Cartoon Violence brings together two 3D animations—by American artists Takeshi Murata and Bunny Rogers—that grapple with the coded, gendered violence that defines the ultimate American cultural product, the cartoon.

Murata’s I, Popeye (2010) turns the eponymous sailor man into a crudely 3D-rendered subject suffering an existential crisis. The six-minute video opens on our erstwhile hero absent-mindedly filling cans with spinach on a factory-floor production line. Alienated from his labour, and the ambrosia which grants him his power, his masculinity, he drifts into a psychedelic vision of melting colours and incomprehensible planes. The ensuing factory disaster has terrible consequences for Popeye, revealing his powerlessness and the futility and impotence of his life, all to the soundtrack of his usual theme transposed to a disturbing and sinister minor key. Popeye’s final release is at once violent and liberating, as he seems to tell us: ‘That’s all I can stands, ’cause I can’t stands no more’.

Rogers’s Mandy’s Piano Solo in Columbine Cafeteria (2016) is haunted by the spectre of the Columbine High School shooting. In this thirteen-minute video, a woman sits at a grand piano abandoned in the cafeteria, performing mournful covers of Elliot Smith songs. Mandy—appropriated from the cartoon Clone High and originally voiced by pop star Mandy Moore—only pauses her elegiac performance to drain a glass of red wine. Her performance continues while snow falls, as if the sky itself were grieving and burying the dead. Rogers’s work meditates on the aftermath of male violence, and how a traumatic event might poison an entire generation, their pop culture, their music, their innocence, their cartoons.