I just got back from Seoul, Korea, where I spoke at a conference called DICON 2009, a digital conference that was part of the International Creative Content Fair. I liked that this event had its own slogan, “Show the Spirit of Creative Content!” since I rarely attend events that have slogans these days. I don’t think the Ottawa Festival has a slogan. I can only imagine what it would be. (“Sit down, shut up, listen to Chris?”)

While at DICON, I gave a presentation on the elements of quality cartoons. I was happy they had asked about that particular topic since it’s a fun topic to talk about. No one in the US seems terribly interested in pondering this anymore. I guess we have it all figured out here.

The Korean animation industry is an interesting case study. After years of doing service work for the US, Canada and Europe, throughout the 2000s, the animation industry in Korea shifted its attention to creating cartoons. Schools added programs in animation, and beautiful, moody Korean short films began showing up in festivals worldwide. Within a matter of years, original Korean series began showing up on the air in Korea.

The Korean animation industry’s most recent focus has been how to sell these cartoons outside of Asia. It is hard to sell to the US, even for people who live here, I assured them. There’s not a lot of space on the air and there are a lot of shows out there.

The American animation industry has a long and interesting relationship with the Korean animation industry. Through the 1980s and 90s, a great deal of animation service work was sent to Korea. Most animation executives, creators and producers participated in a particular rite of passage, a trip to Korea to visit the production studios. Reeling from jet lag, you would then have the surreal experience of seeing hundreds of people you had never met sitting and drawing or painting various series you worked on. Actually, some would be working on your series, and the people next to them would be working on series for rival networks, which would make it even more surreal.

I was always impressed with the work of the studios we worked with, Rough Draft, Yeson, Sae Rom, and several others. I remember thinking over the years that it was just a matter of time before these animators and studios would want to create original content, shows in Korean that they could watch on the air. By the early 2000s, much of the Korean animation industry had jumped head first into the murky waters of intellectual property development, along with a great deal of help from the Korean government, by way of KOCCA, the Korea Creative Content Agency.

The focus on service work had come out of a long history of Korean manufacturing. Conversely, the desire to create and own intellectual property probably came more from the marketing and publishing areas of Korean business and the desire to own the rights to the series they are producing, as well as the honor of seeing these Korean series get sold internationally.

I have met several newer studios over the years, through pitches and visits, and I have always sensed that frustration you have when you first start out doing something and you want everyone to appreciate what you are doing right away. I got a sense that the Korean government was looking at the American and Japanese industries and wondering why after six or seven years, Korea’s animation industry hadn’t caught up yet.

I have taken a number a pitches from these Korean studios over the years and one thing has been consistent — the amazing artwork. They make CGI look effortless and almost each show I’ve seen features amazing artwork. Direction and design in the pilots I look at is always topnotch.

However, I have watched a number of pilots wondering whether I’d watched something with a plot or characters, or just a study in movement. I often feel the same way watching Japanese animation, and I’ve always chalked it up to the idea that the way Japanese animators tell stories is just different from the way we westerners tell stories. No problem, I’d think, every culture deserves to have a national film style. But the issues kick in when the Korean studios want to sell these series to the US, Canada and Europe. Some of their series that remind me of independent films, but then I see they are targeted to preschool or 6-8 audiences. I guess that’s why we were invited there to give our speeches.

There was a mix of speakers from the US at DICON: Max Howard, David Voss from Mattel, Christopher Skala of HIT, Josh Selig of Little Airplane, Brian Konietzko and Seung Hyun Oh of Avatar: The Last Airbender, and a long list of other speakers from Asia and Europe. I did my session with Celine Chesnay from France Television. Kevin Rafferty, the well known feature film visual effects supervisor gave a keynote speech along with Rintaro (aka Shigeyuki Hayashi), the Japanese director of Galaxy Express 999 and Metropolis.

They didn’t just cover the film and television industries. Other sessions focused on mobile and internet content, social networking, co-productions, financing, and the music industry.

For my speech, I did walk through a long list of things you must do to make a cartoon a good cartoon. After my presentation, I received a number of smart and well-thought-out questions. The most direct was, “be honest, what do you think are the weaknesses of Korean animation?” I said what I’d been saying right along, “You create amazing artwork here and direction is always great. You need to focus on character and story.” A few of the studios pointed out they had hooked up with British writers. That’s a start, I suppose.

