To save the day, you must ruin it first; a script followed by most cartoons. Our entire childhoods were built around that idea. Shin Chan treated every adult instruction as a creative challenge. Chhota Bheem was Dholakpur’s national security policy, because who needs armies when you’ve got a nine-year-old and his biceps? Little Singham somehow balanced primary school and policing an entire town. But where was the girl who got to be foolish? Chutki could be brave and clever, but she was rarely allowed to be petty, impulsive or spectacularly wrong. Boys got entire personalities out of their worst habits. Girls were expected to outgrow theirs before the episode even began.
But cartoons aren’t memorable because they made good decisions; sure, there were morals at the end of the story, but there was also a piano falling on your head. Indian male cartoon characters have been given this opportunity to be memorable because they keep making bad ones. Cartoons have always understood that adventures begin with curiosity, overconfidence and one spectacular lapse in judgement. The mistake is never what interrupts the story. It creates it.Cartoons treated failure with remarkable generosity. In Motu Patlu (2012), Motu was the embodiment of the “This time it will work” ideology. His unyielding hunger for samosas regularly landed him in hot water but he never learned. Growth was never the point. Bad judgement could keep coming back because children thrive on trial and error.
