I always, it takes me forever to get to introductions.So, uh, uh, it's usually sometimes like an hour in, but anyways, um, it's been a while since we talked.I think the first time we talked was on, um, Oh God.I think it was on follow the rules.
Uh, back when I was, uh, Anyways, nevermind, nevermind.Uh, I think you were on like a few episode or two.
I think, yeah, love, love had me on a couple of times, but that was a couple of years ago at least.Yeah.
It's been a while.Um, but yeah, so it's been a while then.Uh, but you're recently putting out content and I always wanted to like get at the heart
of, how shall I say, it's hard to even like put a finger on the problem, but I guess- A big John Kay finger. Yeah, yeah, exactly.Yeah.Or like that painting by Caravaggio of Abraham.
But anyways, to put like a huge thumb on the problem of, I guess you could say, the intersection between animation, kitsch, and identity.But before we get into that, so
How did you, okay, so for those who don't know, for the audience who doesn't know, I know it's like stupid pretending that there's an audience there, but anyways, just for like the sake of my audience, who are you, Spum Donor?
How did you come about and what's your journey been like on the intranuts, if you will?
Um, I started kind of shitposting on Twitter during when COVID started when I had a lot of extra time on my hands at home.And the reason that I started shitposting about cartoons and animation in particular is because
The average Twitter user was very ignorant and had very bad taste about animation, and I just wanted to make fun of them.But the motivation for that kind of came from being a part of the animation blog culture of the 2000s, which
It's kind of crazy to think about now, but John Crisfalusi basically was the king of the hill in 2000s animation blog culture because his animation blog, which is still up, you can still read it amazingly, johnkstuff.blogspot.com.
He was an incredibly prolific blogger.And of course, he talked about Ren and Stimpy.And, you know, he re-litigated some of the behind the scenes stuff about that and how it wasn't his fault that he got fired.It actually kind of was.
But, you know, that's neither here nor there.
He was a cantankerous individual to work with, to say the least.
Yeah.But the bottom line, he really couldn't make his deadlines and it wasn't just Nickelodeon's fault.But anyways, The point is, he talked a lot about animation history on his blog.
And I've come to know some animation historian types who don't entirely agree with his interpretations of animation history.But he really got people excited about animation history and also animation and cartoons. in a really energizing way.
And I wish the comments sections on his blog posts are all taken down.
Obvious reasons.But they were incredible because people would just have these heated debates about whether or not Animaniacs was good and other things that are probably more important than that.But I mean, really funny stuff sometimes too.
You can actually still look it up by looking up the URL on Internet Archive.But He would say something like, I don't know, like, yeah, you know, the Care Bears was so faggy.
And then people would say, like, John, I really respect you and your work, but I take issue with your use of the term faggy.OK, I mean, he was a little bit more verbose than that, but.
Yeah, don't worry about censoring yourself because I edit all these for YouTube.So don't worry.
Oh, OK.But I mean, what John Kay's blogging meant to me at the time was he kind of and I guess he started really around 2004 at the earliest.But he there was like a good five year period from like 04 or 09.
or so where you could go to that blog every single day, and he was almost uploading something every day about all these different aspects of not just TV cartoons, but theatrical, and Disney, and all the different studios, and old illustrative artists, and all these nooks and crannies of cartoon history that nobody else was talking about.
But besides just encouraging a passionate interest in people about all these different aspects of cartoon history, he also kind of provided a framework for understanding the history of cartooning in America and why animation had become so degraded and
It's not just one thing, of course, but essentially he was very vocal about how the animation industry after the Golden Age, after the Disney and Warner Brothers golden years from the 1930s up through the 1950s or 60s at the latest.
So you considered like pre pre and post war.
Yeah.But, you know, it wasn't even so much the war.It was really television, like the advent of television. kind of ruined American animation in a way that it's never really recovered from.
And even though there were some real gems in those early years from Hanna-Barbera and UPA and shows like Roger Ramjet or George of the Jungle or The Alvin Show, you know, Jay Ward, those types of things, that kind of fizzled out really quickly.
The only reason that it was good for a time basically was because a lot of the Golden Age guys were working on those shows.The Flintstones had guys who were Warner Brothers animators pitching in on it, for example.
By the end of the 60s, it became the Saturday morning Scooby-Doo knockoff slop that we associate with when we say Saturday morning cartoons in a derogatory way. You know, he, John actually was working, he entered the industry in the late seventies.
