Gadamer in Cartoon Network

i love cartoon films. how much satisfaction do i get out of these films? just so much. i see them as a break. a break from the heavy issues of life. it's so easy watching cartoon films--no heavy feelings, no mind-buggling conversations, no puzzling endings. it's like seeing all the connections in just one look, i need no second glance. cartoon films are really for kids--and maybe, just maybe, that's the reason why i'm still drawn to it. i want that feeling of being a kid again.
and i guess it's not just me. what started out as cartoon films bloomed to fantasy series. harry potter? lord of the rings? the evolution of man's journey to a fantastical hermeneutics from the minds of the authors who maybe are dead tired of what reality can offer. i wish i could see that view they so much enjoy so i could create my own world even for just a little while. definitely they gather their materials from the now and the here. but you know what's so amazing? where they put these materials.
i don't know if i actually am getting it right. but i can see something out of this bloom of fantasy films: a tapestry of imaginations. fantasy films are made up of beautiful imaginations, an interpretation of life as it is right now: unromantic. from that interpretation man creates his own world, a romantic one, a magical world that the sciences of the time cannor offer. man goes beyond as he oftentimes does but still is grounded to the reality he so much wants to subvert.
if i did understand hans georg gadamer, he is opinion that there is knowledge in tradition. a preceding consensus that is so strong, a pre-understanding of life.
we esperience this. we are always left behind when we tend to create changes. this maybe the reason why some men would tend to release their own understanding through the tunnel of artistic system which, at least the majority, can grasp as simply an expression. there may be contestation even in the realm of art but a stronger paradigm reigns and it clouds artistic forms of expression away from the self-affirmed moralists who have the tendency to see things in black and white.
cartoon and fantasy films always end with a happy ending. a happy ending that echoes everyone's deep longing for a life worth living. a daylight, after all life's troubles. the prevalence of the fantasy films we have, although commercialized by the business sector, is an abbreviated book of comments and a dream of a happy life.
and although we try to go beyond the now and the here, a pre-conceived notion of something already exists even before we get to make a judgment. and this pre-conceived notion resonates, constantly reaching us. our experiences in life serve as biases and bases whenever we encounter something. it's not that j.k. rawling or tolkien experienced the magical world of harry potter or frodo; rather, they've experienced this life we all have and from that came out an unlimited flow of magic they tried to convey through a limited language. it is throgh experiencing the world that we become prejudiced. "prejudices," says gadamer, "are not necessarily unjustified and erroneous, so that they inevitably distort the truth...prejudices, in the literal sense of the word, constitute the initial directedness of our whole ability to experience." our prejudices become our pre-understanding when we interpret or create something. even our own creations entail in them our biases. our whole ability to experience is pre-conditioned by our historicity.
past heartache, for example, either makes us doubtful of a new romance, or clamour for it in an attempt to make it last. it is because "we are possessed by something and precisely because of it we are opened up for the new, the different, the true."
i hope i am not distorting gadamer's thought in saying that even if we go that far, we still carry with us footprints of a certain experience. a certain horizon still limits us that no matter how beautifully clad our fantasy films may be, even if a lot may see them as another world out there that we would like to be in, we cannot deny that 'the world we have here' is still immanent in that 'another world out there.' "there can be no doubt that the great horizon of the past, out of which our culture and our present live, influences us in everything we want, hope for, or fear.."
everything is hermeneutics. hermeneutics is everywhere. even in a computer-generated fantasy film, there can still be room for interpretation. a film, or any work of art for that matter, is an interpretation. it's being a form of art, however, must not be an excuse for it to be untouchable. it's not just in documentary films that you can ask what is being omitted. the presence of violence in fantasy films can be concealed, but cannot be hidden. there is so much head-cutting in fantasy films, so much blood-shedding, so much grieving. but the unquestioning audience can easily let these things go unnoticed or take them as 'normal' because come what may, the film will end happily: the good shall prevail. question it and you will see an 'exasperated look and hear the phrase "IT'S JUST A MOVIE"
what started as an escape from the real world, a noble way of reaching for the beyond, is fast becoming a mirror of the human situation. how much can we transcend, really?
...i'm about to play "the little mermaid" for the nth time around..who knows what answer i can give..