Eric Pringle, the Emmy-nominated Animation Director of Cartoon Network’s Foster’s Home For Imaginary Friends, has recently teamed up with Cold Hard Flash on the merchandise front. Pringle’s weekly, online, animated series Prophet Buddy has spawned handfuls of episodes and now we bring you t-shirts - currently available in the CHF Store. As usual, these are screen-printed shirts, on only the best fabrics available - American Apparel fitted t-shirts.

PROPHET BUDDY T-SHIRTS STOREWhen I heard that Pringle was personally animating his own series (he’s just completed his 16th episode), I immediately offered to help. The indie spirit that keeps him up to 4am is what this website is all about, and I hope that the CHF faithful will join me in supporting this type of passion with a purchase. Pringle has big plans for the project, and pioneering takes countless hours, buckets of sweat and cold, hard cash. I hope you’ve recently done the same for Adam Phillips and his new BrackenStore, another example of artists owning his own future.

In honor of this announcement, Pringle and his pals Matt Danner (mouse) and Eric Bauza (cat) have created the very first Cold Hard Flash commercial. Yee haw!

Choose your favorite flavor!

Cartoon Network’s new “hybrid” show, Out of Jimmy’s Head features live-action actors paired with a Flash-animated 2D cast. The show is an extension of a made-for-TV film Re-animated, which was created by Adam Pava and Tim McKeon and animated at Renegade Animation. Here’s a clip from the series:

The new TV series drew 1.4 million viewers a few weeks back, some critical raves from sources like Hollywood Reporter, but has also received a high level of criticism within the animation community. The flap centers around Cartoon Network’s recent movement away from cartoons. Here’s a quote from a recent message board post about the premiere episode:

Well, the show is as cheesy, badly acted and written as I thought, but after actually sitting through a whole episode, I did notice one thing: the cartoons were great.

And according to an article at AWN.com, “animators work on set, doing drawings on a Wacom tablet and basically creating storyboards on the fly while the live-action production is going on, incorporating ideas generated by what’s happening on the set.” Matt Danner, the supervising producer and animation director for the series is one of those artists who heads to the set in Downey, California each day and as you can see in the clip above, the animation is some of the strongest Flash work around.

Lastly, here’s a clip from Ryan Green, who runs Bluefoot Studios. He animated this Flash-animated promo for Out of Jimmy’s Head in two nights.

Eric Pringle, the Emmy-nominated Animation Director on Cartoon Network’s Foster’s Home For Imaginary Friends, is paving his own animation path. Prophet Buddy launched online today with the pilot episode titled Mustard Must-Have. This Flash-animated series about a cat and his prophetic mouse pal will reveal new episodes weekly.

Pringle directs and animates what he calls “an internet comic that happens to be animated.” The voice acting team boasts an impressive cast - Eric Bauza, who currently plays Rodolfo Rivera on Nickelodeon’s El Tigre, is the voice of the Cat and Matt Danner, the Animation Director on Out of Jimmy’s Head, offers the voice of the Mouse.

For more on this new series, check out the blog.

[link]

Comcast, the largest cable company in the US, has launched a new product called Triple Play, which combines phone, internet and cable services into a single package. Starting last week, new subscribers will also receive a free Nintendo DS gaming system, the dual screen gadget that released back in 2004. To promote this new offering, Comcast and their agency Goodby, Silverstein & Partners teamed up with John Kricfalusi, or John K as he’s known in the animation world. Kricfalusi is one of the founding fathers of Flash character animation, and is also the creative genius behind the Nickelodeon hit series The Ren and Stimpy Show. The result was a minute of Flash animation, featuring a 3-headed dinosaur puppet and some overly-enthusiastic kids.

WATCH THE COMCAST COMMERCIAL IN HI-RES (Quicktime - 18 mb)

OR LOWLY YOUTUBE QUALITY:

John was kind enough to answer some questions about the project, and he brought along a few of the animators too, who you’ll meet near the end of the interview. This is the second CHF interview with Kricfalusi - the first took place back in April of this year, and covered his work on the very first online Flash animated series - The Goddamn George Liquor Program.AARON SIMPSON: How did Comcast get in touch with you?
JOHN KRICFALUSI: Kelsie Van Deman, an account exec at Goodby, Silverstein and Partners found me through MySpace. Ian Hart had written a commercial in the style of my LOG commercials for Ren and Stimpy. At first they wanted to shoot it live with puppets, but then the art director, Mike Coyne thought, “Hell, why don’t we find John and get him to animate it?”

The LOG commercial from The Ren and Stimpy Show

AARON: How did the idea for the spot emerge?
JOHN: It was their idea, but I flew up to meet with them in San Francisco and I sat down and drew the storyboard in front of them. Everyone pitched in with ideas and we basically sculpted it right there.They originally wanted a 45 second spot, but had written a long script. The script was originally 2 1/2 pages long, which I knew from experience would turn out to be 2 1/2 minutes. I took the storyboard and had Marc Deckter make an animatic, where I recorded me doing all the voices as a temp track.

