August 28, 2004
LINUS THE LIONHEARTED
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VAN BEUREN'S TOM & JERRY
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Saturday September 25th, 2004 at 3:00pm. The American Film Institute - Ted Ashley Screening Room, 2021 N. Western Ave., Hollywood, California. ASIFA MEMBERS admitted FREE, Non-Members: $10.00
LAST CHANCE: POPEYE MEETS SINDBAD
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Both screenings are at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood. The first is on Monday (Labor Day) September 6th at exactly 1:35pm. This screening is part of the marathon CINECON programming that weekend (a marathon of rare, restored classic movies that are never run anywhere else and not on dvd, most of the films shown at Cinecon are not on TV or have never been released on video). A complete schedule of Cinecon programming is here. The only other cartoons they are running this year are Mark Kausler's IT'S THE CAT (Thursday September 2nd at 6:30pm) and a restored 35mm print of SCRAPPY'S TELEVISION (Friday September 3rd at 2:25pm).
Cinecon is where I met my wife in 2001, and proposed to her there in 2002. Needless to say, Marea and I will be there all weekend.
POPEYE MEETS SINDBAD will also screen publicly two days later (September 8th at 8:00pm) in the same theatre as part of John Kricfalusi's program of Classic Cartoon influences. This program will feature rare 35mm prints of Lantz, Terry (Tyer), Fleischer and Warner (Clampett & Jones) cartoons. I'll post a complete list of cartoons screening that night as we get closer.
August 27, 2004
The John Kricfalusi Interview, Part 1
An interesting thought occured to me as I was reading this intense exchange of cartoon ideologies between John Kricfalusi and author/historian Michael Barrier, and that's regardless of whether you agree with John's views, Mike's views, or perhaps even some of what they both have to say, it's unlikely that Mike could be having this conversation with any other creator of an animated TV series. It's hardly a secret that John has firmly entrenched opinions about what makes for a good cartoon, but these ideas are rooted in years of diligent study and analysis of the art form. He's the only person I've ever seen who's dissected (with mathematical precision) the layout compositions from UPA's GERALD MCBOING BOING and broken down the story structures of Chuck Jones' WB shorts, and his cartoons are a reflection and outgrowth of this formidable study of the craft. In John's cartoons, whether the content is to one's taste or not, the execution and artistry of his films is undeniable; the cartoons are complex and layered in such a way that they almost demand multiple viewings to fully appreciate the thought and nuance that went into their making.
The new REN & STIMPY episodes - NAKED BEACH FRENZY, ALTRUISTS and STIMPY'S PREGNANT - are no exception to the above, and they represent new heights in the continually evolving art of John Kricfalusi. While I'm sure it's known to a good many readers of this site, now would be an appropriate time to disclose that I worked on these episodes. Admittedly though, at the time of production, there was little thought on my part that the resulting films would turn out to be such an utterly unique viewing experience. One of the show's layout artists Luke Cormican recently put it best: "A John K. cartoon is no longer a short bit of crazy fun…. it's now an epic experience that pushes the boundaries of cartooning further than they've been pushed before in these modern times."
These new cartoons are at turns bust-a-gut funny, fervidly melodramatic, unabashedly offensive, and always brimming with vitality and creativity. They are also of a consistently higher quality than the first batch of REN & STIMPY: ADULT PARTY CARTOON episodes, though REN SEEKS HELP from the earlier bunch is no slouch itself. The rising quality is to be expected considering that when production began, John had to train two relatively green crews - one in Los Angeles and another in Ottawa - to meet his exacting artistic demands. At the moment, Spike TV has not commissioned further episodes beyond the original order of six half-hours, meaning that the majority of the artists John had patiently trained for the past few years have been forced to disband and find cartoon employ elsewhere. To borrow another comment from the quotable Cormican, he says, "It's really a crime that we were cut off right after we had gone through the rough training ground that this season was. It's kind of like if someone burned down Termite Terrace in 1939."
While there's no additional episodes planned, there's still the issue of these three new episodes which have been produced and remain unseen. Originally expected to debut August 20th on Spike TV, the date came to pass with nary a sight of the cat-and-dog duo. Spike has yet to announce another airdate, though Los Angeles residents fortunately have only to wait until Tuesday September 7. That's when the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood will present a SCREENING of the new cartoons to be introduced by John Kricfalusi in person.
