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This is my gripe (Shadane Edition) by Shadane

This is my gripe (Shadane Edition)

Shadane

This is obviously based on that post on Twitter about how western cartoonists draw weasels.


This is half joking, half serious. Joking, because I thought it was funny, and I wanted to make my own variation of the image, and serious because I've seen this my entire childhood, so much so that when I was a small child, I legitimately thought wolves looked like they did in western cartoons because I was very young and I wasn't yet familiar with the outside world, so of course when I saw wolves at the zoo for the first time, all I could think was, "but... these are just dogs; there's no way an animal that looks like that could be a wolf!" and then I thought the zoo was cruel for keeping huskies confined in cages, because dogs are domesticated? Then again, I don't think wild animals belong in cages either, and I think rehabilitating the rescued young and releasing them later down the line would be better than putting them on display in an enclosed space that's only 5% the size of their natural habitat. In the end, I found out that they were, in fact, wolves, and the animals I saw in these cartoons were heavily exaggerated, and there's a few reasons why. For old cartoons specifically, the caricatures had deliberately exaggerated anatomical features to make them appear "ugly", and the cartoons themselves existed to essentially "prove" that wolves really are dumb, man-eating vicious beasts that thoughtlessly kill everything in front of them and attack humans completely unprovoked, so people wouldn't want to sympathize with them, and therefore be completely fine with them being hunted and persecuted, often to extinction. Obviously, wolves weren't the first predatory animals to get this treatment, tigers did, lions did, bears did, hell, even humans did as we can see with those old, racist cartoons.

For newer cartoons, it's usually because all of the animals have exaggerated features, or the artist just didn't really care that much, and wanted to modernize the original caricature, because they just got too used to it. And since I'm sure some people reading this description scrolled down in the post and saw comments mentioning the character One-Eye from Leafie: A Hen into the Wild, and how she's a mix of both, it's the same for wolves too; sometimes, you'll find a mix of both styles, so the animal looks like a combination of the "traditional" wolf design from old cartoons, but also looks like the real animal, kind of like what Wolf Walkers did, and I very much prefer designs like that over those saber-toothed hyena-weasels I used to see all the time.


On a personal note: I originally wanted to do this when my boyfriend first showed me the picture, but I was inspired to actually go through and do it when I was on my way back home from the store, and during my walk, I started to remember this strange cartoon I saw when I was 5 years old that was about bats, and there was an episode about a leucistic black bear that was greedily chowing down on bear bait, and she initially rejected a cub with standard colors due to her rare genetic trait when the bats tried to convince her to take care of him for the time being, but she eventually grew to accept him later after she saved his life, and because I couldn't find it anywhere, I thought to myself, "what is this cartoon, was I imagining it?" Well, I found out that cartoon was actually real, it's just really obscure. It's called Silverwing, it's based on a novel of the same name which my "exaggerated" design on the right was partly inspired by, and I just got done binging the entire series after finding it again. I enjoyed it for the most part, it's really good, but there is unfortunately some 'animal racism'/speciesism as well as cannibalism, so trigger warning for that, and even though the main characters grow to understand that not all birds are bad, due to one of the main characters being a peaceful owl, there are no good wolves sadly, they're all evil, so it kind of loses a star from my personal review rating for that one; that leaves it at 4 stars for me. Hell, they don't even look like wolves, I thought they were hyenas. :/

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    It's true though. Since I fix audio/visual materials for the Library I work at, recently I had to fix a Disney DVD (one of their educational series) about Wolves and Foxes--and all of the animation clips they were showing of Wolves were that they were evil monsters that ate things and looked like your drawing on the right. As I'm watching this educational DVD about Wolves and all their wondrousness I'm thinking--jeeze, Disney, and you keep perpetuating the evil monster stereotype in your animation with both act and look. :<