I was once asked who my childhood crush was and the answer was Lenny from Shark Tale. This was found funny, although accepted, by the people asking. However later into the conversation I was asked who my idea of a beautiful woman is. My answer was the big sister from Lilo and Stitch. This reply was not accepted, and it was pointed out to me that my answers to all of these types of questions was always some kind of cartoon character. I was embarrassed that I had not noticed, and tried to explain. It felt to me that cartoon characters seemed more like archetypes, and were easier to refer to when trying to give an example of a kind of person, without referring to an actual living person which for some reason felt more objectionable to me. The response to this was the question- is it not more dehumanizing to use a cartoon example rather than an actual human? A cartoon that could be argued is an oversimplified representation, and possibly even an unhelpful stereotype? I couldn’t think of a celebrity that was well-known in media that fit the kind of things I found beautiful about Lilo’s big sister Nani. She’s cool, she’s assertive, she’s fighting to keep her family together, she isn’t perfect, she shouts at her sister, her house is a little messy, but she’s patient and she’s extremely beautiful. Im sure there are many examples, but she was the one I loved.
I had already done the damage of making it clear that I watched too many cartoons. It was laughed off and it reinforced a frequent joke that I am a large child. I couldn’t articulate my frustration with this, as a teacher of animation it’s part of my job, but I wasn’t allowed to enjoy watching them? To me, Nani just seemed like a real person. I’m not straight, so I was already in foreign territory trying to express why she might be an example of a woman I think is beautiful. But the more I thought about it, my reasoning for choosing cartoon characters for these questions was not simply because it avoided the objectification of a real person, it was something more, and to the people looking at me, almost definitely an indication of some social deficiency.
Cartoons are fiction. I live in reality. Within reality fictions exist, they are the illusions that shape human desires, and as people act on their desires they shape reality. But the choice between fiction and reality is not a choice. Both are the structure that holds up the other. But within fiction reality exists, not the truth informed by reality, but the truth in fiction itself, more true than reality.
When I think about the bad things that have happened to me in the past, if they are too traumatic, too tragic or painful to think about, I realize that at those moments reality broke down. It was like I fell through a crack in it and suddenly any kind of nightmare was possible. My brain fictionalized the events. The characters at those moments are stretched and warped by unreality. I shrink in a corner or melt into a puddle. As I grow up, the same happens at moments of pleasure, I grow enormous or my tongue wags like a dog’s. Eventually I form a habit of doing this, and at some point it becomes normal. Somewhere along the line I realized that if I was feeling disconnected from people I would crave to be around others like me, the easiest way to do that is to watch the tanuki in Pom Poko stretching themselves into human shapes and walking, strained, through the streets of a human town, I would laugh but agree, that’s exactly how it is. This would have been too much to explain to a group of people asking me simple questions. So instead, as I was sitting there, the problem rattled inside my head behind the whites of my eyes until it came to rest at the back of my tongue and printed out receipt-like from my lips on a ticket only I read: you feel like a cartoon character.
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