I recall a lot of the cartoons I grew up with in the early to mid ought's being pointedly (and hilariously) amoral and meanspirited, in a way that in retrospect feels like a deliberate "get fucking real" backhand against the "lesson at the end of every episode" stereotype of cartoons of the 80s. The Cartoon Cartoons had a lot of this going on (Billy and Mandy and Ed Edd and Eddy being standouts on that front.) Adventure Time feels like it was riding the very back end of that impulse, through a lens that trended more absurdist than mean- constant nihilistic and moral grotesqueries adjacent to the protagonists but comparatively little that they're directly on the hook for, within realistic parameters for a believably messy world. Regular Show fits in here somewhere. Gravity Falls, at points, although it swings away from full-blown amorality in the back half in obvious ways.
A lot of the contemporary tumblr tentpole darlings (2012 or so onwards) feel like they've moved away from that; not morality plays, exactly, because that implies a level of simplicity and flatness that doesn't align with how highly I think of these projects. But certainly couched within a baseline certainty that the protagonists either are straightforwardly good people whose arc is much more about how to enact their morals effectively, or they're on their way to being straightforwardly good people by the end of the story. This is a cluster containing Steven Universe, She-Ra, Kipo, Amphibia, The Owl House, My Adventures with Superman, a few others. Infinity Train, by virtue of it's premise, feels like it cutting against the grain somewhat, even though it's also clearly coming from a similar place as the rest- a shared optimism, humanism and resistance to black-and-white moral condemnation of any of it's characters. (Maybe one really irredeemable guy, as a treat.)
This obviously isn't any kind of comprehensive or airtight analysis- off the top of my head, I'm focusing on the tone of the cartoon-cartoons to the exclusion of the slew of fairly morally-uncomplicated action adventure cartoons that were airing at the same time like ATLA or the DCAU; and I'm focusing on the contemporary cartoons that tumblr likes over, say, Teen Titans Go or anything in the adult animation space. But under the admittedly uncertain assumption that we have any kind of animation industry at all in a few years, I'm curious to see whether there'll be any kind of visible swing against the ethos of stuff like Steven Universe and The Owl House. Stuff that trends meaner, trends cynical. I kind of hope so. I think I've got at least a couple pitches that could ride that wave.