So he was there for all of that.He was there for the real dregs of the animation industry.And he was there when it got better.He was working with Ralph Bakshi on, on his reboot of mighty mouse that changed the industry.
And then of course there was Ren and Stimpy and, you know. And he kept in touch with all of those guys who started with him and then went on to great things in the 90s.Bruce Timm, he was like a coworker of Bruce Timm on Mighty Mouse, for example.
But anyways, he really had this inside perspective.And again, it's like, you may not agree with his interpretations of events. He really provided a context for everything.And I'm sure, Gio, you're about my age.
It was a really interesting time growing up in the 90s.
I was gonna ask you, not to age docs, but are you considered Gen X or are you core millennial?Because I'm 31 years old, so I'm core millennial.
Oh, okay.No, I'm sorry.It's your crusty exterior.You had me fooled.I'm sorry. I'm pushing 40, so never mind.
Oh, so you are like core Gen X then?
No, no, no, no.I'm core.I'm old millennial.
At best.At best.I'm like, no, I could never in good conscience call myself a Gen X or I'm just an old old head millennial.Yeah. OK, so let me let me rephrase that growing up in the 90s was a really interesting time to be a kid for a lot of reasons.
But when it came to watching cartoons, all the old crap was still on the air in reruns.But at the same time, you were seeing all this new and better stuff.
So I think if you were a kid like I was with some kind of interest in the arts and arts history, you were looking at this and thinking, well, how come the stuff from not very long ago is so bad?And why did it get so much better?
And then I think by the end of the 2000s, I mean, I stopped watching TV on a regular basis in the mid 2000s probably. I think by the end of the 2000s, there was a real sea change again.
And I could never say that the animation industry today is putting out stuff as bad as it was in the 70s and 80s, especially the 70s, which is the real dark ages of American animation.But yeah, something has changed again.
it really seems to be stagnating again now.And part of that is also just due to the fact that TV is not the vibrant, popular medium that it used to be.But something's changed in the animation industry again, too.It's in doldrums again.
Yeah, when I was a kid, if you were a kid of the core millennial generation from the late 90s to the early 2000s,
it was like this explosion of creativity and all those legacy brands that we know today from like, you name it, Spongebob, Dexter, uh, like even like, I remember when I was a kid, because my, my cousin who was Gen X or Core Gen X, her favorite show was Red and Stimpy.
And she, and my parents would freak because like, why are you letting them watch that crap?And it's like, you know, and then ripping friends.And then like when I, when I was a kid, I used to watch like, Because, you know, being a leaf.
I would watch those like, quote unquote adult cartoons that would come on like tell a tune late night.So like, oh boy.Yes, like undergrads john Callahan squads.
Clone High, like that, apparently they came back with Clone High, but they came back with like a woke version of it.
Yeah, those are some of the better ones too.
I mean, Canadian animation, I've kind of made fun of it before because it had a tendency to kind of always be playing catch up to American animation and coming off as some like weird off-brand version of it.
Yeah, that's true.But but there was.But so what you're leading up to is that why is and I want to get back to the John Kay stuff, because if I recall, wasn't your handle John Kay Respector back in the day?
Well, yeah, because at first I had no intention but to just provoke people.And that was.
Yeah, you would go to war with people.
And that was that was, you know, that's a real that's a real conversation starter.John Kay Respector.And then I. They really, really get people talking.
I mean, I know I hate to even bring this up, but it's my podcast journalistic duty.You, of course, do not condone all the stuff that we don't have to mention with John Kay, right?Like that disavow, disavow, disavow.
Correct.Yeah, OK, OK.Yeah.I changed that name because it just got tedious to explain that I respected him for his accomplishments and for his outspokenness about the industry.
and not all the other stuff because it was a little dishonest of me being like, you know, no, no, you don't understand.And it's like, OK, but I but I want them to misunderstand a little bit so that I can grab their attention.It was a provocation.
Yeah.Yeah.It's it's sort of like anime racist.They'll have handles of. prolific figures, one particular person of a certain battalion in the mid-century German.
But anyways, but it's very, but I remember you still like go to war in the TL with animation or what people would call art Twitter, which I wanted to get into.But it is unfortunate because John Kay truly is a genius when it comes to animation.
