Cartoons

I've been into cartoons for as long as I can remember.  Disney, of course, but also the Warner Brothers cartoons with their sharp writing.  When I was young I would have said that my favourite cartoon character was Bugs Bunny, but now that I'm older I prefer Daffy Duck!  I also watched The Flintstones, which shows that I had no taste.

Among more recent cartoons, I used to watch South Park, which is very uneven.  A lot of it is vulgar, unfunny schoolboy humour, but there are also sharp bits like an underclass parody of Fat Albert and lines like "They can't tell me what to do, I'm eight years old!" I've also watched The Simpsons, which has often been brilliant, at least in its first decade.  And Canada's National Film Board has produced some incredible animated shorts over the years!

In recent years I've also got into Japanese anime.  Hayao Miyazaki's one of the medium's greatest storytellers, surpassing even Disney himself in features like Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away.  His manga comic book version of Nausicaa of Wind Valley is even better the movie!

And then there's One Piece, which has been running for over twenty years. (In Japan it's an even bigger phenomenon than The Simpsons--there are shops that only sell One Piece merchandise!) It's about a group of mostly adolescent pirates led by Monkey D. Luffy, who's resolved to become King of the Pirates and find a mysterious treasure left behind by an earlier pirate king. He's happy-go-lucky and often foolhardy, but he's a natural leader.  He also ate a devil fruit that allows him to stretch his body like rubber, but he can no longer swim.

Great writers create worlds: Eiichiro Oda created a universe here!  What really makes it great is that every major character (and some minor ones) have a detailed, interesting backstory.  Take Nami, the crew's navigator and treasurer.  In the early episodes we only know her background as that of a thief who specializes in robbing pirates. Later it turns out that a gang of pirate fish-men have been subjecting her home village to extortion and the proceeds from her theft will go to ransom the place and free it from their grip. Then we find out that her foster mother was a soldier who found her and her sister as wandering orphans after a battle, took them home and raised them hand to mouth.  Then when these pirates arrived they charged everyone a "pay or die" amount, but the mother couldn't afford to pay for all of them so she calmly sacrificed herself to save the girls. Really great storytelling!

Another character that interests me is Nico Robin, the crew's resident genius. (The devil fruit that she ate allows her to form extra hands all over the place.) I have Asperger's Syndrome, and I think she's an Aspie too.  While the others are fooling about or quarrelling, she's generally off in the background reading something or observing them with quiet amusement.  She's emotionally reserved in an East Asian sort of way that can make her seem colder than she really is.  

I should add that the soundtrack has superb movie-quality music!