I divide cartoons into two categories. The first category, which I call Non-Cutesy Animation That Doesn’t Suck, involve compelling stories that take advantage of animation’s limitless potential in character design, special effects, and wild premises. The second category, which I call Shittoons, involves stupid stories aimed at stupid parents and their stupid progeny. But don’t get me wrong … even the most puerile pile of crap…such as Chicken Little or The Smurfs (and please spare me the hipster appreciation of that soul killing shite; it’s about as “cool” as feigning a phobia of clowns), takes a great deal of work. Animation is an extremely labor-intensive labor of love. Even with today’s technology, there is an enormous amount of work that must go into every frame. Animators should never be taken for granted, no matter how retarded the final product is.

Like you, I was weaned upon the subversive, anarchistic humor of Warner Brothers cartoons from the 30s to the 50s, the golden age of animation. These animators took full advantage of the medium, creating absurd landscapes and blacker than coal humor that ingrained within me what a cartoon should be all about. The next cartoon that made a deep impression upon me was Thundarr the Barbarian. Within the feckless Saturday morning ghetto, Thundarr stood out like a wonderful sore thumb. It was bleak, subversive, and often shocking, set in a post-apocalyptic world that took its architecture to logical extremes. For example, Thundarr and his buddies at one point have to take on an animated Statue of Liberty, trying to kill them with her flamethrower torch. Even as a little kid, I could not be oblivious to that symbolism, and my older brother Andy even commented, “Wow, that’s very disrespectful.”

And there’s there anime from Japan, which takes the whole medium to levels Western animators rarely go. But I’m going to level with you. I hate most anime, and find these imports as godawful and intelligence-insulting as the latest Disney pap. But good anime is a fantastic experience that any film buff can take digest with the same criteria they bring to any movie, including the mindbending Lain, the melancholy Patlabor 1 and 2, the off the wall Cowboy Bebop, and the jaw droppingly gruesome Elfen Lied.

Though American animators must labor under the puritanical and “all kids are stupid” mindset, the gringos have been able to fire off a few minor masterpieces, including The Incredibles, Ratatouille, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and the first 3/4 of Wall-E. (Small wonder Pixar dominates the list of best American animation). From Europe, there are a good number of wondrous cartoons, such as the dialog-free The Triplets of Bellevue and the tripped out Fantastic Planet.

Non-Cutesty Animation That Doesn’t Suck purports to take you on a cartoon trip of films that will challenge, frighten, and beguile you, into vistas that are not limited by physics or logistics. When a good animator and a good writer collaborate, the alchemy is at once gratifying and terrifying. So if you happen to be an emotional Grown Up, Low Down Cinema humbly submits these cartoons for your approval.

With enough practice, you can learn to differentiate genuine bad movies from those that undergo a special transformation when alcohol enters your bloodstream. There are the comedies that somehow become complete masterpieces when you match drinks with certain characters, or dramas that become farcical laugh riots after the consumption of liquor. The (finely chiseled) bodies of work belonging to Seagal, Van Damme, Bronson, Lundgren, Stallone, Schwarzenegger. Bar fights, cheesy one-liners and over-the-top kills are all that’s necessary after knocking back a fifth or a case; that and a bag of pretzels too. The simpler the better, as far as narrative is concerned, since your attention span is drastically shortened, provided you can even register what’s going on.

Sometimes this magical, nameless transformation seems to be intentional (ie. Bad Santa, Withnail and I, Leaving Las Vegas), other times it’s in spite (or perhaps because) of severe flaws. Take for example 2005′s critical darling, the self-righteous Crash; so full of unchecked ham acting, so hilariously implausible, so poorly written and directed that it now comes across as a series of tasteless sketches, like the fruit of an unholy union between Woody Allen and Spike Lee. Drink for every false climax, egregious racial epithet, or unprovoked discussion of racial stereotypes. Or just let its mind-numbing banality put you to sleep after a long night of bar-hopping, to distract you from more serious matters. Worry about that missing $50 bill in the morning, when you’re avoiding all natural light and taking stock of strange injuries accumulated over the previous evening.

Sure, it’s possible to enjoy Van Damme shoving a man in a penguin suit into a trash compactor while sober. You could waste a couple hours in sobriety watching Seagal break dozens of limbs, undergo an Inuit vision quest, and blow up an oil refinery, but the mindless proceedings would be exponentially less enjoyable. God forbid, you could pretend to be moved by the creaky manipulations of Gran Torino or The Untouchables without this miracle elixir exposing their flaws and assigning them a laugh track of your own raucous creation. Good luck making it through awe-inspiring disasters like Troll 2 or The Apple without a little chemical assistance. Not to say that alcohol is the only way to enjoy these films, just observing that a wet brain deprived of a little oxygen makes them go down a hell of a lot smoother.

There is a scene in Rudy Ray Moore’s Dolemite where a reporter at a police press conference, seeking an important racial detail for his article, queries: “Was this a black on black crime, or an all honky caper?” It’s a legitimate question, so long as the topic is genre cinema. All Honky Capers have a long and glorious tradition going back over a century. They’re stories of crime and punishment, greed and betrayal, sharp suits, clouds of cordite and smoke from unfiltered cigarettes. Of course, there’s hardly a minority to be seen, save as irrelevant background “color”.

One of the earliest narrative shorts, The Great Train Robbery from 1903, was also the first All Honky Caper on record. Countless more would soon follow through the silent era to the invention of the “talkies”, which coincided nicely with the advent of the gangster film, which would dovetail into the rise of film noir and so forth. AHCs have played a vital part in the evolution of the medium as a whole; sometime in the late 40s, they even became legitimate art with the help of Hitchcock, Huston, Dassin, Clouzot, Melville, and many others. Kubrick started out with a couple of tough, cheap and brutal AHCs before moving on to bigger and better things. Others would try to show us the glamorous side of being a rich white honky criminal, from the unintentionally creepy Charade, the trendsetting Ocean’s Eleven, and later in the anamorphic widescreen and Technicolor era, the ultracool Thomas Crown Affair. Scorsese would subsequently de-glam his own Capers, around the same time the glorious Blaxploitation movement sprung from the underground in response to the oversaturation of ivory flesh in Hollywood product. The Godfather duology has raised the bar almost impossibly high for all future endeavors, but the tradition continues to produce quality Caucasian capers such as Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead and The Departed (which viciously disposes of its single, peripheral black character), winner of a recent Best Picture trophy.

The genre will never die out so long as white men and women continue to breed and engage in duplicitous activity.