In this new installment of Alone, Stinking and Unafraid, Chris Robinson assesses the life of troubled Canadian animator Ryan Larkin, who passed away on February 14.

illustration by Theodore Ushev

It’s been a hard year for Canadian animators. In less than two months, the community has lost Helen Hill, Gilbert Taggart (a veteran B.C. animator) and, most recently, Ryan Larkin. I knew all three people but it was Larkin’s life that touched mine the deepest — in a both good and bad ways.

In June 2000, one of our staff at the Ottawa International Animation festival had heard through a friend about this old animator who was now panhandling on the streets of Montreal. I wondered if we could somehow help the guy. We drove to Montreal to meet him. We found him panhandling on St. Laurent, approached him, introduced ourselves, and invited him for a drink.

From there we headed to a nearby bar where Ryan told us his story. Ryan is an easy guy to like and we were all mesmerized with this unique person who was at once comical and heartbreaking, pathetic and inspiring. We returned home convinced we could save him.

The following week one of our jury members dropped out, so we convinced Ryan to come to Ottawa as a replacement. I was worried about how Ryan might behave, but he was fine.

What I remember most about that week was the night we screened the jury’s films. Until that moment, I don’t think that the other jury members (including Chris Landreth) really knew who this guy was. But when Ryan’s Oscar-nominated Walking played, their mouths dropped open. “You did that film!?â€? someone said. In a span of about 20 minutes, Ryan went from little brother to mythological hero. Everyone wanted to know what happened, what he was doing. Everyone gathered around Ryan as he recounted — often through tears — his downfall from golden boy at the NFB to living on the streets. That was the night that Landreth’s eventual Oscar winning film, Ryan, was born.

After the festival, an animation co-op in Calgary was all set to invite him to get back into animation. But Ryan refused. He said he was worried about losing his welfare cheque. In truth, Ryan was scared that he didn’t have anything to say anymore and frankly, the more I got to know him, the more I realized that he didn’t want to be saved. He’d lived this flaneur existence for so long, he couldn’t turn back. Initially I respected this, but I quickly soured towards him because I could see that he had a routine. He convinced many people before and after me into thinking they could save him when all he really wanted was some smokes, beer and chicken wings.

Ryan returned to Ottawa in 2004 to accompany the screening of Ryan. It would be a homecoming of sorts. I even arranged to have Ryan’s film Walking, shown in the cinema (Ryan hadn’t seen the film in 35mm in thirty years). My excitement faded fast though. Ryan had changed. His drinking had reached the point of no return. Ryan needed constant supervision. We kept feeding him with beers and smokes to keep him happy, anything to stop him from flipping out. Of course, by late afternoon, he’d be a mess anyway. As much as I enjoyed watching Ryan piss on the streets in broad daylight, I wanted to grab him and slap some sense into him, tell him to stop being a child and take some responsibility for his life.

It was too late though. The winds of success blew Ryan into mythological status. Young animators made pilgrimages to Montreal to pay tribute to their hero, the flawed genius.

The strange thing about it all is that the same year we showed Ryan, we showed films by two recovering alcoholics, one of whom had just beaten cancer. No one noticed them. And no one noticed the panhandlers under the overpass near the Confederation Building. I passed by there regularly but never gave them change. I didn’t even look at them. Why was Ryan’s life worth more than theirs?

Obviously I have very mixed feelings about Ryan’s passing. Already I’m seeing the hyperbole (”genius” ‘tragedy”) being tossed around freely by those who didn’t know him. Ryan was not an artistic genius. He made 4 films, all of which showed great promise, but with the exception of Walking, you’d be hard pressed to call any a masterpiece. His films were rambling and incomplete, a bit like his life.

Ryan’s story certainly is tragic, but consider the life of Helen Hill, the 36-year-old animator who was murdered in New Orleans on January 4th. If there ever existed a saint, it was Helen. I was in Halifax (Helen lived there for five years) recently and saw first hand the incredible impact she had on the arts community. Helen’s generosity, energy, and explosive optimism literally changed people’s lives. Helen pushed people to be better. She didn’t make excuses. Helen firmly believed that you had to take responsibility for your life and community. In a short time, Helen squeezed every breath out of life. She died young, but left nothing wasted.

In this context, Ryan’s story is especially tragic. Ryan was given a relatively long life and wasted innumerable opportunities to turn his life around. There were always fears and excuses. When he did finally appear to be turning a corner (thanks to Montreal musician Laurie Gordon, Ryan was off the streets and working on a new film), life finally said, sorry bud, it’s too late.

As different as their lives were, though, Ryan’s life, like Helen’s, has had an impact on many people. There is much to be learned from the choices that Ryan made and didn’t make.

In the end, though, it’s important that we keep perspective. Ryan Larkin was no more a hero or genius then he was a drunk or a loser. Like Helen, Ryan was just a human and as Bob Dylan once sang, “as great as you are, man, you’ll never be greater than yourself.â€?