Sure enough it was 2 1/2 minutes long.

The Goodby team had explicit orders from Comcast not to let the commercial be longer than 1:15, so we all worked together to cut it down. It was hard to do, because there was more funny stuff in it.

AARON: What was the goal of the commercial? Who is it targeting?
JOHN: That was the tricky part. They wanted it to pretend to be aimed at kids, but really be aimed at hip parents who would catch the satire in it.It was a delicate balance because Goodby wanted it to be edgy, but if it was too edgy, then kids might actually see it, get their parents mad and then have irate parents yelling at Comcast.

I decided to make it as candy-like and happy as possible visually, because it is a bit cynical if you just listen to the message.

AARON: Who did the character designs and backgrounds?
JOHN: I got Rex Hackelberg, the king of happy design, to create the characters and then I did most of the posing and layouts.

AARON: What type of direction did you give Rex as he set out to design the characters?
JOHN: I sent him my storyboard, and said draw funny kid characters and a bored middle aged man in a 3 headed dinosaur suit.

He sent me tons of doodles and made it very hard for me to choose. There were so many great ideas for the dinosaur suit that I mixed and matched the parts I liked most and probably ruined his style!

I didn’t have to “direct” him to do designs in his own style. My new working method is possible because of the internet. When you have an actual studio in a certain city, your talent pool is limited to who lives there and is available. I have to train a lot of artists to learn my style, system and methods. That costs a lot of money, takes time and it frustrates the artists who don’t get it. Their frustrations pass on by osmosis to the artists who do get it.

Now I can work with people whose styles already fit with mine or I can discover people on the blogs whose styles and skills I like. We get to try things that neither of us might have thought of on our own by mixing up our styles and techniques.

Brian Romero, on his own, inked up some Sody poses I did and sent them to me awhile ago. They were great! He kept all the organic sexy lines around her and didn’t lose the flair of the originals. Inking and cleaning up stylish animation drawings without blanding them out is a very rare skill. The whole animation studio system is geared to ruin individual flair and they actually train everyone to kill everything. I usually have to spend money untraining artists whose natural spirit the evil studios have destroyed.

Online I can find talented artists that have not been killed by the system. Or they find me!

The project goes a lot smoother and there is less direction for me and more fun for all.

AARON: Who painted the background designs?
Kali Fontecchio painted the most colorful background cards.

AARON: What type of art direction did you offer Kali before she started painting the BGs?
JOHN: I told her to read my blog posts on color and do exactly what they say to do, and don’t do what they say not to do. I like unusual colors that evoke mood or are just plain fun.

“Every brush stroke should be pretty”
“No primaries next to secondaries”
“No pink, purple and green”
“No pee and poo colors.”

AARON: The voice actors sound familiar. Who did you bring in to voice it?
JOHN: I hired 2 great voice talents: Gary Owens (Roger Ramjet, Space Ghost, Powdered Toast Man) and Eric Bauza (El Tigre, Ren & Stimpy, The Ripping Friends) to do very fun readings and that added a lot.

My whole goal was to create a light happy jovial feel.

AARON: How long did it take to produce?
JOHN: A month. That’s about 10 times faster than any commercials I have ever done for TV.

I have a new streamlined system that saves a lot of time and overhead and I get to work with top people only.

AARON: What was the most difficult aspect of the spot?
JOHN: Cutting out some funny side gags and bits to make it fit into the time. That’s always difficult!

AARON: What’s up with that unusual aspect ratio?
JOHN: I’m not sure. That’s the format Comcast wanted. Kelsie suggested we put curtains on either side and just put the cartoon in the middle, but I thought, “what the heck, let’s see if we can just do it wide.” It’s a bit awkward, but I like to try new things.

AARON: Did you draw inspiration from any classic cartoons for this piece?
JOHN: I know you set that up. Of course, all the Hubley commercial posts are the inspiration, as they were for LOG.

It doesn’t look exactly like those great commercials and if we tried to just imitate it accurately of course we’d fail.

The style of all my cartoons is the sum total of what the individual artists and talents bring to it.

That’s why I encourage everyone to take advantage of the fact that I don’t have a preset notion of what every detail should be. Break out of the studio chains and make something up!

AARON: How does this effort compare to your recent Raketu project?
JOHN: It’s definitely different. The Comcast commercial doesn’t use my existing characters and it’s not a personality driven cartoon. It’s meant to sell Comcast’s wares and be really fun visually.

The idea behind Raketu was to give the impression that different people in a family have individual uses for each of it’s features. Comcast is aiming at the parents, but pretending not to…

Also we smoothed out some bugs in the production system this time and we were able to make a more elaborate spot in less time.

I have to point out, it sure looks this TV network studio system is doomed. They can’t keep up with all the natural changes technology and the internet is allowing us to take advantage of.

The blog community of artists is the greatest thing yet. All of a sudden there are thousands of cartoonists who - despite whatever minor differences we may have, they are nothing compared to the shared experiences we have in being creatively stifled by the studios.

