Censor: A person given the authority to filter through media in order to cut anything considered to be too obscene or objectifying.
+ Morals: Principles of behaviour in accordance with standards of right and wrong.
+ Ethics: 1. A code of behaviour, especially of a particular group, profession or individual
2. The moral fitness of a decision, course of action etc
3. The study of the moral value of human conduct
"Everybody everywhere wants to modify, transform, embellish, enrich, and reconstruct the world around him - to introduce into an otherwise harsh or bland existence some sort of purposeful and distorting alleviation" (Theodore Levitt, The Morality (?) of Advertising, 1970)
Animation and censorship go hand in hand when aired, depending on the amount of gore or sexual themes that the feature contains, this also depends on the time that the animation is aired.
For example in the animation, Terra Formers the gore added to the action is blacked out with the use of circles, to the point where it becomes confusing. As the black circles are so circular, the censorship stands out more than the main narrative in the animation, the scene becomes confusing through how the circles become something that seemed to have just been added, not to really censor out the gore.
I find that subtle censorship for gore scenes need to be used as even through the worst of the gore is censored out in the example of Terra Formers, the blood around the bodies is till apparent, if the airing of the animation was at an earlier schedule, the use of the blood should be censored as well.
In contrast Tokyo Ghoul uses a gradual censorship that is not as noticeable as the previous example. However some of the censored scenes are so manipulated to the extent that the screen is nearly black and the actual movement of the character is lost as it is hidden from the audience. I felt that the people whom censored the show realised that the censorship was eating into the image in which they changed the colour of the censorship to white and in a few scenes turned the whole scene into a negative. I wasn't too sure how turning the scene into a negative acted as a form of censorship as the blood and gore was still apparent in the scene, just in a different colour set. I felt that the use of using a silhouette and showing the gore in negative would have worked better as it suggests that this was the kind of censorship they were looking for. The use of the silhouette would work as it can impact the atmosphere of the scene well when used with an emotional narrative.
Another example with actions being censored in animation is smoking. In Jojo's Bizarre Adventure, the main character Jotaro is portrayed with a dark patch over his mouth whenever he smokes, which could possibly work if the cigarette and smoke was hidden as well. I understand that the censorship is used due to the character being underage, so he cannot smoke, however for the age range that it is aimed at their shouldn't be a need to censor only this out compared to the amount of gore that is with in the action scenes of the animation. Another example can be seen in the animation One Piece, in which the company 4Kids censored over one of the characters cigarette with a lollypop. Even though it felt a little bit silly compared to the original animation, the censorship worked with the audience that they had aimed the show to the western audience. However, even though they had censored over the lollypop, they had not censored over the smoke that emitted from the cigarette, creating a smoking lollypop. It was a shame that they were not able to remove the smoke as it did not make sense in quite a few of the scenes, in which 4Kids skipped quite a few of episodes and scenes, and sometimes merging episodes together from the amount of cuts they have made.
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