About Writing for Mature Animation:
Admit it or not, as far as the American market goes, few screenwriters in television are as envied as the primetime and late night cable and network mature animation writers. Two obvious names to pull out of a hat here would be (of course), Family Guy and The Simpsons. I said Family Guy FIRST because that show’s still actually somewhat popular.
Seriously though. What animation writer or aspiring animation writer DOESN’T secretly (or openly) aspire to work in a work environment free of the censorship and restraint (or in Spongebob’s case, nonexistent writers, “And instead…Storyboard artists! Yay!”) that children’s programming entails, even for anime.
But the thing is, here’s where it gets interesting, now that I’m addressing this issue in the animation production community….Mature animation (not “adult animation”, i.e. not to be confused with toon porn online) is a sub-genre of animation writing where the writer has a unique and blessed freedom not just to push the limits of what people will want to see in their animation, but also to achieve true cinematic narratology and quality storytelling. Mature animation can be topical like Family Guy. It can be dark and morbid yet with ironically and simultaneously humorous and dramatic undertones like Metalocalypse. It can be sub-urban, tongue-in-cheek stereotypical, and topical and funny and action packed all at the same time, as seen in The Boondocks. You can aspire to write anime, and you very well could one day, IF you know how to make manga, or (this one’s much harder than the former option) understand Japanese business and cultural politics, not be a cultural imperialist, and read and speak fluent kanji and Japanese, and know how to use Japanese screen writing software. So in essence, to go way out and travel that journey (and not just be a voice actor who writes ADR dialogue punch ups on the side), you’d basically have to TURN INTO A JAPANESE PERSON. Not exactly an easy goal. I’m sure someone’s done it or is planning to do it somewhere though. The market is healthy and diverse, after and without multicultural dreamers where would we be, but I digress. Batman the Animated Series, in its heyday, was documented as having hired a novelist or few to write scripts on certain episodes of Batman Animated, way back in the 90s, and that’s one of the soundest methods of recruiting mature animation writers, even to this day. Hire a novelist. They have a sound background in writing, narration, description, and story. Or you could do what I started off doing and take to the internet and spew words anywhere and everywhere you can. That works too.
