I have always enjoyed cartoons from the inception of drawing little figures on book pages and flipping them quickly, to the great works of art like Pinocchio from Disney and The Triplets of Belleville which hearkens right back to Fleischer, Popeye and Betty Boop.
Part of the attraction is the zany world in which anything can happen and no one gets hurt – a little like the Keystone Kops, and part is the wish fulfillment that some of the world should actually work this way. Partly it was a way and still is of saying things that in other ways would not appear funny, or even are difficult to say in public, taking as their starting point the great cartoonists who worked for newspapers and made social comment with a smile. Of course as we have seen in recent years that can be dangerous when people are not brought up with sense of humour.
In many ways the cartoons without any humour go against the expectations of the viewers and are a little hit and miss because even if humour doesn’t work for adults it generally works for children. The great cartoon films are as attractive to adults as to children.
In other ways there are some stories that are best told as cartoons because their effects – like the religious myths- can never be matched in real life films. But then in all likelihood religions are just intellectual cartoons colouring in with imagination the world as we would like to see it and not as it is.