I’m hoping that this new world will bring actual animation back to our shores and with that, creative growth and fun for the artists and the audience.

AARON: Which artists animated the spot?
JOHN: Eric Pringle and Kristen McCormick were my 2 main Flash animators, but I managed to get Will Finn to animate an old fashioned drawn scene and that was great to work with him.

And now a few questions for Eric and Kristen, two animators who also work on Cartoon Network’s Fosters Home For Imaginary Friends.

AARON: Eric, You’ve animated a great deal of John K’s Flash work - dating back to the Spümcø days.
ERIC PRINGLE: I animate way differently now. When I first started at Spümcø I didn’t know how to animate at all. Also, the way we set up our files has evolved tremendously. We weren’t hip to comps (nested timelines) and everything was animated on the mainstage. We still used instances but it was really archaic the way we were doing it back when. It’s funny how we clung to our methods claiming them as “Flash secrets.” Looking back on those files I’m really embarrassed. Now that I am slightly more confident in my animation, I know how to set eases on my tweens and I don’t feel compelled to antic-overshoot-settle all the time. I still seek advice from John, Craig Kellman, and Matt Danner because I still have a lot to learn and need some slapping around every once and a while.

AARON: Does this type of animation differ from a TV series?
ERIC: Totally. On the TV series that I’ve worked on, everything is stock digital puppets with a few special poses here and there. On the Comcast commercial nothing is stock - John drew layouts for everything. I enjoy working with layouts a lot more, the poses tend to be stronger and more organic. Working with stock it’s always a matter of trying to Frankenstein a pose together, like getting the correct hand from the library to fit the pose, “eh, it’s the wrong angle, hopefully no one will notice.” However, for me, working with layouts makes the turnaround time much longer; maybe I’m just not accustomed to that kind of process anymore. From my experiences working with both layout and stock pipelines in Flash, working with stock is the best way of going about making a TV series. Layouts require too much clean up and rigging that would most likely bottleneck somewhere in the production. Though the quality is better with layouts, it is just not economical for the demands of the studios with tight budgets and tighter schedules, especially when competing with overseas shops. But for a short, like the Comcast commercial, it’s totally the way to go. What was the question again?

KRISTEN MCCORMICK: I agree! Working for John K is different that any work I have ever done. Each project he does requires a different approach. He won’t let you use any formulas you’re used to. He hates formulas! I often start on a John K animation project animating a certain way, the way I am used to. It usually ends up being completely the wrong way, and by the end am doing something totally different, something that I would never have thought of. I always learn a lot.

AARON: This spot appears to be an homage to Bob Clampett’s Beany and Cecil cartoons. Did you use any reference/inspiration for timing and movement for your animation?
ERIC: I’ve actually never watched Bob Clampett’s Beany and Cecil before but I did notice the resemblance when I started on the project. For some of the scenes of the commercial, John told me I should reference some of Clampett’s Looney Tunes for the timing. Along with referencing Looney Tunes, I’m always referencing Foster’s, since I look at it everyday. Some of the animators on the crew have some really interesting techniques that can be really helpful.

KRISTEN: I started working on this Comcast project a little late, so I was inspired by the awesome animation that had been already done by Pringle. But I had been thinking about the recent posting John had done on the Hubley salt commercial such beautiful animation. And such great use of timing. John wanted me to look back at the animation Copernicus had done on the Tenacious D video. They did some amazing work that is very humbling and inspiring to study.

AARON: What type of direction did John give you before you animated?
ERIC: John’s main goal was to make this commercial not look ‘Flashy’ but still be smooth. He didn’t want too many overshoots, even timed tweens, or over distorted drawings using the transform tool. Most of the revisions he gave me were to substitute overshoots with slow ins to eliminate the jerky animation we often see in Flash cartoons. He also acted out all the shots for me, the most memorable was him rubbing the mouse on his head to demonstrate what shaving a dog should look like.

KRISTEN: He tries to be very thorough in his direction, acting it out, making timing notes or quick sketches for where the actions should happen. After taking the first pass on the animation I get a lot more direction. Their are usually several retake sessions on any given shot, especially early on I have to unlearn the typical way I do things.

AARON: The aspect ratio is so wide and atypical. Did that present any challenges?
ERIC: It sure did. John drew everything in standard def (16:9 ratio), and I had animated most of the shots in standard. We didn’t find out what the ratio was until halfway through the production. John improvised and added drawings to most the shots to fill the space and also broke one of the shots up into an assortment of vignettes that covered the wide ratio. He described this shot as one of those dumb things Disney used to do. It wasn’t too hard, for me anyway, to make the switch from standard to extra wide. I think it all worked out.

KRISTEN: My part of the project didn’t really get affected too much by that. After I was done animating, some of the drawings got modified. Also editing and other really cool things were done to make better use of the unique shape of the screen.

