Seeing The Brick
“The animated film enables the filmmaker to be more expressive and thus more subversive than is readily acknowledged. Almost consciously,animators in being aware that they, and their works, are marginalized and/or consigned to innocent, inappropriate or accidental audience, use this apparently unguarded space to create films with surface pleasures and hidden depths.”
When I read this quote I immediately thought of multiple animated series that I recently started watching. A lot of the comedy series’ I had been watching did not match up to the level of subversion that animated series were bringing to the table. Bob’s Burgers is a show that I enjoy watching that often has hilariously entertaining scripts and tackles social issues in a way that is unthreatening and eye opening. An episode that has stuck with me is “An Incident Thanksgiving Proposal.” In this episode the main character, Bob, a cook who owns a burger restaurant, goes to the supermarket to buy a Turkey for Thanksgiving and strikes up conversation with the butcher. After a series of mishaps, Bob is forced to return to the Butcher multiple times for multiple turkey’s. The butcher misinterprets this and assumes that Bob was trying to hit on him and used the turkeys as a way to return to the shop.
Instead of getting defensive about the accusation that Bob was flirting with the butcher, Bob was worried about the butcher thinking he was incapable of cooking a turkey properly. This show constantly takes unexpected turns in order to indirectly expose issues that people are faced with in reality. Bob’s concern with being seen as an inadequate chef, allowed him to totally dismiss the butchers inference. This scene is a different way to look at the issue of defense mechanisms used by straight males to avoid being perceived as feminine or flamboyant. Instead of taking the obvious route and having Bob feel threatened by the implication that he is attracted to the butcher, Bob feels comfortable enough to disregard it. This is an example of a way that Bob’s Burgers maintains it’s “surface pleasures” all while incorporating “hidden depths.”