And I think that, I saw this thread the other day from you, where you were talking about the difference between the wordiness.I always get distracted.I always go off a million tangents, but I'll save it for later.
But let's get to why was there this huge sea change in around like the mid to late 90s.I know a certain like YouTube video essays, they're like, well, you know, the Simpsons changed everything and so forth.
I mean, I guess that is true compared to like what animated entertainment was in the 70s and 80s.But then the 80s, you also still, you had like
You had things that were like, you know, like heavy metal or like you mentioned Ralph Bakshi with like Fritz the Cat, like things that were more raunchy and raw and for an adult audience.
But it seems that unlike, for example, in Japan, here in North America, even Europe as well, Europe, they have a lot of To them, like comic books and animation is quite different.
But here in North America, for some reason, we always equate animation with like kid stuff.And that.Yeah.
Well, that, you know, you have one man to thank for that is it rhymes with Disney. Literally, there's a timeline where the Fleishers won the war and animation truly is for everyone, but we don't live in that timeline.
We live in the post-Disney timeline. And that's the Disney curse.
I don't know if Americans will ever really embrace animation as something that is not inherently just for children and only sometimes for adults as a novelty, because Walt Disney really drilled that into people's heads.
I don't even know how conscious it was on his part.It's just that he was such a corny guy.
He was such a, he had, you know, with, you know, with some due respect to the Midwest, he just had very bland Midwestern tastes and ideas about art and culture.And he had a really lame sense of humor and that was reflected in everything he did.
And because he was the most financially successful, that's just what people came to associate with animation and how it was defined for them for not just Disney's generation, but two or three generations after that.
Do you buy into a lot of... I know that certain Like, for example, like on the left, you have like conspiracy theory.Their brand of conspiracy theory people would be like the parapolitics people.And some of that stuff is useful information.
But I know that a lot of people, they talk about Walt Disney's various like glow in the dark connections through, for example, with Epcot.
and so forth, like there's some connection there and how animation was integral to the sort of like American spectacle of society.
So do you think like it was a conscious programming or was it just like the basic nuts and bolts consumer capitalist, you know, mantra that if you sell things to children, you're going to make a lot of money?
Like, where do you land on the Walt Disney Quest?
In other words, the DQ, not the Dairy Queen.I don't know. how glow how much he glowed in the dark.But I will say that the reason that people assume that he was a Nazi is because He had kind of a Hitler-esque vision for... Oh, can I say Hitler?
He had kind of a... He had kind of a dictatorial, totalitarian vision for entertainment.And it's reflected in the fact that when he... It's like talking about... Alexander the Great, when he saw that he had nothing left to conquer, he weeped.
Because animation was just the beginning for him.As soon as he could, he moved into live action features.And then he was an early adapter to television.And then he basically created the modern theme park.
And then after that, the last thing he did before he died was he wanted to start creating his own cities, his own communities, the experimental prototype community of tomorrow.
So people read all this sinister stuff into him because there is something inherently sinister about his combination of megalomania, but also like a folksy, aw shucks exterior to that megalomania.
Oh, and then the other reason they assume that he's a Nazi is because he was friends with Wernher von Braun and had him on television with him.
But yeah, they have all the paperclips.
And honestly, he gets honestly, honestly, Disney gets a bad rap with the jokes on Family Guy about him hating Jews and stuff.I don't I don't think that's really true.But, you know, as a as a figure of the 20th century, he's
He's a little bit frightening.It's a little bit frightening that so much power was accrued to one man and still in his name.
We have this Walt Disney Corporation that carries on this vision of a kind of total control of all entertainment, like one company that just owns everything.And when
When the Disney company buys something, you know that it's going to get watered down.It's going to have the rough edges smoothed off.And people used to talk more about the Disney version of things.
People would make fun of like, oh, yeah, the Disney version of this or that.It's going to be all cheerful and happy now.But I don't think people even do that anymore.It's just kind of accepted.
People have just come to accept the dominance of Disney in their cultural lives.
Which is tragic in a way, because there is sort of like a weird kitschification of life through Disney, but then when you translate it to the current day, I know like a lot of like conservative grifters, like I'm talking, you know, Daily Wire, Matt Walsh here, type of stuff.
They'll talk about like, you know, Disney going woke or whatever.But like the serious critique would be that there is sort of,
there no doubt is sort of like subtle social messaging that, but even behind that, if you were, if you were just to like bracket their obvious attempts to like woke up by what the, like mass entertainment, there is something like inherently sinister outright just to have this huge conglomerate that has a very unique and sanitized style of entertainment delivery control, such a huge share of literally the consciousness of people from very young age.
