GRAPHIC VS CONTENT: South Park

GRAPHIC VS CONTENT

South Park is an American TV show that gains popularity in the last few years. Due to its explicit contents that are conveyed by the use of child-friendly graphics which is considered new to the comic industries. Undoubtedly it is one example of how contemporary artists and comic writers use a such graphics to display explicit contents for older audiences.

CHARACTER

The graphic style used to create such child-friendly look is the use of papered cutout art, which is often taught in art classes during elementary school. The structure of human body in the show are exaggerated. Heads are usually bigger than the body.  Legs were shorten out of real human scale and remains motionless in every animation sequences.  Pupils in the character's eye appears as small as a dot while the overall eye is an oval shape like an egg. Details such as wrinkles on the shirt, fingers, foot and ears, are all hidden to simplify to overall appearance of the characters. All these features were combined to create a visual illusion that resembles a human figure, but in a child-friendly and happy way.

CONTENT

However, to make fun about real life political issues and social trends in explicit way, a certain features were drawn into the character, sometimes even exaggerate those features in the mean of  being overly sarcastic. In the episode of "Make Love, Not Warcraft", the 4 main characters, Eric, Kenny, Kyle and Stan, were redrawn with fat wrinkles, ance and a face expression. All to imitate an internet icon related to the Warcraft game; boogie2988 (youtuber's name) and the stereotype of overall player's appearance in real life.

Another similar example is in the episode "Whale Whores", which depicting a typical stereotype of the Japanese, while being sarcastic about the whale hunting issues in the Japanese sea and the fact that Japanese loves to eat fish. Therefore the new Japanese character appears with smaller eyes and overly aggressive face expression. Leg and arm, unlike the normal character, appears to be rapidly moving, making Japanese character even more aggressive while attacking the dolphins.