It’d be a lie to say no one could have predicted the current renaissance in adult animation – twenty years ago the Simpsons offered some of the most incisive commentary about American suburbia on television – but the direction this movement has taken has been surprising. Exemplified by Rick and Morty and Bojack Horseman, the best of modern animation tackles issues that range from middle-aged ennui to subjective morality, while always maintaining a self-awareness of the medium and the tropes that they gleefully employ. What’s surprising in this trend towards complex themes is the context that it emerged from. After the Simpsons opened the door to adult audiences, we saw the rise of South Park and later Family Guy, who further pushed the boundaries of animation. However, the popularity of these shows did feed into a characterisation of adult animation as being mature, primarily through their willingness to feature socially unacceptable humour.

This trend can be seen in the later seasons of the Simpsons, which moved progressively away from social commentary and towards the more random irreverence of its competitors. Compounding this trend was the range of Family Guy spin-offs that proliferated in the 2000s and pointed towards the continued domination of the animation market by a very particular form of humour. What shows like South Park and Family Guy did was open the door that Bojack Horseman and Rick and Morty have walked through. Although flippantly and without much depth, the former shows did touch on a wide variety of themes. Along with the Simpsons this proved the existence of a market for adult animation, which made the experimentation of recent years possible. This market, combined with the rise of Netflix and online streaming, allowed risks to be taken that would have been impossible even 20 years ago – like a show built around an anthropomorphic, alcoholic horse who struggles to find meaning in life following the cancellation of Horsin’ Around, his mediocre 90’s sitcom. Netflix didn’t need to worry about what time slot to air Bojack Horseman, or what demographic to target: they could drop it onto people’s computers and wait for the market to come to them.

The same is true for Rick and Morty, which Adult Swim airs online for free. In fact, Adult Swim deserve a lot of the credit for the new direction we’ve seen in animation, with shows like Moral Orel and Venture Bros’ proving that animation could handle impactful themes. The internet has also allowed for new expressions of popularity and fandom with Facebook, Twitter and Reddit giving successful shows easy feedback for their creators. While in the past, experimental shows could easily slip under the radar and face early cancellation, instant online metrics, like views on Youtube, quickly show what is and is not popular. What Rick and Morty and Bojack Horseman did with this opportunity to experiment, is explore how life is not only complex and strange, it can also be fundamentally unfair. Previous cartoons either maintained the sitcom trope of happy endings and returning to a stable tabula rasa at the end of each episode, or broke with that trope in flippant and infantile ways. This is what really separates these new cartoons from their contemporaries: they are happy to leave the questions they ask hanging instead of offering easy answers or cheap escapism. Instead of Peter Griffin fighting an anthropomorphic chicken, we have Rick contemplating suicide because he seems incapable of forming healthy emotional connections with other people.

At their heart, Bojack Horseman and Rick and Morty are both genuine in the themes they deconstruct. They are no less funny for this – after years of unending irony, it’s refreshing to have television dealing with the kind of questions real people struggle with. Maybe they get away with being so heartfelt precisely because they have the cartoon veneer, a built-in mechanism that means they avoid becoming over-wrought or “too serious”. Of course, there must be a disclaimer that only Western animation is being dealt with here; deep themes have been explored in Japanese anime for many years. Ghost in the Shell was asking what it means to be human in a computerised world on television in 2002. In fact, the growth in popularity of anime has undoubtedly played a part in introducing the idea of high-concept animation. And make no mistake; the defining feature of the current “animation renaissance” is how high-concept it’s willing to go. Bojack Horseman seemed set at the beginning to be little more than a well-trod critique of celebrity and Hollywood before evolving into one of the most compelling character studies on television. Somehow the characters are all-too-human, despite often being anthropomorphic animals – a fact that the show’s internal logic simply takes as a given.

Rick and Morty tackles the question of how to make characters human in animation by foregrounding its Science Fiction elements – while subtly examining how human beings are changed by the things they have to witness and do. This is arguably the central theme of the show, which is explored through the contrast between its two protagonists: Morty, the naïve and inexperienced teenager and Rick, the emotionally closed-off veteran who’s suffered decades of struggle and loss. Both shows have now finished their second seasons, so we have a good idea of what each is trying to achieve and where they are going – although each has surprised their audience before with left-field developments. Perhaps the wider question is what they mean for adult animation as a medium.

The advent of Family Guy forced the Simpsons to evolve, but it doesn’t seem likely that Family Guy is going to suddenly start challenging its audiences to question their basic assumptions. Perhaps, it’ll be more like the eventual fate of Horsin’ Around – eclipsed by newer and smarter shows, the older generation of cartoons may just find themselves outdated. Although such a development is years away it does point towards how radically animation has changed, not only in the past decade but even in the past three years. If the release of Rick and Morty in 2013 heralds the beginning of the new trend in animation it’s frankly impossible to know where it will lead. After all, it’s that very uncertainty that makes these new shows so compelling.