AARON: Compared to your Spümcø work, do you animate any differently now or use any new tricks?
ERIC: Everyday I’m learning some kind of new shortcut that makes lives easier. On the Comcast commercial I used some shape tween methods we use on Foster’s. After setting the shape tween, I keyframe it out and use the layer frame distributor plug-in and then export the FLA (Flash file) to an Illustrator file and apply the art brushes and import that stuff back into flash. I did that with the dinosaur’s neck and the dog’s nose animation. Also I used the tween2keys plug-in to eliminate some of the tweeny animation in some of the shots, but that’s not really a trick. For the vibrating fx on the burst and weird shapes I just made some shape tweens and then clicked the smooth tool a few times to slightly distort the shapes on each frame. Other than that stuff, I didn’t do anything other than slide John’s drawings into each other and hope for something nice.

AARON: Thanks everyone. For more on the Comcast spot, head over to John K’s blog and check out his posts.

PRODUCTION CREDITS

Character Design
Rex Hackelberg

Animation
Eric Pringle
Kristen McCormick
Leo Riley
Greg Franklin
Will Finn

Inks
Brian Romero
Corbett Vanoni

Background Designs
Kali Fontecchio

Voices
Gary Owens
Eric Bauza
Deneo Harris
Kelsie Van Deman
Amy Maloof

Production Coordinator
Marc Deckter

Production Assistant
Joe Henderson

This weekend, I participated in the 2nd Annual Flash Class at Six Point Harness Studios in Hollywood. The two-day event featured presentations and lectures by Matt Danner and Eric Pringle from Cartoon Network, 6PH’s Greg Franklin and Titmouse’s Chris Prynoski.

As always, the class was free, subject to a resume and portfolio review. After a post on cartoonbrew.com, the class size swelled past the 16 planned slots, easily surpassing 35. It was standing room only for both days, and you gotta give it up to these artists who passed up a perfect weekend at KROQ’s Weenie Roast to sit inside all day.

Thanks to everyone who attended and to Six Point for hosting. It was so promising to see that many people interested in learning about Flash animation. It confirms what many of us already know - this digital 2D movement has moved past ‘trend’ and now boasts a strong foothold in the animation industry.

This year John Kricfalusi returned to a genre he essentially created - online, direct-sponsor cartoons. It began in 1997 with George Liquor furiously urging us to buy albums at Tower Records, and today we can watch his new online shorts for Raketu, the VOIP provider.

Get the Flash Player to see the wordTube Media Player.

But we’ll get to all of that later on. First, let’s see how this TV animation visionary ended up as a Flash animation pioneer.The contributions John Kricfalusi, or John K as he’s come to be known, has given the world of animation are numerous - The Ren and Stimpy Show, his work on the revival series Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures, the Bjork music video, and his 2-episode revival of the Yogi Bear universe. But when future generations reflect on Kricfalusi’s career, his impact on the world of online entertainment and his recent educational blog-spewing will stack up there with his mightiest of achievements.

Get the Flash Player to see the wordTube Media Player.

Perhaps too bold and stubborn to last long in the corporate world of TV animation, Kricfalusi found himself breaking ground in online entertainment. He was tinkering with the internet in the early 90s, long before most people knew what ‘www’ stood for. Kricfalusi was spending his down-time surfing through Usenet discussion boards, and if you’re resourceful you can even find some of his postings dating back to 1995, the year Netscape announced the IPO heard ’round the world. To put this into an animation perspective, Nickelodeon didn’t even have a website until 1997. So with the October 15th, 1997 launch of The Goddamn George Liquor Program, Kricfalusi had begun the first cartoon series produced specifically for the Internet. In the discussion board alt.animation.spumco Stephen Worth, the Spümcø-vet who acted as webmaster, typed this brash message announcing the episode titled Babysitting the Idiot.

Spümcø has just made history by introducing the first animated series created exclusively for the World Wide Web. These are also the only cartoons being produced today that are 100% TAMPER-FREE… No network execs or censors looking over the creator’s shoulder.

Watch Episode 1 of the Goddamn George Liquor Program - Babysitting the Idiot

That creator’s shoulder also ended up the cover of several magazines that month, including Wired, and the website welcomed 150,000 visitors in the first week alone. He and a handful of TV-vets set out to shock the system, and they did just that. Dancing feces, interactive interstitials and raw, uncut hilarity was available to anyone with a 28.8 modem at spumco.com. Between 1996 and 2002, some exceptional work was created - the 1999 Weekend Pussy Hunt series on Icebox.com, 2 revival episodes of the Yogi Bear series in 1999 (not to be confused with Wildbrain’s Yogi episode), a 2001 music video for Tenacious D, a 2001 commercial for Quisp, and a 2002 series of 3 Jetsons cartoons - all of which were animated and broadcast in Flash.

Watch episode 1 of Weekend Pussy Hunt - originally broadcast at icebox.com

Beyond making cartoons, Kricfalusi is also simply a fan. He prefers animation legends like Chuck Jones, Tex Avery, and his absolute favorite, Bob Clampett.

Get the Flash Player to see the wordTube Media Player.

