Children’s Cartoons & Utopia

From a paper I just finished:

Maggie is a five-year old cartoon character who imagines a space called Nowhere Land. At one point she organizes her imaginary friends and they collectively dig a big hole; even Rudy the Mouse (whose hat doesn’t come off) is given a spoon so as to help. When they’ve finished digging the hole, her friends inquire as to its purpose. Maggie is temporarily perplexed, but responds by asking if her friends had fun digging the hole, to which they respond in the affirmative. The point of digging the hole, Maggie explains, was to have fun.

We see that Nowhere Land is a utopia, it is the space from which Maggie articulates and imagines her desires, and the content of her utopia is a critique of capitalist society: the idea that labour should be undertaken for personal fulfillment echoes Marx’s critique of the alienation of the labourer from his or her labour, and offers a critique of a capitalist society where labour is a means to an “end” as a perpetually unfulfilled consumer.

In the next vignette of that episode, Maggie and her friends go to rebuild the home of Sidestep (the crab) whose sand house has been washed away by a wave. After they build the house they put a red star(fish?) above the entrance.

Whoever wrote that episode was clearly a socialist.

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