Cartoon Brew - Voice Post

I read a lot of animation blogs, but the one that I visit the most is Cartoon Brew. It's a great source of news, and it's widely read around the animation industry in multiple countries. Its lead writer, Amid Amidi, goes in-depth on a lot of wide-ranging subjects under the animation umbrella, and it's always a fun read. Occasionally, he uses the blog to report on wage fixing scandals or canceled television shows. On more than one occasion, he’s used the blog to break news on the collapses of visual effects companies. Other times, he rants—and his fiery rage is always fun.

One of my favorite articles is called Why Kids Today Think Disney was a Jew-Hating, Hitler-Loving Racist. I especially appreciate it because accusations of Walt Disney's racism are rampant. Everybody seems to know that, just as Walt's frozen corpse is kept within the Disneyland castle, a frigid, racist core belies the Mouse House.

I grew up with that urban myth in my head (the racist one—cannot confirm or deny the frozen body one). I distinctly remember my mom telling me about Walt Disney's hatred of Jews and African Americans when I was a kid. It wasn't until I took a History of Animation college class that I saw that Walt Disney was swept up in a lot of things—anti-labor union and communist sentiments, to name two - but it would be hard to call him a racist.*

Amidi points to Family Guy for perpetuating the rumor. He attaches a clip and writes:

"Combine the endemic laziness of animation writers with an every-child-left-behind educational system that has created a legion of TV viewers who can’t recognize that they’re being duped by old hearsay instead of being revealed new truths, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster."

I think the volatility of the sentence is a little unnecessary in defending the legacy of a man as revered and well-known as Walt Disney. Is calling Disney a racist a “disaster”? Probably not. Still, it's undeniably a great and loaded rejoinder to Family Guy's unoriginal joke. The Family Guy joke is curt, but Amidi's response is a sprawling attack that takes on both the writing of the joke and the audience that finds it funny. It's obviously hyperbolic, but it accurately portrays what Amidi perceives to be uninformed idiocy.**

Or take this quote from the article Nickelodeon Continues Its Never-Ending Search for Entertaining Cartoons, in which Amidi talks about Nickelodeon's vigilant search for another Spongebob-sized success through their pitch program:

"Nick is looking for ideas that are 'original, humor-based and character-driven.' So, if you’ve been developing an unoriginal and unfunny idea about a background prop, don’t even think about submitting it."

Again, the quote may be overly-sardonic, but it points out how lost Nick execs are in pinpointing what is successful about their shows. He follows up Nick's pitch idea description with its antithesis to show how broad it really is. On an unrelated note, I need a second to rethink my pitch about a mop who notarizes documents to support his ailing son.

Lastly, I’ll point to “DreamWorks Execs Have An Incredible Reason For Why Their Films Are Unpopular,” whose title is self-explanatory. Amidi writes:

“Everyone and their mother has a theory [about why Dreamworks films are underperforming], but the most outlandish one might belong to DreamWorks executives, who told an investment firm recently that people have been avoiding their films because they are too adult.

“...DreamWorks explained... that sometime between 2012 and 2014, kids stopped watching animated films as much as they used to, and now only very small children watch animated films. This sudden shift in moviegoing audiences from young to very young obviously hurt DreamWorks, which specializes in high-brow fare for discerning filmgoers.”

I think a lot of the fun of this post rests in how much Amidi clearly relishes the opportunity to lambast Dreamworks’ assertion that it is too mature for any audience. Although he concedes that many don’t know for sure why the company has floundered, he immediately sets a caustic tone by describing these bystanders as “everyone and their mother”. He then calls Dreamworks’ theory an “outlandish” explanation and hyperbolically describes that the executives pinned their failure on films that were “too adult”. In reality, their claim was that they were making films for older children. Amidi ends with perhaps the most sarcastic sentence ever written. By doing so, he lets the irony of Dreamworks’ deduction ring out. The link to a slapstick promotional clip from Home is just icing on the cake.

Cartoon Brew is much more than the snark-fest that I’ve probably painted it to be. It’s a great and rare animation-specific blog that goes in-depth on a lot of different topics and can satisfy pretty much anyone—regardless of their interest in animation.

*There were cartoons with racially insensitive imagery and subject matter created within his company - perhaps most notably Uncle Remus from Song of the South (1946) and the original design of Mickey Mouse, who resembled a minstrel show performer. However, neither were entirely Walt’s invention and characters with pseudo-blackface were manifold in the 1910s and 1920s - from Otto Mesmer’s Felix the Cat to Krazy Kat. The latter was created by the mixed-race George Herriman and is now viewed to be somewhat racially forward-thinking. Many of these apparently-blackface-donning characters, including Felix, Mickey, and Krazy Kat, were not the by-product of turn-of-the-century stereotypes as much as a 1920s fascination with black culture and jazz.

**As a side-note, the first comment on the post is by eighty-year-old African-American Disney artist Floyd Norman, who has on numerous occasions defended Disney’s relationship towards African-Americans.

Gravity Falls and Outsourcing

Gravity Falls is a Disney-produced tv show that just ended its run last month. It's a pretty ambitiously cinematic tv show in terms of its writing and its visual style.

I study animation, so I watch a lot of cartoons in my free time. I stumbled across Gravity Falls and was pretty blown away by the some pieces of animation in the show - especially in its opening credits. Other pieces of the animation were more typical of a tv show though. Apparently, the ever-watchful Tumblr-verse picked up on that too.