And, lucky for us, he doesn’t keep his appreciation to himself. Kricfalusi has consistently and tirelessly imparted his thoughts and animation wisdom to future generations of animators. As early as 1998, John was posting articles on the Spümcø website, detailing his theories for animation fans and students alike. Flash forward to February of 2006 when Kricfalusi started posting to his blog, and right from the beginning he shared his process, his theories and his art. A little over a year later, he has posted hundreds of priceless, dense diatribes. Some detail TV network missteps while others are laser-sharp breakdowns of the best cartoons ever made. Many of these posts should be (and probably are) required reading for any animation student looking to build a strong career foundation. It’s bound to become a proud and lasting legacy of his career - one that will surely be formalized into chapter form someday down the road.But John K’s Flash animation legacy is already being carried on at studios around North America. He trained artists like Eric Pringle, Gabe Swarr, Tony Mora, Matt Danner, Jerry DeJesus, Jessica Borutski, Nick Cross and dozens more. None are household names (yet), but they’re now the Flash animation backbones at studios like Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon and Copernicus - shops that have embraced the Flash animation revolution. These artists also benefit from a studio system that now embraces creator-driven shows, a concept that had all but disappeared in the 80s.

With The Ren and Stimpy Show, John K had top billing, and now we have Foster’s Home For Imaginary Friends and El Tigre, fronted by strong creators.So that brings us to today. John continues to pursue partnerships with major brands, develop original shorts and demand that animators everywhere study the past, and make trend-breaking cartoons. He shared these views and many more with Cold Hard Flash this month in a lengthy interview below.

AARON SIMPSON: You’ve been an accurate prognosticator of the digital animation age - the emergence of Flash animation and sponsor-integration into online shorts - what can we expect to see in 5 years?

JOHN KRICFALUSI: Well some of the things I predicted were supposed to happen 5 years ago and some are still slow in coming - like the directly-sponsored shows online. No sponsor has done that right yet. I have lots more predictions, but I think I wanna take advantage of some myself this time instead of giving the ideas away for free!

AARON: When you first started tinkering with Flash - did you immediately see the potential?

JOHN: Even before Flash. As soon as I discovered the web in the early 90s, I waited for something like Flash to come along.I worked with Macromedia for a while and they added a lot of my suggestions to the program. Sadly, it hasn’t really progressed in the last 5 years.It still has a lot of bugs and isn’t animator friendly. I wish I could develop a simple and sensible animation program that does everything real professionals would like, but leaves out all the cheesy stuff and uses a real ex sheet.

AARON: You’ve called yourself “a trouble-maker” before. Do you think this still holds true?

JOHN: I guess anyone who upsets the status-quo is a trouble maker, and I’m never satisfied with formula, so yes I guess so.

AARON: Looking back on The Goddamn George Liquor Program shorts you created for the internet - do you have any critiques of your own work?

JOHN: Oh yeah - big time. When I started the cartoons, it was an experiment just to see whether Flash was even capable of doing cartoon animation at all. At the time, people were just using it for animated lettering in banner ads and some simple games. I looked at it and thought, “Hmm, I’ll bet we could make animation with this.” We had a Flash expert who was working at Microsoft who would tell us what Flash couldn’t do. Lip sync for example. He told us, as did the Macromedia tech support people, that we shouldn’t even bother trying to have the characters talk. So we made them talk.

The first thing we were concerned with was how technically to make Flash make cartoons. We didn’t know where it would take us yet.

I also needed a story, so I took one we wrote for our line of Dark Horse comics called Babysitting the Idiot.

It’s about George’s nephews Slab ‘N’ Ernie babysitting Jimmy the Retarded Boy for an afternoon and corrupting him by teaching him to smoke while playing “strip club” around George’s hidden stash of nudist colony magazines. The story would take about 15 or 20 minutes to tell in a full cartoon, but we just started making it anyway. We found out that Flash could only hold about 2 or 3 minutes of material in a file, so we broke up the story into short bits. Then, on top of that, we could only afford to produce a cartoon every couple months, so it was hard to build an audience.

If I were to do it again, I would just make stand-alone 3-minute cartoons with no continued stories so the audience would be satisfied at the end of each cartoon. I have one called What Pee Boners Are For that floors the audience whenever we show it in theatres at retrospectives.

Babysitting the Idiot took 8 short cartoons just to do the story setup - it hasn’t even started the plot yet! It’s a really funny story, but where we left off we had just barely gotten into it.

We also had to have long title sequences in 1997 because the text would eat up time while the pictures downloaded. I imagine some of the potential audience couldn’t stand the wait for the cartoon.

AARON: Your recent collaboration with Raketu created quite the buzz on the internet. Have you heard from the company on how the campaign is working?

JOHN: Well, they told me that since the launch they had multiplied their downloads by a huge percentage, so I figure that’s a good sign. I hope to do more cartoons with them. They are a good group. Oliver McIntyre, the marketing director was all over the concept and really wanted to define Raketu as a unique brand. Oliver and I met along with the owner of Raketu, Greg Parker, in New York to go over all the concepts and I kind of wrote them on the spot as they showed me what Raketu was all about.