Below you'll find the first part of a chat I recently had with John about the new episodes. The second part of our interview will be posted here on Tuesday, August 31. To see clips and images from the new episodes, visit the ADULT PARTY CARTOON website.
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John Kricfalusi: No they weren't planned before hand at all. I envy novelists because they just write a story with a beginning, middle and end, and when they run out of things to say about the story, it's over. In TV animation, you're constricted by the arbitrary length of time. Also a lot of the original Ren and Stimpy's were half hours. The very first one was a half hour - STIMPY'S BIG DAY. SVEN HOEK and SON OF STIMPY were also both half-hours. I was always struggling with that, even in the first season. No matter what scene we come up with, I always think up a million variations and ways to take the gag further and explore each gag. For example, ALTRUISTS is the extreme example of that. We set out to make a completely gag cartoon. It does have a plot, that Ren and Stimpy are altruists and they want to help a hot lady in distress. But it turns out what they have to do is build a house. We actually had a hell of a lot more scenes, with some even storyboarded for that cartoon, and we ran out of time to produce it. A few of the cartoons are like that. STIMPY'S PREGNANT has a lot more scenes written and we just didn't have the time to produce them.
Despite their length though, the cartoons never drag or feel padded out. Do you have any methods when it comes to structuring cartoons so that gag scenes which aren't plot heavy are balanced with the story scenes that drive the narrative forward? Or is it simply just a matter of making sure everything is funny?
No, there's no general theory about it. I just try to make it funny. And I bore easy so I don't want to repeat the same type of thing over and over again. I'm not saying that I don't commit that sin sometimes and I do. Like there were a lot of poo jokes this year which kind of got out of hand. I would forget the previous cartoon; 'Oh, we just did a poo joke in the last one.' It was my poo phase. But I had my farts and booger phase too during the first couple of seasons and everyone loved it. I'm over the poo now. In the meantime there's eight million other types of jokes in each cartoon.
On STIMPY'S PREGNANT, one of the sequences I enjoyed the most was Stimpy preparing the food, but I heard that you didn't like that particular sequence —
No, I didn't like it at all.
— which is surprising though because a lot of people who've seen the cartoon think that's a really funny bit. Which scenes then do you think work well in STIMPY'S PREGNANT?
Well it's probably a good thing I don't censor myself. Sometimes I'll leave things in that I don't think are working and other people tell me it's their favorite scene in the picture. To me, the very best scenes are in the very beginning when Stimpy is trying to bring himself to tell Ren that he's knocked up. And then once Ren freaks out, Stimpy has to calm him down and get him to go along with it. That whole sequence to me is the best acted thing we've ever done and I was really proud of that. There's just tons of expressions and drawings in every scene of that. There's more drawings in STIMPY'S PREGNANT than any cartoon we've ever done. 40,000 cels, and at least half of them are damn keys. It's like an old Rod Scribner scene. When you freeze-frame it, there's no inbetweens.
That's definitely one of the things that I noticed is that the new cartoons are less pose-to-pose than the original series. But to play devil's advocate, one could argue that it's a waste of time to put in so many key drawings and expressions in a cartoon when they're going by so quickly. Projected at regular speed, the audience doesn't see most of them, so what is the ultimate purpose of putting in so many drawings?
Well, when you watch a gripping actor in live action, a very subtle actor such as Peter Lorre or Kirk Douglas or Robert Ryan, you can't see every expression. They don't act pose-to-pose; no actor goes pose-to-pose. You see the change in the thought process from one expression to another and there's a lot of things happening in between. The more subtle and rich that it is, the more the audience believes it and the more real it seems. So in this sequence, yeah you're not going to see every single drawing as you're watching in real time, but it's way more gripping storywise. That's the best part of that whole cartoon; it's like a melodramatic movie. It's all about the acting; the more changes that you can have between the key expressions and emotions, the more realistic transitions you have.
I'm sure you felt that. It was really tense at times, when Stimpy was thinking, "How am I going to tell Ren that I'm going to have his kid?" It was almost not funny because it was so real. I wanted people to feel that because a lot of parents probably go through something similar. Obviously we exaggerated it and made it more severe, but I'm sure there's a lot of accidents happening out there in real life. And there's got to be that moment when the wife has to tell the husband and she thinks she's going to get in trouble for it. I'm sure a lot of people will identify with that.