(originally published in the March 5, 2007 edition of The Ottawa Citizen)

Chris Robinson is the artistic director of the Ottawa International Animation Festival and a noted author/critic/historian whose books include Between Genius and Utter Illiteracy: A Story of Estonian Animation, Ottawa Senators: Great Stories from the NHL’s First Dynasty, Unsung Heroes of Animation, and Great Left Wingers and Stole This From a Hockey Card: A Philosophy of Hockey, Doug Harvey, Identity & Booze. He lives in Ottawa with his wife, Kelly, and sons Jarvis and Harrison.

According to the folks at Black 20, “Spiderman 3 went way over budget, and to finish the film, producers had to use product placement to generate more money”.

This spoof (embedded below) is too good to ignore, despite the fact that half the 2:02 video is an ad for the Black 20 website, followed by 20 seconds of their logo. You can cut it off at the :47 sec mark.

A quick follow-up to my earlier post about the pixilation shorts of Chuck Menville and Len Janson: another one of their shorts is also posted on YouTube—Stop, Look and Listen. This film was nominated for an Oscar for Live-Action Short.

Really now, c’mon EcoZone.tv. If you’re going to hire somebody to ape somebody else’s style from concept through design through gags, wouldn’t it be more respectable to hire the real McCoy. Little suprise that whoever is responsible for producing the animation isn’t taking credit for it online.

This is an amusing anecdote from Rocky & Bullwinkle writer Bill Scott which took place back in the early-1950s while he was working at UPA. The story provides a good example of how throwing a lot of talent at a project doesn’t necessarily guarantee success; creative people need a solid foundation to work from and should be assigned projects that are suited to their particular skills. Fortunately, Bosustow was smart enough to recognize that he was more of a businessman than a creative (which is more than can be said for the majority of execs working in animation today). For this reason, he had placed director John Hubley in charge of the studio’s day-to-day creative decisions to avoid situations like the one described by Scott:

Another time, you know Steve Bosustow was close friends with Ted Geisel—Dr. Seuss—since they’d worked together during the war. They were having lunch together, and Geisel says, “I have a great idea for a film about eyebrows. You start with some guy’s face, and see how his eyebrows move up and down, and furrow and knit and all the things eyebrows usually do, and then suddenly the eyebrows manage to move away from the face and just keep on dancing on their own.”

Steve thought it was great, and bought it. I mean, he pulled out his checkbook right there at the table, and bought it on the spot. Then he passed it on to Phil [Eastman] and me, and said, “Here’s a new film we’re going to do.”

We looked it over, and said right away, “Wait a minute. Where’s the story? What happens?”

Steve said, “Well, can’t you figure something out?”

So we worked on it for a while, but basically it isn’t the idea for a film; it’s a gag that has to fit into some other context. When Steve finally realized that, he went back to Geisel and asked for his money back. And he got it.

Yours truly, Brewmaster Jerry Beck, will appear on a live Internet radio chat Wednesday afternoon (4/25) at 4pm. I will be joined by animation historian-voice actor Keith Scott (pictured above) and pop-culture addict/host Stuart Shostack on Stu’s Show, which is broadcast on Shokus Internet Radio. Together Stu, Keith and I will discuss classic cartoons, animation dvds, cartoon voice acting, Jay Ward, Popeye, and anything you want (toll-free phone participation is encouraged).

Australian Keith Scott is, of course, the author of The Moose That Roared, the definitive history of the Jay Ward studio—and he’s a popular cartoon voice actor (Bullwinkle, George of the Jungle, etc.). Stu’s Show is only available via streaming audio during broadcast (and several subsequent reruns); it’s not archived for downloading later. So if you want to hear the two hour show live, you’ll have to tune in on Wednesday at 4pm Pacific Time (7pm Eastern). So mark you calendar now (but in case you forget, I’ll remind you again on Wednesday).

We must sadly note the passing of Jim Thurman, an Emmy-award winning children’s television writer, who died April 14 at age 72.

I had the pleasure to meet Jim several times in New York about 12 years ago. He was a great big funny guy with a deep “radio announcer” voice. He was working for Children’s Television Workshop at the time, but I was more interested in asking him about his work as co-writer of every episode of Roger Ramjet. With Gene Moss he also wrote and provided voices for Ramjet and Shrimpenstein, a fondly remembered local children’s show in Los Angeles during the late 1960s.

Thurman and Moss originally teamed to form a boutique ad agency, Creative Advertising Stuff and they eventually wrote material for Bob Hope, Dean Martin, Carol Burnett, Bill Cosby and Bob Newhart. After Ramjet, Thurman wrote for Sesame Street, The Electric Company, and 321 Contact. He also performed voices such as Sesame Street’s “Teeny Little Super Guy.”

Lou Romano (The Incredibles, Powerpuff Girls) recently had his own personal drawing jam where he made dozens of sketches and then painted them digitally. He writes on his blog, “These drawings were done one right after another without any plan in mind. Then they were scanned and painted digitally in the order in which they were drawn. The goal for me was to get ideas out of my head, on to paper and into color as fluidly and as quickly as possible.”

The results are all posted here.

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