Second PDF file -- Watch the Simpsons

This essay's focus on the satire, disarmament, and "subversion" second nature to cartoons is on point, I think, (also "foregrounded referenciality," "suspension of disbelief," etc...though these seem to belong to the precinct of film in general) but neglects a trait more basic to a cartoon, along side verisimilitude or anthropomorphism, which is how it conflates representation and time. However, this makes sense, as shows like the Simpsons work to suppress this kind of inseparability of images and motion that are not so much conveyed but simply and effectively present when "drawings move." They could be invisible because they are inseperable when effective. This veil cartoons create----specifically "cartoons," of the illustrative kind, with their iconography and surface-----obliterates animation's unique ability to exist independently from the analogy of the photograph, its documentary origin in "recording," and its connection to physical space. In this sense, and also because it is entirely the residue of human activity instead of a mediation on a mechanical process, that of the film camera, it might be mechanically closer to writing or language. Mechanically, specifically because an apparatus is separate from its effects. I think the essay talks about the content of form, (the way the show looks, and acts, the way the characters look and act) not the form of its form, the form its genre overtakes (animation, what the show is, materially: drawings/not photographs, dialogue/not recordings of places, in color, in so being, connotative). On the same token, to produce language over an animation, is the outright goal of the Simpsons, not an afterthought or an accident----made apparent by what this essay chooses or can choose to analyze; how characters and their situations function, instead of how the characters and their situations are achieved). I just think there is something by force as connotative and equivocal as the "pastiche," "self-reference," and "parody" of the Simpsons the essay describes, in how a drawing moves; how fast or slow, fluidly (more drawings) or coarsely (less drawings), as it affects perception. The text quotes Barthes: "The readerly is an effect based on the operations of solidarity (the readerly "sticks" does this mean sticks that keep things in check?); but the more this solidarity is renewed, the more the intelligible becomes intelligent. The ideological goal of ths technique is to naturalize meaning and thus to give credence to the reality of the story." It seems this intelligence in the apparent tension between legibility and "discontinuity," or "readerly," and "writerly," or "denotative," and connotative" can be looked at from the stances of what we look at, see, consume----each distinct activities.