Yeah, it really it really disturbs me to the now that I'm a parent how I Mean, I guess this is something I always knew but I didn't really see it in effect until I had children which is that Disney really owns people's childhoods and yeah, they own the sense of the imagination or the Imaginarium and when you for example look up
a fairy tale that you might like to buy a book of for your child and read with your child, you enter Rapunzel or Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty into the Amazon search bar, and what version do you think is going to pop up first?The Disney one.
It was good business sense starting all the way back with Snow White for Walt to say, okay, what are some public domain fairy tales that we can use as the basis for films?
But with the domination of Disney, you also have the domination of his and their vision of cultural history and stories that go back hundreds of years.
even if they don't, which are just good stories in their own right, that they kind of, by making their version the go-to version, they take it away from people.Like Winnie the Pooh would be a more modern example.
That's not hundreds of years old, but the original Winnie the Pooh books, Milne, I think, or Milne, I don't even know how to pronounce the author's name, but those are very special things and they're a reflection of the author.
And the Disney version is fine, but that shouldn't be the only version that there is.
No, exactly.And it's sort of like Rob's people of the inherent mythos, like like the Grimm fairy tales, for instance, was unique to a specific Germanic culture, but then now it's become this like mass globalized thing.
And like, for example, the formula that they perfected, that Disney's perfected above the only comparison would be Disney owns Marvel, right?They own Marvel or DC?
Oh, okay.So yeah, there you go.Disney and Marvel, they sort of like perfected, I guess just Disney.They've perfected
like truly globalized culture to like lowest common denominator where people that around the world that like live in the third world or in China or wherever that they don't have English as a first language like they can immediately like that.
Those are the things that go like super big.It goes everywhere.And I think there's a weird. planetization of culture that was only meant for specific European peoples, for example, in any grim fairy tale that they're remixing or reproducing.
So it's very weird how they've had to like smooth down a lot of the edges to make it a appeal to children with certain sensibilities, but also appeal to like the planet as a whole, which is I know, there's something very off-putting about that.Yeah.
Well, it's kind of like if America is the center, the wellspring of globalism, then the Disney company didn't start out as the department of culture for the global American empire, but that's kind of what it's become, if only de facto.
Even if they don't have a official partnership, which, you know, I'm sure I'm sure there's some official partnerships because the Department of Defense works with Hollywood, for example.
But yeah, I mean, Disney is essentially the global department of culture and it sucks.
And so, yeah, exactly.And so when we were talking about the the sort of animation revolution for a particular generation, like To go back to John Kay, what does he think and what do you think?
What were the events that transpired in the mid-90s that created such a huge outburst of creativity and stuff that... I mean, I know it's a meme nowadays because of soillennial writers, but you had, for example, Courage the Cowardly Dog,
things that kind of were adultish or, but now it's become like, like you, as you pointed out numerous times, it's become like this weird trope of like, so millennial writers doing the whole, like, this doesn't matter for children.Like, but, but
not being like conscious of that in a very postmodern way, what led to that explosion of creativity to where you could have things that were very raunchy, very surreal, like Red and Stimpy, things that had such a, that were almost grotesque in a way, like that would never fly in the 70s for instance.
Like what led to that?Was it just culture in general became more edgy and more open
Um, you know, perhaps I think I think there was, I think in part culture allowed for it, uh, coming, going out of the eighties and coming into the nineties.
Cause I think, uh, the cultural scenes of the nineties were a lot more interested in being transgressive, uh, in the mainstream than, uh, eighties mainstream culture.
But the, the main thing that changed was the mode of production of animation for television.And. Essentially what happened was... In the golden age of cartoons, cartoons were produced as theatrical shorts, right?
And the studios, Universal, Warner Brothers, they had these, Paramount eventually bought Fleischer Studios.They had cartoon departments.And in these cartoon departments, the artists and the animators basically had autonomy to do what they wanted.
They had to answer to executives. It wasn't anything at all like the mode of production for television, because when the theatrical short animation era ended and television began,
There was a little bit of a transitional period, like I mentioned, where a lot of people who worked in the Golden Age were also working on these TV cartoons.
