Black And White Morality / Western Animation

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• Played straight as an arrow in the Felix the Cat (Joe Oriolo) cartoons. Whereas the original b&w cartoons tended to have grey morality, the Trans-Lux series is crystal clear in its morality. Felix is unambiguously a good guy (to the point of having very few, if any vices at all), while Professor and Rock Bottom, hapless villains as they may be, are unmistakably the bad guys and always painted in the wrong. Its taken further with the episodes starring Master Cylinder, who is much more evil than either Professor or Rock. The series sometimes lapses into White-and-Grey Morality though, such as in the episode "The Mouse and Felix".
• Severely downplayed in Avatar: The Last Airbender. At first, the set-up seems to make the Black and the White quite clear: the Fire Nation is the Always Chaotic Evil Empire embarking on a campaign of world conquest, and those who fight against them are good. Then the writers seem to spend the remainder of the series picking this stark divide to pieces in every direction, with an abundance of quite likable and sympathetic Fire Nation characters and an abundance of utterly loathsome Earth Kingdom and Water Tribe characters. The Fire Lord and his daughter remain the clear bad guys, and Team Avatar the clear good guys, straight until the end, but beyond that the series drifts closer to Grey-and-Grey Morality than almost any other children's show you could name. If anything, the war itself functions as a Greater-Scope Villain after it spirals out of Fire Lord Sozin's control, driving characters on both sides to ever greater extremes and deeper into ethical compromise as they struggle to survive.
  • Some of the main characters, primarily Katara, come close to crossing the line more than once.
  • The Fire Lord's son, Zuko, alone is a subversion. It seems like the moral the show's trying to send is that life isn't so straightforward and it's important to remember that.
  • However, this is played straight in the second season of the sequel series The Legend of Korra, with the conflict between Raava/light spirits and Vaatu/dark spirits.
• Ben 10 is mostly this trope, but the main hero's character flaws can push it slightly into Black-and-Gray Morality at times.
• Captain Planet was famous for this trope. The bad guys were not only bad, they tended to put together their absurdly complicated plots strictly For the Evulz. Abiding by the EPA's regulations probably would have been cheaper than some of the crackpot pollution schemes these guys concocted.
• Kim Possible and friends are undoubtedly the good guys, but it's her foes that really exemplify this trope. Every one of them describes themselves as an evil villain, sometimes worrying if they're being evil enough. Evil supervillainy appears to be a whole subculture in their world.
• Samurai Jack. The eponymous main character is good, and Aku is evil. Aku is literally the Japanese word for evil. However, it gets more complicated with the Daughters of Aku in Season 5; Jack believes they are maliciously ruthless killers who chose to single-mindedly kill him, but the thing is, they didn't choose to be evil.
• South Park occasionally parodies this by taking what is often considered a real life example and reversing the roles to show how ridiculous this trope is to those who don't buy into it.
  • The rainforest episode, where the rainforest is shown solely as a Death World where Everything Is Trying to Kill You, and the loggers destroying the rainforest are invariably kind, hospitable, and heroic, with the episode ending on the lesson that "Rainforests are evil and need to be destroyed".
  • The smoking episode "Butt Out", in which tobacco companies are portrayed as affable, proud of tobacco's role in building America, careful to ensure that customers are fully warned about the dangers of smoking, and perfectly fine with not living to old age. The anti-smoking activists are greasy, Wormtongue-esque characters who regularly make up evidence against smoking, try to murder a ten year old boy in the name of some of said evidence, and are overly rude to smokers, even when they're in a place where they're completely in their rights to smoke.
  • The "Imaginationland" trilogy features the dimension where every character ever imagined by humanity, from deities to cartoon characters and advertising mascots, lives. A wall separates the good from the bad imaginary characters, and they work exactly like the trope says: all good characters are cheerful, happy-go-lucky do-gooders, while all bad characters (whether they are Wile E. Coyote, the Pac-Man ghosts, Mr. Hyde or freakin' Darkseid) are bloodthirsty sociopaths who want nothing less than the good characters' erasure from existence.
• Transformers: Autobots are good, Decepticons are evil (except in Shattered Glass, where it's the other way round).
  • According to the creators of Transformers: Animated alot of this is an enforced trope by Hasbro. Autobot characters like Rodimus Prime and Cliffjumper were originally going to receive the Adaptational Jerkass treatment, but this was vetoed by Hasbro whom wanted the main autobot characters to always be good guys.
• Wander over Yonder plays this for laughs. Wander is clearly "good"—he loves to help people out, adventure and is genuinely cheerful and Sylvia, while snarky, also has fairly good intentions. Lord Hater is a Card-Carrying Villain who see himself as evil and wants to rule the galaxy. He's also a skeleton in a robe, if the "he's the bad guy" message wasn't obvious. On the other hand, instead of frightening, he's an incredibly insecure Psychopathic Man Child. Craig McCracken has stated that the dynamics between Wander and Hater are not so much "Good Vs. Evil" as it really is "Love Vs. Hate."
• All of the main characters of Xiaolin Showdown explicitly refer to themselves as good or evil. While there is a decent bit of switching sides, (in fact, all four of the monks have been evil for some period of time, though for different reasons), once a character turns good/evil they will be very good/evil. For example: Good!Jack is nothing but hugs and rainbows to the point where he weirds everyone else out, and Evil!Omi is a hyperactive Blood Knight who loves to cause destruction and get in fights.
• In My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic it very much depends on the character. Twilight Sparkle and her friends are very much not black and white, with even the worst villains being given opportunities at redemption and the chance to improve over time. However, Starswirl the Bearded, a unicorn sorcerer from a thousand years ago, believes "once a villain, always a villain" aggressively until he changes his tune after Twilight manages to redeem his old friend who had turned into an Eldritch Abomination.

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