Fangface- Case Study

Cartoons are a long-standing target for the critics of children’s television, and at the same time a firmly entrenched favourite viewing category for younger viewers.

It will be too difficult to go through all the different cartoons, which are suitable for children so I will just concentrate on the series Fangface. Even in the 50 second long opening sequence there is a vast amount of meaning. In the sound track, the dialogue and sound effects during the first hundred shots are as follows:

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Introduction

‘Every 400 years a baby werewolf is born in the Fangsworth family, and so when the moon shined on little Sherman Fangsworth he changed into “Fangface”.’

[Howls, music in.]

‘A werewolf! Only the sun can change him back to normal. And so little Fangs grew up and teamed up with three daring teenagers, Kim, Biff and Pugsie, and together they find danger, excitement and adventure.’

[Music and sound effects continue.]

‘Who can save the day. Who can run the race and right the wrongs. None other than “Fangface”!’

Video: Fangface Opening Sequence

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The verbal language here accompanies a visual text, which is much richer in that there are many more images than words. But the verbal language affects the interpretation of the accompanying visual text. One important thing it does is to assign names. They label some images and ought to make them easier to recall and use in verbal language, giving them salience, and imposing specific interpretations on them. Barthes calls this function ‘anchorage’, by which he refers to the function of verbal language in limiting and tying down the ambiguity and multiple meanings of visual signs.

Verbal language also communicates abstract concepts such as ‘400 years’, ‘the Fangsworth family’, which are not present in the visual images. Words can convey concepts like time and causality more directly than pictures. Although most of the words are simple, the overall meaning of the text is actually very difficult to interpret. If its larger structures are perceived at all, they will be seen as contradictions. However, there are strong pressures against this contradictoriness being perceived. Even for adults the overall message will tend to decompose into chaos of apparently unrelated fragments, a series of rapid and discrete small-scale syntagms. Children, we can hypothesize, will hardly bother to ‘read’ the larger message at all, and its contradictory elements will float together in their memories arbitrarily and without recognition of their lack of coherence.