And you know, like Hanna-Barbera, those guys did work at the MGM theatrical shorts department, producing Tom and Jerry and stuff.So when they were producing Yogi Bear and stuff like that, they had respect for anime.They were animators themselves.
They were cartoonists themselves.And they respected those guys and they gave them creative freedom and autonomy and stuff.
But what changed by the end of the 1960s, when TV production became more codified and entrenched, is that the people in charge of cartoon production for television were people who didn't come out of animation, didn't particularly care about animation, didn't particularly like animation,
And they were organizing the production of animated TV shows as you would any live action TV show, which which doesn't fit because, you know, people like to say TV is a writer's medium.
OK, well, animated cartoons are supposed to be a cartoonist's medium.So what you the the discrepancy or the the contradiction that you had was
Suddenly you have these animators being handed these scripts by these kind of fly by night hack TV writers who are just like, yeah, what do you need?A Yogi bear cartoon.Okay.Uh, he, he, he steals picnic baskets, right?Okay.
Let me just get on the typewriter and bang that one out for you.And they hand off these scripts to the animators and the animators are like, well, can, can we like change anything?Nope. No, that's not how TV works and you better hurry up.Okay.
Well, can we, can we get a little creative with the drawings?I don't know.Maybe if you want to like do some crazy drawing, we need to get it approved first.Like animators and cartoonists just lost all creative control over cartoons.And that's why.
That's why when you look at cartoons from the sixties, it's like, yeah, they're low budget.Yeah.They're limited animation, but.
If you watch an episode of Rocky and Bullwinkle, you can tell that the artists are like having fun drawing the characters and being creative and, and getting to do good work.
Um, even when they're working off of, of, uh, scripts, which, you know, even if they were written by non cartoonists could still be pretty good.
Cause a lot of the early TV writers came out of the golden age of radio, so they could at least write funny dialogue and stuff.But anyways, yeah, there's like this abrupt change from.
the 60s to the 70s, where suddenly cartoons just seem totally incompetent, really, really unwatchable.I don't think most people now even know how unwatchable the average Saturday morning cartoon from the 1970s was.It defies belief.
Any particularly egregious examples you could think of?
I mean, even at Hanna-Barbera, which had started out all right, You could look up like, I don't know, speed buggy might have been one turbo teen.Oh, God.
Great.Any any any number of their Scooby Doo clones like they were just ripping themselves off by that point.But yeah.Oh, the worst offender, though, the worst animation studio of the 1970s and probably into the 80s was Filmation, which
basically copied Hanna-Barbera's business model, but did everything cheaper and lazier.
Oh yeah.It was like the knockoff equivalent.Yeah.
Yeah.Yeah.And, um, they did fat Albert.
Oh my God.That was some of the stuff they, I gotta admit though, like some of the dialogue in fat Albert, like from like a modern, like cynical, like,
Especially like for modern cynical, like, you know, like Eden is in lines was like kind of funny, though, like it was like unintentionally funny.
And like, I mean, I guess, you know, Gen Xers, speaking of have a kind of kitschy, nostalgic fondness for these absolute dog shit cartoons from the 70s, like like Fat Albert.
But like, really try, try sitting down and watching a whole episode of Fat Albert.Try watching two episodes. Without without your brains completely leaking out of their ears Yeah, me and two friends did that once on discord.
It was hilarious.It was the fat Albert one where he's like You have to realize like that that new kid is retarded.
I know I Yeah, that stuff that stuff is that stuff is very funny.But I
But it was terrible, like from animation perspective, like it was just like there's a there's a there's a a document which I think John Kay might have like held on to and posted on his blog.I think that's where I saved it from.
But it's like a model sheet of one of the Fat Albert characters. you know, showing him from like the front view, the three-quarter view, the side view.And there are these typewritten notes from corporate saying, copy these poses as often as possible.
Do not do new drawings. photocopy these drawings as often as you can for the layouts.It's just like really literally instructing them to be as uncreative as possible with the animation, because that's how they're going to save money.
So that's kind of who the that's kind of who the industry was being run by in the 70s.Sorry, I'm like, this is taking two.I'm not giving you a short answer to this.No, no, it's good.It's cool.Okay.Yeah.But
In the 80s, studios started outsourcing to Japanese studios.That came later.The Korean animation industry was basically started by Hollywood for the purpose of outsourcing because they couldn't just outsource everything to Taiwan and Japan anymore.
