willing to clap as hard as you can

I've realized the best definition for my reaction to american cartoonage: emotionally unsatisfying.

It's kind of like watching Romeo and Juliet, or Hamlet, or even Porgy and Bess... as put on by fourth-graders. Or worse: adults with all the maturity of fourth-graders -- that is to say, none.

It's a character about to commit suicide at the side of his dead beloved:

I still will stay with thee;
And never from this palace of dim night
Depart again: here, here will I remain
With worms that are thy chamber-maids; O, here
Will I set up my everlasting rest,
And shake the yoke of inauspicious stars
From this world-wearied flesh.

...who follows that with a smirk.

If -- for even the remotest second -- you, as the audience, believed, truly believed that this character was a living person moments away from killing himself -- you would be absolutely on the edge of your seat, the tragedy that much more compounded knowing that Romeo is ignorant of the fact that Juliet only appears to be dead. You might even be one of those in the audience fighting to hold back the cries of wanting to warn the character, somehow, to stop the forward momentum that will lead to eventual ruin.

( American cartoons are an embarrassed fourth-grader, wiping his mouth after faking a kiss on the dead Juliet's lips. )