Cartoon characters don't get older.

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Ever notice how cartoon characters don't get older. They are always the same age.

Sometimes they do..well..just a bit..
e.g. the ones from rugrats...I think pebbles and bam bam too.
Simba from the Lion King, though that was an animated movie, Tarzan (from the disney movie)...


Though during the duration of the series, you're right, usually they don't get older.

Bart and Lisa from "The Simpsons" are a good example.

I've actually noticed that in some episodes they apparantely were born around the 1980's, and then in some of the later episodes they were born in the 1990's.

Well, yeah, it's a cartoon.

They aren't really supposed to get older.. or make sense.

"For Better or For Worse" by Lynn Johnston actually had the characters age. The cartoonist has since discontinued the strip for personal reasons but up until a year or so ago she had every character age, some died, including an elderly relative and the family dog. Funky Winkerbean has characters who age and die too.

Two exceptions anyway for you ....

I think the kids in South Park went up a grade once didnt they?

Its more so to do with the story telling technique of cartoons. There's not as much a continuity of story from episode to episode with most of your cartoons out there, each episode is typically its own little 20 minute story. Its almost as if the question is that it is not the characters not aging so much as time is not passing.

There is also the continuity of character design you want to keep in tact. There is production season and broadcast season. A production season may have made the last half of one broadcast season and the first half of the next. You can have dozens of people drawing the filler cells, and to change can mess with the consistancy.

There is also marketing and branding to consider.


Though now-a-days its more tradition and the comfort of watching the same people year after year. Since technology and the involvment of computer animation can make it real easy to age a cartoon character year after year.

She stopped making the strip? NO!! ! THAT WAS MY FAVOURITE COMIC OF ALL TIME!

She restarted it a few months back. Yeah, they aged - the oldest son in the original comic was my age about.

I was thinking if they did age - Bart would be around 30, Lisa around 27 and Maggie about 20.

some characters do get older

elfquest characters age, and several have died of age.
many change as they age, grow beards, become more quiet and mature, etc.
since the series begun, a ton of characters have been added, simply by birth.


its the best known example i can think of

maybe they dont count, if you only look for cartoon characters
south park as mentioned above have aged w one year or so, according to the story.

SP - they aged 1 year in 13 years.

Pebbles and Bam-Bam from "The Flintstones", as well as Blondie and Dagwood Bumstead's kids grew up - to a point.

It's sort of a cartoon "rule" that characters don't age. There are exceptions of course, like in the For Bettor Or For Worse comics the family members aged like real people. This led to Lynn Johnston to having do some things she knew her fans wouldn't like in order to be true to the strip, like ending Farley the dog's life when he was 14.

I'm a cartoonist myself and I really don't want my characters to age because eventually they'd die or be too old to bother with. I think we might be using it as part of our desire not to age ourselves. A lot of other things about them don't change either, like the clothes they wear. Sometimes it's played for laughs, like one time Bart Simpson had a crush on Reverend Lovejoy's daughter and when she doesn't return his affections at first he asks Lisa if it's because he's been wearing the same t-shirt and shorts day-in and day-out for the past several years. Another time Bart and Lisa complained to Homer they were running out of clean clothes and Lisa said "Feels like I've been wearing this same red dress forever."

I don't consider spin-offs or episodes that show present-day characters as younger or older versions of themselves as them really aging. It's more of a hypothetical thing -what would they be like as kids/adults/teens? Also, usually when older characters are kids or babies, it's a marketing gimmick.

Mickey Mouse is maybe around 80 by now. That's old for a mouse! And Bugs Bunny has been around for a long time, too. I remember on the Tiny Toons episode "Fields of Honey", it's explained to Babs that Bugs was over 50, but he doesn't look it because laughter keeps a Toon young but they grow old and forgotten if the laughter stops.

The Total Drama series is probably one of those rare instances of this, because even the creators themselves confirmed that none of their characters ever age.

I still remember The Simpson's episode when it was still the 90's where a fortune teller predicts Lisa's future, and according to it we're now supposed to no longer have real trees but just holograms of them, robots look and have emotions just like real humans but when they cry their tear gush out and make their heads explode, and the British saved the American's...rear ends... in WWIII.

And of course Lisa was in College, Bart was actually not in prison, Homer was still alive and Maggie was a teenager but whenever she tried to speak someone interrupted her.

But recently they did an episode that took place in the 90's and Bart said, "That never happened."

Some do. She was probably around 16 when she first appeared. Then about 10 years later she was 50 or so. Other characters in that cartoon also became older.