All in all, it was a fun trip. There was a store called Aniland right near the hotel, with Totoro right on the sign next to the store’s logo. I bought some great toys for my kids. The Korean aesthetic is all about extreme cuteness. Their toys and designs are even cuter than Japanese characters. That’s good news if you have a four-year-old daughter. I bought all the toys from vending machines that looked like gumball machines. We have a good collection of Tofu-head magnets now.

However, I slept no more than ten hours in three nights so I have been spending the week catching up on that all important sleep.

I was sorting through some files the other day and came across some of the more amusing summer vacation photos I’ve taken. Last year I had commented to Jerry that I wanted to post these photos on Cartoon Brew and he had suggested that I write about this particular trip, so here we go — our somewhat accidental visit to Flintstones Bedrock City in Custer, South Dakota.

I should mention first that I had always been curious about Flintstones Bedrock City, which is a theme park and camp ground in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Curious was about the extent of it, since I felt reasonably sure I’d never find myself in South Dakota. The reason I knew about this vacation destination was a trail of off-model merchandise that seemed to find me in each job I had. When I started at Nickelodeon in 1986, someone there had just returned from a Nick At Nite TV-themed road trip and had left some bell-shaped salt and pepper shakers on the desk that would become mine. It wasn’t an act of kindness — no one wanted them so they landed on the empty desk. I showed up and as a Flintstones fan, was delighted to acquire these. They were ugly, but campy enough and they had the Flintstones on them, and this was before the merchandising mania of the early 90s, so I was more than happy to keep them.

Fast forward nine years, and at the start of my Cartoon Network job, again, someone had done the obligatory roadtrip through Custer and I somehow became the proud owner of an aluminum Flintstones ashtray. Again, it was surprisingly ugly but campy enough, and since I was at Cartoon Network, I was more than happy to add this to the now growing collection of cartoon related ephemera that seemed to find me. I was pretty curious about Bedrock City, and mostly why they didn’t try a little harder to get their merchandise on model.

When I got to PBS, no Flintstones merchandise was awaiting me. I kind of forgot about Bedrock City, since I wasn’t thinking about the Flintstones every day anymore.

Now fast forward to last summer, where we loaded up the family and headed from a family visit in Colorado up to South Dakota for a trip to Mount Rushmore. We were on our way to a cabin in Custer State Park. We zipped up Route 16 and just as we were getting closer to the state park, there it was…Flintstones Bedrock City. “Wow, there it is,” I yelled, “I had completely forgotten about this place!” And like Camelot, there it was shimmering in the distance, and I was finally going to get to see it, after wondering about it for 20 years. “We need to go back there,” I declared. The rest of my family seemed ambivalent. We had planned out our week to include Mount Rushmore, Crazy Horse, Wind Cave, and a lot of things that would involve buffalo or rocks or caves or nature of some sort. The Flintstones seemed like the part of my life I was on vacation from. But to my family, it mostly didn’t look like it would be that much fun.

But this wasn’t about them, it was about me. And statues of Fred.

Anyway, Bedrock City wasn’t really shimmering. It was more like the way miniature golf courses look when it has been 95 degrees out for a long time. South Dakota can get pretty hot, and it was hot the entire time we were there. We finally got back there after lunch one day and my daughter, who was two at the time, had just settled down in the car for an afternoon nap. Anne volunteered to wait in the car with her. Ethan and I explored the, uh, parking lot. We walked around a little bit, but it was extremely hot, and Ethan, who had never watched the Flintstones to begin with, looked at me with an annoyed squint and said, “Can’t we just go to the gift shop?” No, I explained, we have to take some photos. You don’t understand, I told him, I’ve always wanted to come here. He looked around, looked back at me quizzically, and then looked just looked sad and tired. The walk across the parking lot to take pictures in front of the signs seemed unnaturally long. We took some photos and walked back. He posed by signs and by the souvenir shop, which was designed to look like a Flintstones house.

