Maaaaaan, don't get me started on cartoons! I goddamn love cartoons, everything from the older Disney to modern french surreal cartoons. I can't get enough of them! Also one thing I learned to throw out the window pretty early is that demographics weren't that important. Something I kind of forgot until quite recently, I'll get into that later.
As some of you know I am a huge sucker for the modern reboot of the My Little Pony cartoons (MLP:Friendship is Magic), and while it might not be understandable from the outside, or hell, even the inside. It's a really good show with nice colors, animations and decent enough story arcs, while also being just generally entertaining. I mostly got into it for the lulz, as they say on the internet back when it was a huge fad. But I actually liked it in the end, it wasn't until later that I found out the some of the people working on it were also on the team that made The PowerPuff Girls, another cartoon I liked a lot as a kid, which is definitely not marketed to dudes.
There's also Sheep in the Big City, something that I only watched younger when it was dubbed in Danish, which made me loathe it. It's slow, looks bad and the story is non-sensical in a very unfunny way. BUT, I watched it YEARS later in English and figured out why some people liked it. It's entire premise is a series of puns and stupid wordplays, while the story can be overanalysed into being EVERYTHING. Something that you can't really enjoy as a kid. It also breaks the fourth wall in ways I find pretty funny, even if shoehorned in.
I don't think I saw anyone mention it either, but there's also Regular Show. A slice of life cartoon about two goofballs trying to do as little work as possible without getting fired from their park maintenance jobs. This doesn't sound very interesting, but every episode completely derails about halfway through into occult crazy stuff or the like. A lot of the time without all that much warning, which in it's absurd formularity makes it goddamn hilarious to me. You could see it as a bit of a stoner cartoon, but it's really good even if you are not intoxicated, at least in my opinion.
Edit:
Speaking of the french, there's Wakfu, which is pretty standard in terms of plot and characters. But it is beautiful for a flash cartoon, at least I think so. It took some time getting into it though and the French dubbing with English subs really put me off for a while. But character design is a breath of fresh air for cartoons in my opinion, because pretty much everyone is exaggerated in ways you wouldn't see in most mainstream cartoons. For example Evangeline who is pretty sexualized, something that may put some off as her and her love interest in the series is supposed around 16-18 or so IIRC.
MOVING ON, anime.
If you haven't seen Cowboy Bebop, DO SO NOW. It's basically Firefly before Firefly, a wild west space thriller/comedy/action thing with a ship and it's motley crew of not entirely good do-gooders. Neon Genesis Evangelion is also pretty good, but I haven't had the chance to watch it since I got older. Never saw it till the end, but it is filled with metaphors, symbolic imagery and entirely mindfuck visuals at some points. From what I read/remember a lot of the story, plot and imagery is purposefully made to mess with peoples expectations.
Edit edit:
Oh man, and I completely forgot about Samurai Jack, which Cartoon Network ran back in the day. It was slow paced as all hell with lots of establishing shots. Which only helped emphasize the fantastically choreographed action scenes. I don't remember that many of the episodes off the top of my head, but one thing ran through them all, it was damn beautiful and filled with subdued humour and lots of quirky character design.
I also bolded all the cartoon names in case anyone wants to just take the TL;DR route. Also I haven't slept today, in case I am rambling too much and that bleeds through into the post.