In the 1980s, cartoons start to look a little different because they're outsourcing to Japan, and you get these weird pseudo-anime-ish looking styles on cartoons like G.I.
Joe and the real Ghostbusters, where it's not quite anime, but you can sort of tell watching it, maybe Japanese people animated it.
They transmogrify G.I.Joe into anime.
Children at the time wouldn't have known this, of course, but in hindsight, knowing what knowing about anime now, we can kind of we can see how that worked.OK, but what really changed for the American industry was in 1987, Ralph Bakshi
uh, got a deal to make a children's cartoon and that, and that was by the way.
Right.Yeah.Unthinkably, but only something like this could have helped save the industry.Right.
Because what he winds up doing is a reboot of mighty mouse and he goes around LA and he hires, you know, who he knows are the best young talent at that time, including young John, Chris Felucci, young Bruce, Tim, uh,
young Kent Butterworth, Jim Reardon, who would later go on to do The Simpsons, but bunch of guys, you know, really strong talent.And he says, Okay, you guys, I'm in charge.
And I say you guys are going to get to make cartoons kind of like they did in the old days.Like I'm not going to make you work from these crappy hack scripts from people who can't even draw.You guys come up with the stories.
You guys storyboard them out.We're going to make the drawings funny.We're going to make the animation wacky."It was a mid-budgeted show.It was maybe half a million per episode at the time.Not super cheap
of maybe like 700,000, not super cheap, but a little bit more money than some other shows so they could make it look a little better.
And it wasn't like a ratings smash, but it had this big impact on the industry where other basically animators looked at it and said, wow, can we do something like that?And then a couple of years later, you have Tiny Toons.
You start to have these shows where it's like, OK, We can give some more creative license to the animators again.
Oh, and then a couple of years later, yeah, Nickelodeon launches their Nicktoons series of Rugrats, Rugrats, Doug, and of course, Ren and Stimpy all premiere.
And then- Core, core Soylennial stuff.
And then Ren and Stimpy really blows people's minds.And then, you know, suddenly the whole industry is like, oh yeah, maybe, maybe we can have some more cartoons like that from now on. There was so much stuff going on in the late 80s, early 90s.
Batman, the animated series started.The Simpsons started.So yeah, just a really intense period of change in the late 80s onto early 90s that gave the 90s a lot of momentum for cartoons to be good and cool and interesting again.
And what changed after that is a little more vague, perhaps, because it wasn't any one thing, it was more like, I guess, entropy.It's like there wasn't enough momentum left to keep the innovation continuing as it should have.
Because I think, really, I know Adventure Time has its fans and stuff.But I think when Adventure Time came out and as the 2000s became the 2010s, these really simplified art styles started to get really popular.
And part of that, I believe, is intertwined with Tumblr culture.Yes, yes.Because, you know, Tumblr is and was sort of a great thing as far as like being a platform for young cartoonists to share their work.But
It also encouraged a sort of sameness and a sort of good enough art style where if you could draw in this, you know, I've taken to calling it bean mouth for a long time now, but
It's sort of what we think of as the modern style of very rounded edges, bean-shaped bodies, rounded teeth.
It looks a little bit like old 1930s rubber hose, but it's kind of like squishier, and people tend to look like blobs, and the color design tends to be very pastel.
The CalArts style, in other words.
Well, I used to call it CalArts style, too.I don't anymore, because I don't think that really, you know, that kind of like
almost lets the style walk easy.
It's a little bit unfair to CalArts because actually a lot of talented people went to CalArts.Kennedy Tartakovsky went to CalArts.Craig McCracken went to CalArts.I don't think you can entirely hang it
on CalArts because really CalArts just teaches whatever they think is the industry standard at the time.So when the industry standard started looking more like Steven Universe, that's what they started teaching.
You know, as far as Tumblr goes, I think this.Part of the reason this art style caught on is that it was easier for aspiring artists to draw and post on Tumblr and say, Hey, look, I'm pretty close to a professional level.
Now, if I can draw this style really well, but economically in terms of like production, the other reason that this style was promoted and caught on.
is because it is easier for outsourced Korean animators to draw in bulk because it's so much simpler.
Yeah, and also I think there's something.There's something else going on because I mentioned this style.
In passing, in my forthcoming book entitled Neoliberal Kitsch Art and Aesthetics in the 21st century, sorry Internet online or in aesthetics in the 21st century, I mentioned how. For example, if you, what would you call it?