I think you just hit on a really interesting point. In some of the episodes like REN SEEKS HELP and STIMPY'S PREGNANT, there were moments where I thought the cartoon was disturbing. It wasn't the humor, but the animation itself felt disturbing. Perhaps that's because our eyes are not used to seeing so many expressive, intense drawings in animation.
Well I love extremes in different mediums. The extreme of a cartoon is surrealism, that cartoons can do anything. A character can explode, can fly into pieces and come back together, can have their heads blown off, squash into a pancake, turn into an erection, I love all that stuff. But that's not all I love. To me, if I make the character so real, so believable, and then do wild stuff with it, it puts you in a whole other world. It makes the weird stuff even more believable. Like in STIMPY'S PREGNANT the whole opening, after the puke stuff's over, turns into this realistic drama. Then when all the intensity is released and Ren accepts that he's going to have the kid, it's all happy and light-hearted. All the birds and squirrels show up, and then it goes right into gags. So it's about contrast. I like to do a lot of different mood and feelings, it's not just a string of gags. It certainly isn't a string of one-liners. There's all kind of things. There's acting, slapstick gags, surreal gags, verbal gags, the way the characters talk.
Also I'm not merely influenced by animation. If I was, I probably would have much shallower cartoons. I would draw off less experience and information, but I love movies and old sitcoms. I mean, THE HONEYMOONERS is a great example. When you watch Jackie Gleason, he's completely gripping throughout the show. Even if it's a Norton scene and Norton's doing a lot of funny stuff, you could just watch Ralph's reactions and they're hilarious, subtle and amazing. He's doing all this stuff that builds tension and real emotion in the scene. Cartoons don't generally do that. The closest ever were Bob Clampett's cartoons. They did it, but not to the extent of the live-action movies and the classic sitcoms of the '50s and '60s.
Can you point to any specific examples of where you were influenced by a live-action actor or actress in these new episodes or was it just general inspiration?
I don't think I used anything specific this time around. I did during the original seasons because I was learning to act with my pencil and so I had to draw upon things that I knew really well. When you learn something, you learn by imitation first but I think I've gotten past that stage where now I can just feel things from my own life experience and I just act them out in the mirror. Sometimes I don't even need a mirror. You've seen me do it, right? Have you been in my office where people try to come in and talk to me while I'm drawing a scene. You see me in all sorts of contorted poses.
Right. You look very focused.
Sometimes if I have a really tricky expression, I'll use a mirror. But a lot of times, I can feel it in my heart and I know what it looks like. I'll just draw it. But I couldn't do that when we first started Ren and Stimpy. There's a lot of scenes in the original Ren & Stimpy's that we just stole out of old movies.
(To be continued...)
August 25, 2004
MEET FRED LADD
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August 24, 2004
More on S&P
The post I made last weekend about Standards & Practices has drawn a couple responses worth pointing out. Writer/producer Mark Evanier adds perspective to the discussion and compares his experiences with S&P in live-action versus animation. He also points out historically that some TV producers like Bill Hanna have simply found it easier to appease S&P rather than fight against them. Of course, during the downtrodden TV animation scene of the Eighties, Hanna's lack of vigor in defending his cartoons is somewhat understandable. As H-B was producing hundreds of forgettable hours of animation every TV season, I'm sure the least of Hanna's worries was that the artistic vision of THE GARY COLEMAN SHOW and MONCHICHIS was being compromised by S&P notes. Then again, that indifference is (in some part) responsible for allowing S&P to thrive and become an unnecessarily difficult hurdle for today's creator-driven animated series. Also this thread on Animation Nation continues the list of outlandish revisions that artists have been asked to make on television cartoons.
NY TIMES on Team America
I haven't particularly enjoyed anything by Trey Parker and Matt Stone since their short THE SPIRIT OF CHRISTMAS, but that doesn't mean I'm not looking forward to their upcoming puppet feature TEAM AMERICA: WORLD POLICE. This NY TIMES article details the painstakingly difficult production of the film, while revealing that the movie's budget is $32 million dollars and the Chiodo Bros. are creating the puppets for the film. (via Scrubbles.net)
August 23, 2004
STRANGE ATTRACTORS
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Thanks to Lisa Thomas for the link.