This is how I would love to work with sponsors. Show me the product, tell me what the selling points are and then let me come up with an entertaining way to pitch it so that the audience actually wants to watch the commercial. That was the concept behind my fake commercials in Ren and Stimpy. Log, Powdered Toast, etc. - I wanted to show that you could make commercials that people would love as much as the show itself.

AARON: Are there any corporate mascots you would enjoy bringing to life in animated commercials or sponsored shorts?

JOHN: Well I’d be happy doing any of them, but I wish sponsors would go back to old style ads, where you could understand what the commercial was about and you liked the characters instead of bombarding you with pink and purple multimedia montages. The old characters had personalities and little stories too, and that seems to have been largely abandoned. I think mascots should be made to be liked, not just be graphic icons.

I used to really like the 50s Tony the Tiger, the original Trix Rabbit, Sonny from Cocoa Puffs, Matty Mattel and Linus The Lionhearted.

Of course I would love to create new mascots too like I did for Old Navy (AS - which won an Annie Award for Best Commercial in 1999).

Get the Flash Player to see the wordTube Media Player.

AARON: Some companies don’t have mascots or icons you could breathe life into. Are there any that come to mind that you would like to team up with?JOHN:

• Labatt 50
• Ultimate Fighting
• Any cereal company
• Toy companies
• Dreamworks could use something to breathe life into it

Watch the animated Quisp cereal commercial by Spümcø

AARON: For the Raketu spots, you used a method in which some forms had outlines, while others didn’t. Is this a new method? And what are you trying to achieve with it?

JOHN: I was just trying to play with the style. I’d like to make cartoons that look like Golden Books some day and that was an experiment in that direction. A fast experiment! I had to turn out 4 cartoons in a month!

AARON: While drawing layouts for the Raketu spots, you experimented drawing the various mouth positions with a Cintiq monitor. Do you see yourself eventually going entirely paperless?

JOHN: Theoretically, I like the idea; it seems like it would be practical, but I don’t see it happening anytime soon. The software that’s designed for drawing and animating is so clunky and complicated and anti-artist that it really makes it hard for organic style artists to warm up to drawing directly on the computer.

I’ve pestered software companies for at least 10 years to let me design an all-purpose cartoon and animation program that is artist/animator friendly, but can’t seem to get anyone to do it.

As it is, you have to use a bunch of different programs to make a cartoon, and you still have to use paper if you want the drawings to flow and look natural.

AARON: Are there any improvements you’d like to see in drawing tablets?

JOHN: Maybe the combination of the tablet, the pen and the program. It needs to have a more pliable touch and more natural ability to go with the pressure and angle of your pen.

You can’t beat paper and pencils for that - or paint brushes and paint.

AARON: The relative simplicity of Flash has welcomed a vast, new generation into the animation industry. How will this new wave of animators change the animation landscape?

JOHN: Well right now, it’s made it easier for non-skilled artists to break into the business.

So TV cartoons have become cheaper and more amateurish as a result.

I think Flash is a temporary fix. It was a good thing for the internet because it allowed you to make animation with small file sizes, but it also makes “tweens” which really makes animation look cheesy. Too many people rely on it to make things mathematically smooth, which to me looks very fake and cold.

It ought to be easy to make a program just for animators and build in classic principles, real brush and paint tools to make it easier for us to learn the things that the animators of the 30s took a decade to learn.

AARON: You once mentioned that your “breakfast diet was planned by Bugs Bunny, Yogi Bear and Rocky Squirrel.” Recent studies have revealed that “less than 2% of television commercials are for foods that promote a balanced diet.” With the spiraling obesity and childhood diabetes epidemics in America, do you think that children’s advertisers should be regulated?

JOHN: No. But companies that make healthier products should jump on the bandwagon and get me to create mascots for them and cartoons that entertain kids and sell the healthy foods. Lots of healthy food actually tastes good and most fast foods taste like crap.

When I was a kid I ate whatever cereal had the best cartoon character on the box and had the best prize. Most cereal doesn’t taste very good anyway. We just ate it so we could get the next box and prize.

I’m amazed at how amateurish the graphics are now even on the big name cereals. They don’t even look fun anymore. I could cure that so easily. Hell, kids wanted to buy Log just because of the commercial! I’m obsessed with packaging and would love to find sponsors that see that making their products seem fun will sell a lot more products.

Watch the Tony Mora Pizza commercial by Spümcø

Watch the Ultimate Fighting commercial featuring George Liquor by Spümcø

Watch the Rice Patooties commercial featuring Wally Whimsy by Spümcø

AARON: Shows like South Park and Family Guy broadcast material today that probably wouldn’t have snuck through 10 years ago. How do you account for that?

JOHN: Well it started with Bakshi’s Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures and Pee Wee Herman. Those were kid shows, but with layers of perversion in them. Then The Simpsons came along and did edgy material in prime time cartoons.