Or it used to be known as art Twitter, quote unquote, or the people that work in the industry or these like Zoomers with Wacom tablets.
They always have this very kitschy, repetitive style that is unique to their like post Tumblr identity complexes, if you will.They always have pastel colors.They always look very shiny.They're very rounded.They're very, how shall I say it?
By POC-ish, if you know what I mean? They have a particular style that developed, I guess you could say like humans of flat design.
It was like an appropriation of mid-century modernism, but now you have this like digital overlay where it's like this one-to-one similitude of like their own self insert.And like, that's the reality.
And a lot of it is like just terrible recolors of Vizpop or Rebecca Sugar, what have you. But it's like, how did this style like it seems to be everywhere?And if you mention it, these people will attack you, as you know.Yeah.
But do you think it's because it intersected with the 2010s tumblr culture or do you think there's something more going on?
Well, I don't.Yeah.Yeah. I don't want to pontificate too much about, like, the ideological component of it.
I mean, I think there is one, and I think it does have to do with what you're getting at, which is... There's an aesthetic truth to it, in other words.
Yeah, I mean, aesthetics do reflect people's beliefs, and if you look at popular cartooning styles from the 2000s, for instance, you see a lot of literal edges for art styles that people wanted to associate with edginess.
But in the 2010s, yes, it becomes more rounded, it becomes more blob-like, and it becomes more androgynous, too.
It kind of has to do... Yeah, androgyny is a big one, yeah.
It kind of has to do with, like, eliminating contrasts, which is terrible for cartooning, because cartooning is, at its best, all about heightening and exaggeration.
And the modern style, what I hate about it the most is that it feels so watered down, and it feels so undefined, like an unformed piece of clay or something.And it's by design.
Cartoon characters drawn in the post-Adventure Time, post-Steven Universe style all just kind of look like little fat children or something. Like everyone's fat, right?Like that's, that's kind of the, that's one of the key defining features.
Everyone's fat, everyone's brown, everyone's, you know, other things I probably can't say, but yeah, it's like, it's got the, yeah.But, but Adventure Time is interesting because I quite enjoyed the first few seasons of Adventure Time.
I think that it had a really great mythological backstory, but then by the time you went on, it's like, okay, I think what happened was Pendleton Ward left And then it just became like Tumblr fest.And it's like, you know what I mean?
Like it just, it wasn't even just because the politics, it was just because the story didn't go.
Like I felt like they robbed people of that very interesting post-apocalyptic backstory that like to focus solely on like, okay, let's ship these characters.Let's appeal to the Tumblr crowd.Let's do all the little like kitschy things.And it's,
I don't know.Yeah.Yeah.What do you think?Yeah.
I mean, I don't have strong opinions about Adventure Time, except that I do see it artistically as a demarcation point in terms of when the modern style began, because I think it premiered in 2008, 2009, something like that.
And I was too old for it when it started.But I remember being taken aback by the look of it and thinking, oh, that's really neat that they have this very simple childlike style.
And the characters have these noodley arms that wiggle and wave everywhere.And it feels evocative of old Betty Boop cartoons or old Fleischer cartoons, Popeyes, where you've got olive oil and her noodley arms and legs flailing every which way.
I saw a lot of that in it and I liked that, but ultimately I think it turned out to be a bad influence because it's almost like peanuts.When peanuts became a cultural phenomenon, people looked at that art style and they said, Oh, it's so simple.
Like we can we can do that.Like, that's easy to do.And it's like, well, actually, Charles Schultz worked very hard to make it to make that simple.It's deceptively simple, like so many great things.
Like there's actually a lot of thoughtfulness put into it.And the imitators don't have the same level of skill or thoughtfulness in it.
Yeah, exactly.And I think that it seems like like it's there's just been like a plague of this.And I'm probably like, crafting things for more of a more digital media is probably another like like the updated Simpsons is totally different.
I mean, I could this probably be five hours long if we talk about the Simpsons.But like as as you know, as you know, I enjoy the early seasons and to see like the other abomination is now.
But even like SpongeBob or a lot of the cartoons that we grew up with, it's like it seems that there's been like a persistent spirit that's been robbed from them.
And I wonder if that's because they're overtly digitalized, or is it that animators just don't care, don't try anymore? or they don't have the same freedom.I mean, I guess there's indie animators that do, but.
