The revolution will be animated: Why animation is my Molotov cocktail
With the ability to go beyond the limitations of live-action and set fire to perceived social norms, Carl Jones, Co-Founder of animation studio Martian Blueberry, explains why animation isn't just for kids.
The living, breathing pulse of animation beats louder than ever in a world choked by a digital death grip.
Viral vids, algorithms, and clickbait dominate our lives, making authenticity an endangered species. But piercing through the noise there’s one raw, unfiltered artwork that’s still screaming into the void, and that’s animation.
Western audiences shoved animation into a safe and friendly kids' zone, but it can be a dangerous flamethrower.
Western audiences shoved animation into a safe and friendly kids' zone, but it can be a dangerous flamethrower. It can set social norms ablaze, distill human truths, bend reality, and make us laugh at things we’d normally cry about. Great art sometimes holds up a mirror to society. The best art breaks that mirror and makes us pick up the pieces.
Above: Animation isn't just something for kids, it can be a dangerous, cultural flamethrower.
I’ve used animation to laugh in the face of censorship and sometimes at the human condition. The beauty of the medium is that it lives outside the boundaries of the real world, with no live-action limitations. In animation, a kid can swing through multiverses as Spider-Man. A talking horse like Bojack Horseman can expose celebrity culture. And The Boondocks can make MLK Jr. drop the n-bomb on national television.
That’s the kind of disruption that only animation can pull off. It slips under the radar of political correctness, disguises razor-sharp commentary in punchlines, and slices through bullshit with surgical precision.
I’ve used animation to laugh in the face of censorship and sometimes at the human condition.
For centuries, satire has relied on visual storytelling as a secret weapon. The Greeks roasted tyrants with it. Political cartoons mocked kings and toppled empires. And in modern times shows like The Boondocks carry that torch, stuffing society’s contradictions into the mouth of a little Black kid, with big, adorable anime eyes and a giant 'fro.
In the episode Return of the King, we imagined a world where MLK Jr. survived the assassination attempt and woke up from a coma decades later, only to find the dream he got all of those ass whoopings for distorted it beyond recognition. When he delivered a fiery speech condemning the current state of Black people it hit a nerve, and that was the point. You can say in animation what you can't say anywhere else. You can challenge sacred cows, disrupt false narratives, and pull skeletons out of America's closet. And we did.
Above: Animated show The Boondocks' episode The Return of the King imagined a world in which Martin Luther King Jnr survived, waking up in the present and in a world far from that he could imagine.
Another moment that showed the power of animation for me was writing Black Dynamite’s The Wizard of Watts. It’s one thing to entertain, it’s another to confront police brutality, systemic racism, and psychological trauma using The Wizard of Oz as a metaphor and still make people laugh.
The Wizard of Watts dropped during a time when tensions around police violence were boiling over in America. We used the surreal, satirical landscape of Oz to confront real-life horrors. In the episode, Black Dynamite is knocked unconscious by a crooked cop and wakes up in a warped dreamscape where familiar characters represent different facets of the Black American experience. The episode was featured in The New York Times as an example of how animated satire can push boundaries, open minds and speak hard truths when the world refuses to listen. That’s what I mean when I say animation is a Molotov cocktail.
Even Renaissance masters weren’t just painting pretty angels; they were sneaking heresy into cathedrals.
This radical, truth-telling art stretches back centuries. Even Renaissance masters weren’t just painting pretty angels; they were sneaking heresy into cathedrals. Keith Haring turned New York’s subway tunnels into sacred scrolls of resistance, screaming about AIDS, racism and corporate greed in simple, bold cartoony paintings. Emory Douglas didn’t paint bowls of fruit, he armed the Black Panthers with bold, visceral images of Black pride and resistance. His rippled through our communities like scripture. He didn’t ask permission to speak the truth; he illustrated it and let the work do the shouting.
Animation is that same spirit, rendered in keyframes.
Above: The Wizard of Watts satirised The Wizard of Oz and showed how animated series could push political boundaries.
At Martian Blueberry, we don’t see animation as content, we see it as culture. We use it to amplify unheard voices and to explore what it means to be human, especially when humanity feels like it may have lost its way.
Animation remains one of the last spaces where perspective, substance, and uniqueness still matter.
Whether we’re helping brands move authentically in Black culture or creating disruptive animated series, our mission is to tell the truth, without flinching. Make things a little uncomfortable. Make it bold. Make it unforgettable. Because animation doesn’t just ask you to think, it dares you to.
In a world of AI, where sameness is scaling fast, animation remains one of the last spaces where perspective, substance, and uniqueness still matter. It reaches across cultures, languages and platforms. Animators are the new griots, and the revolution will be animated, drawing the truth into the light, one keyframe at a time.