Parenting & Family Quote by John Kricfalusi

Kricfalusi is quietly picking a fight with the most persistent condescension in animation: the idea that the medium comes with an age limit. By saying cartoons aren’t “only for kids,” he’s not lobbying for cartoons to be treated like prestige TV; he’s insisting they’ve always been capable of adult appetite - for style, for discomfort, for taste that isn’t pre-chewed. Coming from the artist behind The Ren & Stimpy Show, the line reads less like a polite clarification and more like a mission statement from someone who weaponized elasticity, close-ups, and gross-out texture to prove animation can be as abrasive and sensual as any live-action comedy.

Then he pivots: kids will love anything “as long as it’s visually interesting.” That’s the dagger. It reframes children not as simpletons who need moral lessons, but as ruthless formalists. Kids, in his view, respond to rhythm, color, exaggeration, surprise - the raw grammar of looking. Story and “appropriateness” become secondary to the immediate hit of design and motion. There’s also a critique of the industry’s lazy segmentation: if your work only “works for kids,” maybe you’ve confused pandering with clarity.

The subtext is an artist defending pleasure and craft over respectability. Animation, he implies, doesn’t need to earn legitimacy by pretending to be something else. It wins by being irresistibly seen.