TELEVISION / Farewell Bambi, hello Butt-head: Forget Disney and his cuddly animals - the new wave of American animation has a bite as vicious as its bark. Ben Thompson reports

WHAT DO we expect a cartoon to be? A rough sketch maybe; an exaggeration; a blockbusting Disney cute-fest? On British children's television now, a cartoon usually means a badly drawn family of cuddly dinosaurs. In America, things are different. There is still pap, of course, oceans of it - but over the last five years cartoons have supplied some of the most sophisticated and edgy entertainment around. The Simpsons, Ren & Stimpy and Beavis and Butt-head make up a three-part cartoon odyssey into the heart of American social anxiety - and they're funny with it.

In this country, however, their impact has been restricted for too long to the dish-owning minority. The terrestrial channels were very slow off the mark. The Simpsons began life in America in 1987 as part of The Tracey Ullman Show. The BBC bought Tracey but not the 'too American' Simpsons: like picking a peach and only eating the stone. Sky TV then used them as their main (their only?) selling point. Questions have been asked in the House about preserving Wimbledon tennis for the non-satellite nation, but no one ever said anything about The Simpsons.

This was not just a vital stage in the breakdown of a shared national culture. It also meant that anyone who didn't want to become a part of Rupert Murdoch's world had to hire The Simpsons from the video shop. This is well worth the effort. The show has a rare acuity and a rich, multi-faceted wit. When it first appeared, The Simpsons - alongside similarly subversive, live-action sitcoms, such as Roseanne and Married with Children - was part of an unexpected televisual shift back to reality. At the end of the Reagan era, no one could deny that this had a political dimension. George Bush said he wanted the average American family to be 'more like The Waltons and less like The Simpsons'. Look what happened to him.

Producer James L Brooks claims The Simpsons 'shows the normal American family in all its beauty and all its horror'. As the man behind such shameless Hollywood schmaltz as Terms of Endearment, his views on this subject are not necessarily to be trusted, but The Simpsons' creator Matt Groening certainly wanted it to be that way. Why else should he name all the main characters except the angelic brat Bart - father Homer, mother Marge and daughters Lisa and Maggie - after his own family? It's a tribute to the strength of his vision that The Simpsons, now as much of an institution in the US as the cosy Cosbys, has not lost its punch. More importantly, it has also paved the way for new, still more daring visions.

In America, the second wave, Ren & Stimpy, which in 1991-92 became the most popular US cable TV show ever, is already effectively over. Creator John Kricfalusi had to hand over the rights to his characters to get the programme made. At the end of the second series he was ousted from his own show - the official reason was missed deadlines, but another suggestion was corporate unease with Kricfalusi's unpredictable nature. The kids' channel Nickelodeon carried on making it without him, with the help of one of his former partners, but the third series, with Kricfalusi's hand torn from the rudder, has widely been deemed a disaster.

In Britain though, Ren & Stimpy is still at its best. Snapped up - better late than never - by BBC2, there are three episodes of the first series and 13 of the second still to come. Savour them while you can, because this is really something special. The animation lights up the screen with glowing colours, rakish angles and hallucinatory shape-changes. Ren & Stimpy is not just a throwback to the golden days of Tex Avery, Chuck Jones and Bob 'Bugs Bunny' Clampett, it is new and dark, and sometimes even frightening.

There is nothing intrinsically radical about the relationship of Ren Hoek, an irascible chihuahua, and the heartbreakingly stupid Stimpson J Cat; even though they share the same bed. As Kricfalusi himself says: 'They're a classic double-act in the Laurel and Hardy mould; one's an asshole and the other's retarded.' But their adventures trash the barriers of time and space. One week Ren & Stimpy journey to the outer reaches of the Crab Nebula, the next they present their own nature programme. One minute they are erasing history, the next they are saving a horse from a burning skyscraper.

The emotional pyrotechnics are just as dazzling as the animatory ones. Stimpy, his idiotic tongue poking out from beneath his bulbous blue nose, endlessly torments his partner with misguided attempts to improve the quality of his life. Ren responds with a dazzling array of mood-swings, veering without warning from cringing fearfulness - eyes filling with tears, heart pumping through paper-thin skin - to psychotic menace. Kricfalusi himself supplies the voice: three parts Peter Lorre to one part Jack Nicholson (he didn't want to do it, but none of the 30 actors auditioned could manage the requisite intensity).

Has he owned a chihuahua? 'No, but if I wasn't allergic to them and didn't hate clearing up poop, I think I definitely would. They are the coolest dogs. One time I was going into a restaurant and someone had left two in their car, chained to the steering wheel. They were screaming at me and their eyes were bulging; these two tiny little creatures who couldn't do a thing for themselves were aching to tear my throat out. I thought, 'This has to be in a cartoon'. '

This man talks about cartoons with evangelical fervour. 'There are millions of things made now that are called cartoons, but none of them is truly cartoony,' he says angrily. 'Cartoons today aren't written by cartoonists, they're made by people who can't draw - hack writers and accountants.' So what is the essence of cartoony-ness? 'Just funny drawings, basically - wild, surreal drawings - and butt-jokes.'

Ah yes, butt-jokes. Ren & Stimpy is consistently, at times unnervingly, scatological, and sometimes snotological too. Stimpy's abiding love is Gritty Kitty cat litter. His hairballs are large and luxuriant. In one episode Ren climbs a single, Rapunzel-length hair up a castle tower. It turns out to be of nasal origin. 'Mainly we put the fart and booger jokes in for kids, but we found out that grown-ups liked them as well,' says Kricfalusi, who 'likes people watching to feel as if they got away with something'.

