The construction of heroes in cartoons: the period of hybrid narratives (1980 – 2000)

Abstract

The last decades of the 20th century saw the incidence of animated series featuring primordial heroes, attuned to pagan mythology and to chivalric romance. From a critical, descriptive and historical perspective, this paper aims to track the initiatives conveyed in animated movies between 1980 and 2000 and their correlation with literature, cinema and comic books. The paper offers a historical outline, which provides an overview of perspectives that traditional heroes were represented within a twenty-year time span. In order to do so, it relies on specialized criticism, narrative theory, and on studies about animation and cultural industry. Overall, it points towards an interesting scenario if compared to earlier decades, which were mostly marked by the presence of hybridity. Thus, diverse studios employed a network of signs from specific contexts, such as mythology, medievalism, Arthurian literature, science fiction, American western, and Japanese samurai epics.