8. Cow And Chicken
Animals that generally get less anthropomorphic treatment receive something of a reparation in this series from the late nineties. The eponymous protagonists navigate an essentially Simpsonian dynamic of main character relative ages, personal outlook, family and school; but here similarity ceases and madness takes hold. Satan plagues them with problems. Childhood toys soil themselves and aren't happy about it. Their parents refer to themselves with total gender interchangeability, which ceases to be at all confusing when the camera pans back from the child perspective to reveal that each parent entirely lacks a top half. The series also presents a blatant wrinkle in the fabric of censorship compliance, the sort of contrariness which never fails to amuse; prohibited from using the name Satan after his first appearance to describe their devil character, how to then delineate this character as tormentor? Answer: accentuate the characters rump, make his typical appearance naked, and get him to continually reference his lack of nether garments with a string of relevant disguise pseudonyms. Oh, and make his general outlook unmedicatedly Bipolar. Cow and Chicken took an apparent stance of presenting an animation to the world, and letting the world decide if they liked what they saw. This must have worked in some measure, as the I.M. Weasel segment got its own spinoff and was a good cartoon in its own right (helped in no small measure by Michael Dorn's voice acting). A year ago Cow and Chicken graduated to showing as reruns on Cartoon Network's Cartoon Planet block. The thing is, it's the most recent nominee in this list, and for that reason I humbly posit that it actually be reinstated to production.