Single-frame Cartoons
Has there ever existed a cartoon that is structured like a play?—meaning, the entire 30 minutes is contained in a single cut, on a fixed cartoon stage, with characters going in and out. This is the antithesis of the one-second rapid cuts you find in Disney kids shows, and is even much slower than the “slow” 10-30 second cuts in a show like Arthur. Psychologically, this might be the best kind of TV for kids; it would fall into the same category of “face time with relatives,” which is safe because it’s a fixed object in a fixed frame. What’s funny is that early cinema was exactly this, because we were totally fixed in the paradigm of the prior medium; but now that we’ve moved past it, we’ve completely moved past it—to the point that it barely exists in film anymore, and was never once attempted in a cartoon. We’ve ignored it, when returning to it might be especially useful, especially for kids, especially in this moment where early age TV addiction seems to be stunting development.