Animation Studies – Vol.5, 2010

Assessing the failings of mechanisms of power through comedy has remained a constant throughout animation. Within the specific arena of ‘the popular’, always a potent area for consid-eration, adult British network television animation in the early part of the 21st century has main-tained a unique relationship with modes of Satire that has enabled writers and performers to ex-plicitly address such concerns. An illustration of this can be located within the animated satire, Popetown (2005). This is a useful vehicle by which to not only assess British mainstream anima-tion’s interaction with one of the key social institutions, the Church, but it also serves as a baro-meter for broader cultural attitudes towards tradition, hierarchy and authority and as well as as-sessing contemporary definitions of the satiric form itself. Popetown has also since become not-able for effectively drawing to a close a period of institutional support within British mainstream Television animation, mainly through an inception defined by concession, but also through its failure to fully exploit the freedoms afforded to its form. In actuality it embodies many of the shortcomings now located within contemporary satirical comedy. By placing the show into a broader cultural context what emerges here is how conceptions of nostalgia, rather than any dir-ect interrogation of institutions, now appear to shape the basis of British animated mainstrea