a turkey. I watched them to see the Coyote get injured in various and humorous ways by his own brilliant traps.

AZ_Dawn said:

Half the fun the TV cartoons was the lack of change.

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Yup.

I like Starscream as an ambitious, cowardly, vicious character who was never, ever going to change. It was so wonderfully familiar and secure - you always knew what to expect from him.

I watched in the hopes that Wile E. ("You may call me SUPER genius") ate the roadrunner. I knew he'd never catch him, but I always hoped.

Even now - I watch cartoons for the sheer entertainment (and the mockery, when I recognize it) - and that's pretty much it. Oh, and Brian. How can you not love a martini-swilling, talking dog?

If you like to watch cartoons but hope to see some actual character change and development, might I suggest anime? One of the big things that impressed me about anime when I first saw some was that many times, characters do change and evolve (probably because much anime has a serial nature, where episodes build off of each other, rather than an episodic nature, where everything stands better alone).

The catch is, you will have to search for yourself to find anime with good character development, because not all of it is the same. Some is more episodic, like American cartoons.

DwayneA said:

I don't get it. Why does this happen in cartoons and televion? Why don't characters ever change completely?

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A cartoon isn't a novel. A sitcom isn't a novel. They're using different tools to accomplish different goals.

Taking this together with many of your other threads, it sounds to me like you're looking for excuses why your stories should be exempt from having character development.