I get into trouble for saying 'cartoon' when it should be animation.....
Lemme at 'em, Candy, I'll take care of 'em. Animation is what you do to create a cartoon! ("The animation of that...uh, animation...is very, uh, animated.")
Sheesh, my computer went down a few days ago, I've resurrected an old clunker, and now I can't shut up, on any topic. I'll wind down soon.
Oh, yes: cartoon: at one point it was a drawing preliminary to another artwork, such as a painting, sculpture, stained glass window, or I think, architectural work. In my experience, (stress that, throughout this bloviation) yes, a cartoon is (usually) a single-panel, humorous drawing, with or without caption. The multi-panel stories are comic strips, a collection of them in a newspaper is comics, and a magazine-style publication of longer stories or serials is a comic book or comic, even if it's not intended to be humorous. Most of the short animated presentations, such as the Saturday-morning variety, are, like the single-panel cartoons, intended to make us laugh, and they share the name. The feature-length animated movies don't easily fit into the vernacular. They're animated like a cartoon, but they aren't necessarily, or primarily, designed solely to make us laugh, so I've noticed some reluctance to call them cartoons; yet no sane person wants to call them "animated feature-length motion pictures." I haven't done a study, but I would estimate that I've heard a division over the years of about one part cartoon, one part cartoon movie, and two parts animated movie. Let me emphasize the non-scientific nature of my results.
Peter
