The inevitable has happened. Fuck Yeah Animation Bosses is a Tumblr for “anyone and everyone who feels a little bit tingly in their pants when they hear/see/touch a person in the animation community.”
Cartoon Brew has occasionally received flack due to writing about the personal lives of animators, but the people who complain are missing the big picture. The shift toward the celebrification of animators has been rapidly gaining steam for at least a decade. To the younger generation, the animation artist is no longer a private figure who works in anonymity, but rather a public figure who is revered and discussed, scrutinized and worshipped.
Animators themselves feed into the trend by releasing videos of themselves to the public, appearing in fashion magazines and engaging with their fans on platforms like Twitter, Facebook and their personal blogs. In the 1990s, if you enjoyed watching a certain piece of animation, the only way to communicate with its creator was to write and post a fan letter to the artist. Today, if you have something to say about the latest episode of Adventure Time, you can reach out instantly to its creator Pen Ward, not to mention the rest of the show’s crew, on their personal Twitter accounts.
and was going through his fanmail from the 1950s and 1960s. Ward received quite a bit of it, but none of it was for his animation work. Ward was only known to the general public for his efforts as a jazz bandleader and operating a railroad in his backyard.