We went into the souvenir shop where I was anticipating rows and rows of amusing off-model merchandise that I could bring back to entertain my friends. I guess most of that merchandise existed from the era before HB and WB figured out how to market the Flintstones. They had a fair amount of actual Flintstones merchandise there, and it reminded me of the old HB store in the HB offices. They also had a lot of dinosaur themed merchandise there, as well. Barney dolls were on sale. Apparently Fred sells much better than Barney does. We looked around and couldn’t find anything ironic. Ethan ended up getting some dinosaur toys that had nothing to do with the Flintstones, and we went back to the car. The next step should have been a walk to the theme park but no one was willing to budge. Sara was still asleep. Anne looked bored. Ethan looked hot and tired. “Anyone want to check out the campgrounds?” I asked. No. They did not. The truth was that suddenly I didn’t want to, either. This wasn’t really any more ironic than a miniature golf course or any campgrounds built in the 60s. After all that anticipation and curiosity, I couldn’t seem to summon any enthusiasm to talk my family into trekking in 95 degree heat to see more statues of Dino. It didn’t help that there were probably only about ten cars in the lot at that moment. Everyone else clearly had found a pool to hang out in. We left and headed up route 16, off to our cabin in the woods. In retrospect, I do wish we had gone to the theme park part of it, but I’ll just save that for the next trip there. After all, if I made it to SD once, why not twice?

Editor’s Note: Welcome to the first post by regular Guest Brewer Linda Simensky. The picture above is from from her cameo appearence in episode 6 of PBS Kids’ WordGirl.

I just finished celebrating my birthday. My actual birthday was about a month ago, but I was busy then and kind of distracted and it rained that day, so we didn’t really do much. But there was a high point that day, and it was a big one for me. My daughter asked to watch Bugs Bunny cartoons with me.

A little background first — I have a son, Ethan, who is eight and a daughter, Sara, who is three. They find my job in kids TV mildly interesting, but as far as they know, every kid’s mom works in kids TV. That’s just how life is for them. They do like TV, at least. But as far as ways to kill time, Ethan would just as soon play games. He loves his Wii, videogames and Club Penguin the most. Coming in second would be his Bakugan toys. Next would be Bionicles. Next would be reading or anything to do with Harry Potter. Then we get to watching Bakugan. By the time we get to this point, his free time is all used up.

You’ll notice no mention of funny cartoons. He does watch the occasional funny show, but only if for some reason it isn’t time for Wii. Now one of my major interests in life, as well as my career, is animation — and specifically funny cartoons. So you see the irony here. Others in animation with kids warned me of the “they don’t always like what you want them to like” syndrome. I always knew it could happen to me.

My daughter, on the other hand, is still open-minded and malleable. She does have some definite opinions, and she does love TV. She likes funny things. She hasn’t really discovered computers yet, and she doesn’t play videogames yet. So this was her birthday gift to me — she came shuffling in to the bedroom on the morning of my birthday and said, “Let’s watch some Bugs Bunny cartoons.” I’d have to say this may be one of my biggest accomplishments in child rearing as of late.

We did watch Bugs Bunny cartoons that morning. And we’ve watched on several weekend mornings since. She seems to like Bugs the best, although she is definitely drawn to Daffy as well. And the crazier the gags, the more she likes them. My mother had mentioned to me that by three, she already could see that I liked cartoons, so maybe it just runs in the family.

With that in mind, I spent my Amazon gift certificate getting caught up on the Looney Tunes DVD sets. I already had four of the DVD sets, and with volume six coming out just last week, I realized I had better get volume five. Especially now that I have an eager three-year-old to share them with. (Subliminal advertising: Go buy the Looney Tunes DVDs.) Apparently volume six is the last of this excellent series.

A three-year-old watching Bugs Bunny probably doesn’t seem like a bi deal to many of you, but consider that kids aren’t watching the Looney Tunes the same way we all did. When I started in the kids TV industry in the mid-1980s, I was ten years older than the oldest kids in the audience. We had pretty much the same lives. Sure, they grew up with cable, and we didn’t have it until I was in junior high, but that was the biggest difference. Otherwise we all had had many shared experiences growing up, and watching Looney Tunes on Saturday morning was one of them. Kids now don’t watch the Looney Tunes much — it’s hidden on Boomerang. And there are more funny cartoons available to kids these days — and most of them were made in the past decade, not half a century ago.

You can see why it would be such a big deal that my daughter would want to watch Looney Tunes. So yes, it was a pretty good birthday.

Next up for my daughter — some NFB films. We’ll start slowly.