Graduation Year
2025
Document Type
Thesis
Degree
M.A.
Degree Name
Master of Arts (M.A.)
Degree Granting Department
Humanities and Cultural Studies
Major Professor
Scott Ferguson, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Todd Jurgess, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Brendan Cook, Ph.D.
Keywords
animation, economies, neoliberal, net, scarcity, television
Abstract
Summer Camp Island exhibits the culmination of the animation styles and ethics of dependent care produced within contemporary Cartoon Network animations. As part of the production cycle of Warner Bros. animated television programs following Adventure Time, Julia Pott’s animated program depicts networks of collaborative care informed by the lived realities of the creator-animators. By employing a reparative reading of the narratives and cute aesthetics which appear in the program, I maintain that the care networks presented within the diegesis of Summer Camp Island depict alternatives to the precarious economic and industrial realities that actively shaped the show’s production and distribution. Most notably accomplished in episode 107 and 210 – titled “Feeling Spacey” and “We’ll Just Move the Stars” – Summer Camp Island depicts and emphasizes social organizations predicated on collaborative care which resemble humanities conceptions of heterodox economies and actor-networks. Recognizing the reparative cuteness in the program, I read the aesthetics as evident of the collective networks which inform the program’s ethics of collaborative care. Challenging established animation studies accounts which recognize humanistic and pro-social aspects within contemporary Cartoon Network narratives, I extend my examination of Summer Camp Island to include extra-diegetic socio-political concerns. Consequently, many of the animated programs produced on the heels of Adventure Time assume confusing and needlessly austere distribution models, leaving spectators with extremely limited avenues for viewership, thereby diminishing the reach and impact of these narratives. Primarily, I maintain that Summer Camp Island recognizes reparative alternatives to its austere production relations, exhibiting and subsequently denying the zero-sum logics of neoliberal economies with positive-sum aesthetics and narratives which offer interdependence, heterodox economics, and repaired social relations as viable solutions.
Scholar Commons Citation
Hanjian, James R., "Reparative Cuteness: Summer Camp Island’s Obfuscated Streaming Distribution Reveals Our Dependence on Monetary Care" (2025). USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/etd/10957