THE PUMPKIN OF NYEFAR
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We are finishing up the film website now... www.pumpkinlove.com There I will include all the details, images, story behind production... etc. At the moment I only have the open page... The links are not yet working. But should be up in the next week or so.The film will screen in L.A. later this week for Academy qualification. I look forward to seeing it!I wasn't' sure if your readers were interested in how "Pumpkin" came to be... In 1994 Maurice began training a group of young designers at Chuck Jones film productions. A lot of us were working on our own personal short projects, several of them based on ethnic folktales. Maurice thought it would be a great idea if the group of us could develop a series of shorts inspired by stories from around the world. We called this series "Noble Tales", and we, his trainees, became known as the "Noble Boys" (which also included a few girls).
Many of us traveled around the world and developed and together designed several dozen ideas... "The Pumpkin Of Nyefar" was one short idea Maurice and I wrote while visiting Turkey. Our first morning in Istanbul we came downstairs to the dining room... and around the table were 20 belly dancers... and a lot of pumpkin dishes. All the girls of course were smitten by Mr. Nobles charm. Ha ha... I can still see him grinning from ear to ear. Afterwords we talked things over, and decided to write a story about a prince who could marry any beauty in his kingdom... but instead chooses to wait for true love. As fate would have it... The prince finds true love in the form of a pumpkin.
While I was supervising a TV show in Thailand, James Wang (Wang film) invited Maurice and I to use his Thai studio to make our short. Maurice underwent surgery so that he could make the flight to Bangkok... unfortunately he died a few weeks later. I came to Thailand a few months later to work on the short myself... But my friends didn't leave me to do the film alone...
For soon after, my pal Mark Oftedal, came to town for a visit. His short vacation, turned into a several year working holiday, He became so involved with the project, that I just made him pumpkin Co-director. Other friends from America helped out too... June Foray donated her voice to the film, Ben Jones, and Lawrence Marvit both did short stints in Bangkok to help get things going. Sue Kroyer did a lot of inspirational character design... as did Roman Laney. Jules Engel looked over a lot of the early design and color.Aaron Sorenson, Dave Marshall, Dave Thomas, and Mike Polvani all donated time to the project. It was really a great collaboration of friends, Just the way Maurice had dreamed about... doing a short film together... everything donated... just because they wanted to do it.
August 22, 2004
The Disappearing Comics Page
As a change of pace from news about the depressing animation scene, here's a NY TIMES article with news about the depressing newspaper comics scene. (via Mark Evanier)
Why Modern Cartoons Suck - Reason #492
It's easy to make fun of TV animation execs, but it's even easier to make fun of the twits who work at the networks' Broadcast Standards & Practices divisions. These low-lifes have done more to ruin TV animation and suck fun and entertainment out of cartoons as anybody else has since the Seventies. Speak to anybody who has worked in TV animation and they're likely to have countless stories about the inane changes and arbitrary cuts that S&P people like to make. Here's an ARTICLE that lists a bunch of imbecilic changes for an episode of THE TICK such as "It will not be acceptable for the Four-Legged Man to be seriously injured with 'two splinted legs ... a neck brace and a head bandage.' He may be prevented from teaching his class due to some minor injury, or for another reason, such as a common cold or flu or car trouble." More recently, Eddie Mort and Lili Chin mention a ridiculous cut requested on their show MUCHA LUCHA:
"The note we received from Standards and Practices was to replace the Spanish word, pulpo, with its English translation: octopus. Why? Because they thought pulpo sounded like (ahem) a kid-inappropriate word ..."
I racked my brain and couldn't think of any inappropriate word that even remotely sounds like pulpo. Other readers of their blog couldn't figure it out either so Eddie finally revealed in their comments section that THIS was the offensive word S&P thought it sounded like. Perhaps they should also ban anybody from using the verb "put" on the show from now on. That's far more likely to be confused with the word than pulpo.
But that's nothing compared to a change that the creators of Comedy Central's upcoming animated series DRAWN TOGETHER told audiences about at last month's San Diego Comic Con. They said that one of the characters in their show said something along the lines of, "Wow, that's almost as bad as the Holocaust and Slavery." Now a sensible request from Comedy Central's S&P might have been that such a comment was out of line and that the creators couldn't compare a trivial event in their show to two horrible tragedies like the Holocaust and American Slavery. S&P's note however was that the comparison to Slavery was quite fine, but the Holocaust reference had to be removed because Slavery wasn't as bad as the Holocaust. Somebody should really compile a book of these gems.