To paraphrase an enlightening post from an unenlightened place, many older cartoons were drawn or directed by people with real experiences to share. Their goal was to give their memories new texture upon a screen. Adventures and heartbreak and love and motion and landscapes pulled from within themselves. Because of the sheer amount of accrued media, some modern cartoons come not from experiences but from producing animations in the style of modern animations.

Like AI collapse, if you feed cartoons to cartoonists indefinitely, you end up with animation that looks like a cartoon rather than a cartoon that looks like something. It’s funny to notice visual tropes becoming standard