Random Cartoon Show Generator

What this list is

These are animated television shows, and if you look at the range on this list, from crude adult comedy to sweeping fantasy adventure to strange, beautiful, deeply personal series, you are looking at the result of a quiet revolution: the transformation of TV animation from an assembly-line product for children into a medium where a single creator's vision could reach the screen more or less intact.

Press Generate and it hands you one. A few from the list:

• The Simpsons
• Avatar: The Last Airbender
• Adventure Time
• BoJack Horseman
• Steven Universe
• Rick and Morty
• Gravity Falls
• South Park

That list would have been impossible for most of television history, when cartoons were made to a formula, by committee, for small children, on a factory schedule. The shows above exist because, over a few decades, TV animation changed into something that could carry a real author's voice, tell a continuous story, and speak to adults as well as children. This page is about how that happened.

Drawing a show

1. Press Generate for one show.
2. Ask for a few to build a watchlist.
3. Type into Contains to search the titles.
4. Copy to keep them.

Where these come from

Animated television shows gathered and checked by hand, across the famous and the obscure. The tool picks from that pool in your browser.

From factory line to single vision

For most of its history, television animation was made like a product, not authored like a work. Shows were produced on tight budgets and tighter schedules, aimed squarely at young children, and built to a reliable formula so that episodes could be churned out quickly and cheaply, often by large teams where no single person's vision dominated. The goal was to fill a Saturday morning and sell some toys, and the results, while sometimes charming, were rarely anyone's personal artistic statement.

This factory model made a certain sense. Animation is enormously labour-intensive, and television demands a lot of it fast, so the pressure was always toward efficiency: standard formats, interchangeable episodes, house styles that any team could execute. A distinctive personal vision is slow and expensive and risky, exactly what a factory is built to avoid. So for decades, the medium produced competent, formulaic, disposable children's entertainment, and the idea that a cartoon might be a serious work of authorship, or aimed at adults, or tell a single continuous story with real emotional weight, was mostly foreign to it.

The shows on this list represent the slow overturning of that model, the gradual shift from animation as an anonymous factory product to animation as a medium where individual creators could put their genuine, personal, distinctive vision on screen. It did not happen all at once, and it happened because a series of shows proved, one by one, that the old assumptions were wrong.

The show that proved cartoons could be for everyone

The single most important breach in the old wall was a show that proved, definitively and to enormous commercial success, that an animated series could be aimed at adults as much as children, and become one of the most significant things on television.

Before it, prime-time animation for adults was thought to be a dead end. This show demolished that. It was sharp, satirical, emotionally real, and written with a wit aimed squarely over children's heads at their parents, and it became a genuine cultural phenomenon, one of the longest-running and most influential shows in the entire history of the medium. It worked on two levels at once: children could enjoy the bright characters and slapstick, while adults caught the satire, the references, the genuine emotional depth underneath the comedy.

Its success changed what was thinkable. It proved there was a large adult audience for animation, that a cartoon could be culturally central rather than a children's sideshow, and that the medium could carry real writing, real satire, and real feeling. Every adult animated show that followed, and there are many on this list, owes its existence to that proof of concept. The wall between cartoons and adults, which had stood for decades, was breached, and once it was breached the whole landscape of what an animated show could be began to open up.

The creators who were allowed to be authors

The deeper change, and the one that produced the most interesting shows on this list, was the rise of the individual creator as author, the animation equivalent of a film director whose personal vision defines the work.

As the medium matured and networks came to trust that distinctive shows could find audiences, they increasingly handed a series to a single creator and let that creator's voice drive it, rather than smoothing everything into a house style by committee. This produced shows that were unmistakably the vision of one person: idiosyncratic, personal, stylistically distinctive, carrying a particular sensibility all the way through. A show could now look and feel like its creator thought and dreamed, rather than like a product designed by consensus to offend no one.

The results were transformative. Given real authorial freedom, creators made animated shows of extraordinary originality and emotional depth, series that tackled grief, identity, mental illness, growing up, love and loss, wrapped in wildly imaginative worlds that only animation could produce. Some of the most acclaimed television of recent years, in any form, animated or live-action, sits on this list, made by creators who were trusted to pursue a singular vision and did. The medium that had once been an anonymous factory became a place where an artist could say something personal and strange and true.

This is the auteur model, long familiar in film, arriving in television animation, and it changed the ceiling of what the medium could achieve. When you let a genuine artist author a cartoon, rather than assembling it by committee to a formula, you get work that can stand with the best of any medium, and the proof is scattered all through this list.

When cartoons learned to tell one long story

One more shift completed the transformation, and it is visible in the difference between the older shows on this list and the newer ones: animated television learned to tell continuous, serialised stories, where episodes build on each other and characters genuinely change.

The old factory model was built on self-contained episodes, deliberately so. Each episode reset to the same starting point, nothing carried over, and you could watch them in any order, which suited a medium made for casual young viewers and endless syndication. Characters never aged, never learned, never changed, because change would break the interchangeability the format depended on. This kept things simple and repeatable, and it kept the stories shallow, since nothing could ever accumulate or develop.

The newer shows broke this open. Following the lead of ambitious live-action drama, they began telling long, continuous stories across whole seasons and series: characters who grow and change, plots that build over dozens of episodes, arcs with real beginnings, middles and ends, emotional stakes that deepen as the story accumulates. A fantasy adventure could tell one epic tale across its whole run. A strange, personal series could let its characters genuinely mature over years. This let animated shows achieve a depth of character and story that the reset-button format never could, because now things could carry forward, consequences could stick, and a character at the end of a series could be a changed person from who they were at the start.

Put these shifts together, animation for adults, the creator as author, and the serialised story, and you have the whole revolution this list represents. TV animation went from a formulaic factory product for children to a medium capable of personal, adult, serialised storytelling as sophisticated as anything on television. The range on this list, from the crude to the sublime, is the range of a medium that grew up, and the best of it stands with the best that television has produced in any form.

Questions people ask

When did cartoons stop being just for children?

The decisive breach came with a hugely successful prime-time animated show that proved a cartoon could be aimed at adults as much as children and become culturally central. Its success opened the door for the many adult animated series that followed, overturning the long assumption that animation was only children's entertainment.

Why do some animated shows feel so distinctive and personal?

Because networks increasingly handed a series to a single creator and let that creator's vision drive it, rather than smoothing everything into a committee-designed house style. This auteur model, long familiar in film, let creators make animated shows that were unmistakably the work of one artist, with all the originality that brings.

Why do newer cartoons tell continuous stories when older ones didn't?

Because the old factory model relied on self-contained, resettable episodes that could air in any order, which kept stories shallow. Newer shows, following ambitious live-action drama, adopted serialised storytelling where characters change and plots build across seasons, achieving a depth the reset-button format never allowed.

Are animated shows really as good as live-action ones?

The best of them stand with the best television in any form. Once the medium allowed adult themes, authorial vision and serialised storytelling, creators produced animated series that tackle grief, identity and growing up with genuine sophistication, wrapped in imaginative worlds only animation could create.

References

1. The Simpsons, on the prime-time animated series that proved a cartoon could reach a mass adult audience and reshape the medium. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Simpsons
2. Adventure Time, on the creator-driven, serialised style that helped redefine what television animation could achieve. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_Time