Ren and Stimpy was known initially for its “edgy” and gross humor, but much of what we did then seems pretty soft compared to Beavis and Butthead, South Park, Family Guy and others that followed.

Sometimes now when I do stuff that’s “edgy,” it’s not really edgy at all by today’s standards but further than the original Ren and Stimpy. If I went as far as South Park or Tenacious D (whose live-action videos are hilarious but filthy), my fans would murder me. I sort of created a monster that I can’t completely benefit from myself. Some people today complain that I go farther than the original show, not remembering how relatively shocking the first season of Ren and Stimpy was. Now, no one would think twice about a fart or booger joke - let alone a gay joke! Even live action does this stuff now. I don’t ever purposely try to be “edgy” or even controversial, I just do what my friends and I think is funny.

But I’m gonna cut back on some edginess now so people can pay attention to more lasting qualities - like acting, funny visual humor, pure cartoon stuff and rich characters. The one potentially “edgy” thing I want to keep doing though is sexy girl stuff. No one else seems to do much of that in cartoons and I can’t figure out why. Violence seems to be just fine in today’s culture but some folks freak out at good, old, all-American lust. What is so damned horrible about well formed perky titties? Mike Fontanelli’s theory is that every movie should have a couple good, naked girl scenes. Then if you hate the story or it has bad acting, at least you can say “well I gotta a couple good titties for my 10 bucks.” Not that I plan to make bad stories just so I can have titties, but I don’t plan on skimping on cheesecake.

I’m also planning on doing some kid shows that are “safe” for your kids to watch. I love kid stuff. I collect old kid shows, cartoons and toys and I would like to see every generation of kids have some pure cartoon humor and funny characters. It’s funny how taboos change over generations. Old cartoons that were fine for kids for 50 years are now deemed too edgy. Every kid who sees Popeye loves him, but you can’t get it on TV. When they’re rarely shown Looney Tunes are cut to Hell. Crazy times! Poor kids today.

I’m also making toys in the old style - kind of a satire of old toys. Off-model and the wrong colors on purpose. Like these.

AARON: Your recent music video for Tenacious D was a big hit on the internet, and you’d collaborated with Jack and Kyle prior that on Fuck Her Gently. Do you have any future plans to work with Tenacious D?

JOHN: My plan is to do anything that Jack and Kyle want me to do. I am making toys for them now.

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AARON: Are there any other current bands that you’d like to animate a music video for?

JOHN: The ones that have the most money to spend. That would probably be the bands and “artists” I hate the most. The ones that talk their songs instead of sing them.Creatively, I’d like to animate videos for Burl Ives, Elvis, Count Basie and lots of old time music. I wish there was a market for it. I’m going to try to create one.

AARON: How did you wind up teaming with Copernicus Studios?

JOHN: Jess Borutski, a wonderful animator in Ottawa, hooked me up with them. I’ve had trouble with some service studios before. Many of them throw out the work you send them and redo it in the local style. The animators at Copernicus were fans and wanted to learn how I make my stuff look and move the way it does. They are dedicated to plussing the style rather than watering it down. They are great to work with.I also mandated that they do their best to not use Flash tricks and to try to make it look as organic as possible, not all “tweeny.” It’s impossible to completely hide the fact that it’s Flash, but they do as good a job as is possible.

AARON: Robert Crumb claims that when he was a child he was sexually aroused by Bugs Bunny. What artists do you think have made the sexiest animated characters?

JOHN: Ha ha. There aren’t too many sexy girls in animation for some unfortunate reason, but Rod Scribner’s Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs is great. I love Owen Fitzgerald’s pretty girl comics. I like Harry Lucey – his Betty and Veronica comics of the 50s and 60s.

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AARON: Over the years, many have claimed that Coal Black has racist undertones. Do you agree?

JOHN: No, not in the least.It glorifies black jazz music. Clampett was a big fan of popular music and frequented the black clubs.

AARON: Imagine that you were creating the curriculum for an animation college. What course titles would you start with (like: Pencils Gone Wild - Jim Tyer’s Crazy Drawings)?

JOHN: I’m actually going to do a blog post breaking down my ultimate cartoon school course, year by year.I sure wouldn’t start with Jim Tyer or “crazy” stuff! I would teach power skills and would have the students learn principles in the same order that the original classic animators did.1ST YEAR

• Rubber hose animation
• Walks, runs, basic movement
• Basic lip synch
• Figure 8 motions
• Animating to beats
• ¾ walks with animating backgrounds
• How to read and write ex sheets
• Animating the impossible - using the medium to do what only animation can do
• History of cartoons, comics and animation from around 1920 till about 1965 - this would be every year and each year I would have the students study aspects of classic cartoons that relate to their exercises
• Life Drawing with an emphasis on slow careful drawings, structure, perspective and proportions
• Caricature
• Observation over style: Learning to use your eyes and senses to analyze, rather than copying trendy styles
• Music, Dance (every year)

2ND YEAR

• 40s principles of animation
• Using simple organic characters made of pears and spheres
• Basic acting, staging, timing
• Observation and application
• More Life Drawing
• Applying concepts from Life Drawing to your animation
• Caricature of bodies as well as heads

3RD YEAR

• Character animation
• Animating different types of designs
• Solving design/animation problems - animating cartoon designs from media other than animation-comic strips, magazine cartoons, etc.
• Advanced acting and dialogue animation - timing and pacing
• Animating caricatures
• Animating specific gestures and expressions that your fellow students make

4TH YEAR

• I’ll have to think about this one… maybe make a film.