One user wrote:  "If it were animated entirely in house, it would take significantly longer due to animation in the US having a higher quality (compare the opening of the show to the show's actual animation to see what i mean), as well as the animators would all e spending their time animating the inbetweens and being unable to work on other things. With it being outsourced, they have more time to multitask. Outsourcing the animation saves both money and time."

Before we unpack that, here are the opening titles.

That's some damn impressive, feature-quality animation. Compare that to some typical animation from the show:

Everything is drawn on-model, and it's comedically-timed, but it's a little bit more bare-bones. The characters move from pose to pose. You don't get the sense that they're alive in the same way. There's no squash and stretch in the character's movement, and there isn't the same detailed overlapping and secondary action in the characters clothes and hair.

To be fair, the opening titles weren't just done in the US; some of the animation production (most likely the in-betweens and ink and paint) was done at Rough Draft Studios in South Korea. Also, the animation of the opening titles gif I attached was done by James Baxter, an ex-Disney animator who's easily one of the best animators alive. It would be hard for anybody to compete with him.

I stumbled across a quote on James Baxter's tumblr though, which is pretty interesting. In a post on Gravity Falls, he wrote: "Gravity Falls follows the default workflow of having the story and layout handled in the US and outsourcing the actual animation to Asia. The reasons for doing it that way are economic, but I’m not sure that’s an idea that has been re-examined lately. I feel that it doesn’t have to be done that way. Like I said, things are changing really fast so there’s every reason to be hopeful."

The claim that "it would take significantly longer due to animation in the US having a higher quality" is wrong. Animation in the US is not inherently bette than animation produced overseas. Neither is the claim that outsourcing animation saves the "time" of the animators. Animation is generally specialized. There are exceptions, but animators generally animate. Outsourcing animation doesn't free up animators to do other things, like layouts or storyboards - it just means that few or no animators are hired in the US.

It's one thing to move a character graphically and its another to make a character feel alive. I think the reason that James Baxter feels that animation doesn't have to be outsourced is that there is a huge pool of traditionally-trained animators in the US who really act and breathe life into their drawings. There is no lack of talent. Creative control is also a benefit. However, there is a lack of money. Even when it's outsourced, it's an expensive endeavor to produce animation for television.

Still, things are changing. We're in the midst of a television renaissance where companies like HBO and Netflix will sometimes spend multiple million dollars on a tv series. If there was a time to make an ambitious animated series and utilize American animation talent, it would be now.

The Fall of the Theatrical Short

If you've ever watched a block of Looney Tunes or Tom and Jerry shorts on a Saturday morning while eating Cheerios, welcome to the club. If somebody made a pie chart of how I spent my childhood, I'm pretty sure I'd see that watching cartoons eclipsed sleeping. There's a lot to love about old cartoons, most of which were originally shown theatrically before movies. From violence to cool visuals to violence, these shorts had it all. However, if you squinted past your spoonful of cheerios, you might have noticed that not every cartoon was the same. The style and humor of these shorts, which were shown back-to-back, could be wildly different.

Take, for example, "The Bowling Alley Cat" from 1942, directed by William Hanna and Joseph Barbera (one of my favorite cartoons):

And "Switcin' Kitten" from 1961, directed by Gene Deitch:

The elaborate character animation and design of "The Bowling Alley Cat" is gone in "Switchin' Kitten" (whose name might also be the weakest rhyme I've ever heard). The sensibility of the humor is also strangely different. The reason? The cartoons were not only produced for radically different budgets - they were produced on different continents. "The Bowling Alley Cat" was produced in Culver City, California, and "Switchin' Kitten" was produced entirely in then-Czechoslovakia.

 The Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Cartoon Studio was created in 1937 to get in on some of the money that Walt Disney Animation and Warner Bros. Cartoons had been earning for years. It housed some of the most talented artists and directors of its day, including William Hanna, Joseph Barbera, and Tex Avery. In 1940, it ended Disney's nearly decade-long Oscar streak and earned twenty oscar nominations and 8 wins of its own.

Theatrical shorts were lavishly produced in the 1930s and 1940s. This was, in part, due to a practice known as "block booking." Movies were sold in blocks or packages (comprised of a film, a B-film, and live action and animated shorts) and were played largely in theaters owned by the big-five movie companies. Independent movie theater owners were often forced to buy inferior films with the film they sought to buy or were edged out entirely by studio-owned theater chains. Eventually, in 1948, the Supreme Court decreed that the Big 5 movie studios were in defiance of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. The studios were forced to sell their theater chains and end the process of block booking.

This was a definite win for independent movie theaters, but the side effect was that it devalued the package of film shown with the feature, including the animated short. Cartoon studios were forced to work for much smaller budgets, and were partially sustained by selling packages of old shorts to television. In the words of Walt Disney, "There was no money in the short subject. You sold them in bunches, like bananas."

MGM closed its cartoon studio in 1957 when it saw that it received the same amount of money for old cartoons as for new cartoons. However, in the 1960s, MGM realized that there was still some money to be had, they contracted Gene Deitch, a former UPA artist who was living in Czechoslovakia with his new Czech wife. His crew was not well-trained, and their cartoons are full of errors.

Another side effect of MGM's closing was that its two lead directors, William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, left to form a new television cartoon studio called Hanna-Barbera, which - as we've seen -was an early adopter of animation outsourcing.

It's a bummer that the artistic and stylistic experimentation of the theatrical animated short died died by the mid-1960s. However, fortunately, the form did not die. As Hollywood cartoon studios fell, independent animators rose. Jan Svankmeyer, Jules Engel, and John and Faith Hubley all produced independent animated films to great acclaim outside of the studio system. Now, the presence of new animation technology has made short production attainable for almost anyone who has the desire.