Nickelodeon felt Kricfalusi was getting away with too much. Watching the occasional appearances of homoerotic superhero Powdered Toast Man, you can see how they might have felt a little out of their depth. Ren's tantrums used to bring letters back from head office saying 'lose the scenes where Ren is acting like an abusive father'. Ren & Stimpy is itself lost now, but when they fired Kricfalusi, Nickelodeon allowed him to take back the rights to a minor character. So neighbourhood despot George Liquor will be at the centre of future projects: a comic book and, with luck, a cinema feature. There was one proviso though: he 'couldn't depict him as a rapist, a child molester or a murderer'.

'Why would I want to do that?' asks an outraged Kricfalusi. 'He's just a normal guy, a walking heart- attack sort of guy. Was Jackie Gleason in The Honeymooners a rapist or a murderer?'

There's no denying the large element of psychosis in Ren & Stimpy. Kricfalusi regards this as 'a release of a lot of human genetic material that we'd probably be better off without; stuff that we don't need, but it's still in there and it's better that it should be released in a safe way, like in cartoons'. He speaks proudly of his fan mail. 'We'd get letters from dads telling us, 'I've had trouble with my sons. We never got along, until one day I came into the room and heard all this shouting on TV. I sat down and watched and now every week our whole family watches Ren & Stimpy together.' '

This may sound rather unlikely, but one of the only things that can bring the archetypal American family together these days is the celebration of its own dysfunction. The virtuoso opening sequence of The Simpsons, where the family runs home from work at the nuclear power plant, shopping and school (Bart is writing lines on the board - 'I must not waste chalk'), to settle down in front of the TV and watch themselves, has proved oddly prophetic.

One of the most shocking things about Beavis and Butt-head, the third and most controversial of these ground-breaking animations, is the absence of any family structure at all. Its heroes are two culturally and morally bankrupt 14-year-old boys, roaming the information highways in search of cheap thrills. Each half- hour episode contains two adventures and a number of rock and rap videos, on which the dumb duo comment in enlightened adolescent fashion (ie. 'look at all those butts').

They like stuff that is cool and dislike stuff that sucks. They hate school and their reading skills are only stimulated by the desire to keep up with the captions on a Guns N' Roses video. The one outlet for their imaginations is thinking up new euphemisms for the erect male member - 'pitching a tent', for example, or 'morning wood'. Their halting speech patterns and constant, moronic, stuttering laughter have made Beavis and Butt-head folk heroes and folk devils at the same time.

Butt-head is the smarter of the two. He has hideous, uncontrollable adolescents' hair, permanently flared nostrils, protuberant gums and mean, piggy eyes. His creator, 30-year-old Mike Judge, says: 'I started out trying to draw a guy I went to high school with. He didn't come out the way I intended, but I kind of liked the way he looked anyway.' Beavis, his blond sidekick, came next - not quite as ugly, but with weird, lightning-flash eyebrows that give his face an unsavoury leer.

Rolling Stone described Beavis and Butt-head as 'America's inner teenager'. Dick Zimmerman, a California state lottery winner, was not so keen. He used his winnings to set up an anti-Beavis and Butt-head hotline, describing the show as 'pure societal poison, glorifying losers, violence and criminality'. What he, and others, have overlooked, is the fact that Beavis and Butt-head is not meant to be a picture of general social collapse, but of a specific and particularly unpleasant stage of adolescence, as mediated through rock-video fantasy.

The lack of any 'moral' voice of redemption or come-uppance is what upsets people most about Beavis and Butt-head. This, of course, is exactly why other people like it - whether as an adjunct or an antidote to MTV's smug synthesis of salacious videos and self-righteous Sixties sermonising. 'There are always people who don't get satire,' says Judge philosophically. 'They don't understand you can portray something without condoning it.'

Fair enough; but the issues raised by Beavis and Butt-head are more complex. When an Ohio mother blamed the show for encouraging her five-year-old son to start a fire which killed her two-year-old daughter, a programme which began as a comment on how we become what we watch became part of the debate about whether we do or not. MTV responded by cancelling the show's early-evening slot - Judge had always argued that Beavis and Butt-head should only be broadcast at night.

When Beavis and Butt-head starts on Channel 4 in three weeks' time, there is sure to be trouble. Some of the programme's more contentious episodes of fantasy fire-raising and actual lighter-fuel sniffing have been done away with in the light of its unexpected crossover success, but it's still pretty severe stuff. Where Ren & Stimpy is a thing of great beauty, Beavis and Butt-head is plain gross. In the unforgettable Monster Truck Heavy Metal Tractor Pull Trash- athon episode, a runaway monster truck crushes a row of portable toilets, unleashing an evil cloud which turns out to be Sterculius, Roman God of Faeces, who kills everybody.

Did Judge specifically set out to make both Beavis and Butt-head ugly? 'I'm not a great artist, but when I first drew them I probably did it a little bit less well than I could have. I wanted them to be an animated version of what I used to draw in high school; there's a way people draw when they've been in art school for too long - they want to draw things from other cartoons, not as they are in reality. Like for an eating place they'll always do a Fifties diner, but I just drew McDonald's'

'The Simpsons': Sky One, Sun 6pm. 'Ren & Stimpy': BBC2, Mon 6.25pm and Fri 11.50pm. 'Beavis and Butt- head': MTV, 9.30pm weekdays, Sat 1am, Sun 11pm; starts on Channel 4 at 11.35pm on Fri 8 April.

(Photographs omitted)