If there was a school like this, the graduates of the first 4 years of the program would revolutionize the medium and no one else could compete with them.

AARON: Many of today’s aspiring animators are using Flash for what is commonly called ‘limited-animation.’ What could these artists learn from studying Ed Benedict?
JOHN: Make your characters characters and not mere designs. They need to learn from the same principles that Ed learned from. I wish young artists would be less concerned about “design” and be more concerned with important stuff, like good drawing and entertainment.

I love Ed, but I can see how his designs work because I know the principles behind them.

You can’t start by being a designer. You need to do things with solid principles for years, and even then, only a very few artists really have design talent to begin with.

The general public doesn’t care about design in the abstract; they want entertainment. If Ed’s characters didn’t seem like real characters, it wouldn’t impress any normal person.

Today people rely on flat “design” because it doesn’t involve any learning curve or skills.

I would like to go back to designing for character, rather than designing flat because it’s easy and supposedly cool.

AARON: Do see any value in returning to TV or feature film in the future?

JOHN: Not unless the whole system changes to favor creator-driven cartoons again.

All the networks have their own in-house studios now. They are basically closed monopolies. They are not interested in having independent studios compete with them. Even if they did buy a show, I would have to give up the rights to it. On top of that, every time I do a new TV series I have to train a whole new staff to do it and networks don’t include training costs in their budgets so I end up spending my own salary and profits to train people. Then when the show is over, the networks snap up my trained crew that they didn’t have to pay for and make them work at a tenth of their ability.

There isn’t a whole lot of incentive to make shows for networks anymore - unless I do what the old TV studios do and pocket half the budget and ship to the cheapest countries. I can’t seem to bring myself to do that. And the networks would then look at the shoddy product and say, “Well, I guess John isn’t creative anymore.” That happened on Ripping Friends, only I still spent my own money on training.

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I personally think TV is going to die anyway. I don’t see how it can sustain itself. Each network continues to grow in size and management staff, while the ratings go down. That can’t go on forever. I’m still betting on the web to change everything and give creativity and sincere entertainers a chance to thrive again.

AARON: Name 5 young artists who you admire.

JOHN: If I only name 5, another 20 will be offended!
But Katie Rice is a genius, I think. I’m in awe of her ideas and constant invention.Eric Bauza, Fred Osmond, Nick Cross, Kali Fontecchio, Kristy Gordon, Lorelay Bove, Helder Mendonca, Jess Borutski, Marlo Meekins, Brianne Drouhard…There are many more!

AARON: If an aspiring animator could rent only 5 animation DVDs - which would you recommend?

JOHN: Betty Boop (the black and whites)

The Fleischer Popeyes (releases July 31st, 2007)

Looney Tunes

Tex Avery’s MGM cartoons

50s animated commercials

AARON: What current animated series do you regularly watch?

JOHN: Every couple weeks or so I tune in to the Fox sitcoms to see if I can find anything interesting. King Of The Hill has some funny stuff.

AARON: For an aspiring animator just starting out – do you have any words of advice?

JOHN: Well I would say, the more time you spend honing real drawing skills and fundamentals, the more tools you will have to create something out of. If you just copy trendy styles, you will be severely handicapped in what you can create. Each modern style has built in limitations. The better you can draw, the more you can learn and observe and interpret, the more of a creative powerhouse you will be.Go back and learn the history of not only animated cartoons, but comics and all kinds of cartoons and illustration. Draw from a wide variety of inspiration, not just Pixar films, Spumco or Cartoon Network. Go to the ASIFA Archive, be amazed at the potential of cartooning and be inspired.Observe the world around you and find ways to draw it based on your observations, rather than filtering it through an existing style.If this next generation of kids would abandon trend-thinking and went back to basics, they could make the best cartoons ever!

Six Point Harness Studios recently created a short animated action sequence for Cartoon Network’s hit show Ben 10. Matt Danner directed, Kerry Valentine produced, Saharat Tantivaranyoo added character layouts and BGs, while Mike Jacobsen brought it all together with some After Effects magic. If you look closely, there’s some 3D work in here too - the opening tunnel shot was created by RedEye Animation, who work in 6PH building. This will reportedly air on TV at some point, but no word on exactly when.

**** UPDATE ****

This clip has apparently been airing on CN for weeks now. Way to go 6PH, and thanks to the CHF commentors below for the news updates.