HeartbreakerByZep wrote:Religion is turned into Christianity? Haven't seen that, but I guess it probably happens.
The situation's actually a bit more complex than that. Any Christian worth his salt can tell you that what passes for "Christian" on television is by no means truly Christian. Case in point: the first X-men cartoons did touch briefly on Nightcrawler's Catholicism in one episode, which also portrayed Wolverine praying in a church at the end. Still, the theology in that episode never got beyond Nightcrawler mentioning that a lot of people (mutant or otherwise) believe that Jesus loves them.
Gee, that's nice! Of course, any greeting card company could have told them that, and the cartoon certainly isn't going to be giving us any reason *why* a lot of people believe this, or what real difference it makes that they do. Meanwhile, kids' cartoons have plenty of sorcery and other decidedly anti-Christian stuff in them, although of course it's dumbed down too. (Did you know, though, that there's actually a Smurfs episode which has the smurfs drawing a pentagram as part of their magic? The censors are rather selective in their vigilance) TV's religion is more like a vague humanist pietism in which a god (no big "G" allowed on television) can get a brief mention as long as he's not portrayed doing anything too socially controversial.
As a follow-up point: the second X-men movie did deal a little more frankly with Nightcrawler's Catholicism, although it also blatantly played the patently false analogy between homosexuality and mutation to the hilt. (Read the raw data: gays are
not "born that way" whatever media commentators claim. But that's a subject for another day.) The reason why this film could get away with raising such controversial points? It's for an older audience.
The influx of anime has, very notably, opened up some middle ground, which I think is all to the good. There's something rather dimwitted in the first place about trying to make an R or even PG-13 series into a G-rated series, but that was pretty much what censors in the earlier decades had to do if they wanted an animated series to get over here at all. As the matter stands now, I think the introduction of the PG-rated Shrek films should help pave the way for a lower level of censorship in which certain things that make adults smirk while flying over the heads of their children will be allowed to stay in.
Bottom line: anime doesn't quite fit in with the American paradigm for cartoons, but with a little more fine-tuning on both sides of the equation, it will.