The digitization is absolutely a part of it, because Flash animation can be a great tool when it's used by animators who have the traditional skills and the foundation of skills.And they're using Flash animation and rigging, which is kind of like
using parts of a drawing as assets that you can put on accesses and move around.
Is that like ray tracing?Or that's different?
No, I think that's different.But it's sort of like Rigging animation in the post-digital landscape means being able to move parts of a drawing without having to redraw them over and over, essentially.
So if you know what you're doing, that can be a great assist. if you are just starting.And I think a lot of people have learned to animate now just with that tool to use more as a crutch.
Then you get animation that is a lot stiffer because you feel like you're just watching the same motions being recycled over and over.And as to the modern art style, I think part of the reason it caught on, again, is because it's easier to animate.
Because like, I remember like, again, as a Canadian, like a reboot was really big here and it was like fresh and it was new and.Oh yeah.
Oh yeah.Okay.So, you know, like there was, there was like a, It was an unexplored territory.It was like a verb to it.But yeah, it's yeah.
But you know, I have so much more affection for reboot than any Pixar thing, because Pixar basically took this digital animation technology and used it to make 3D digital versions of what would otherwise be Disney cartoons.Yeah.
Reboot is from that early computer animation era of like Beyond the Mind's Eye, where the computer animators were just like, how surreal can we make this?How strange and uncanny can we make this look?
Yeah, I love the early digital animation.There's this great Twitter account.I think it's called something
Early 3D renders.Early 3D renders, yes, yeah.
And the landscapes in particular, like there's a weird sort of like quietness to them.There's something very surreal, but also like in a weird way, like post-human in a sense, the way that they're... Yeah, kind of like the Myst CD-ROM game. Yes.Yes.
There's like a stillness to them that I quite enjoy.And I think like that vibe of like, cause I always loved that type of like early two thousands Y2K Bryce 3D.
Yeah.But that's it.But what we're talking about is, is even before that, it's like the early, the early nineties, uh, uh, vibe and aesthetic.Um, did you ever play the residents freak show CD-ROM?Do you know what that is?
I've never played that.I've never played that.
Are you familiar with the residents, the band?
They're kind of like Devo in so far as that they were both a band, but also an art project and an art collective.
And one of the multimedia experiments or creations that they made was a CD-ROM called Freak Show, where it was in first person, and you would go around a freak show and look at the different freak acts.
And there would be accompanying songs, of course. And these freak characters are what we're talking about, like these very bizarre looking CG animated characters that look nothing at all like
what we associate with CG animation today, as far as not just Pixar, but Shrek movies, or Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, or whatever.Just really funky looking stuff.
I would strongly recommend checking out Resident's Freak Show on YouTube, looking at a playthrough, just to get an idea of what I'm talking about.
Oh, it's very interesting.That's almost like music acts that would do a lot of like video art stuff like psychic TV, stuff like that.But but that's it.Yeah.And there is something even to like the very first like 80s animation.
I was watching one of these YouTubers going through the history.For example, you have like the animations that you'd find at like bowling alleys. and stuff like that.
But it just seems like I guess a core issue that you're getting at that you've posted about on Twitter and elsewhere is that it's sort of like a repeated theme that you have in multiple mediums, whether it be
cinema or even like a more I guess more ridiculous example would be like professional wrestling where it's like you have a poetry of emotion and this is for example what Andre Brisson talks about in his essays on cinema where
The moving image is fundamentally different than theater because theater, you have to have dialogue, you have to have the theatrics.But whereas cinema can depict things that are imperceptible to the language alone.
But then when it becomes overtly wordy, it's basically just like a theater production on film.Professional wrestling is similar in that like You had people that came from the original Kearney Spirit, the Booker.
Then by the time you get to the Attitude Era, and as much as I enjoy him, you have people like Vince Russo.It's basically a television drama.And now, of course, WWE is like Disneyland.
In other words, it's not about what's happening in the ring, the story you're telling through this physical interaction.Rather, it's about Okay, Rey Mysterio is in a war with his son, Dominic, and it's like, who cares, right?
Because it's not really about the actual performance.And so what you're seeing is an animation similar in that there's like, you would say, it's like weird, like logocentrism, where like the written word is everything.
Yes, yes, writers, writers took over the medium.And that's actually the simplest way I can put it is that animation is just like cinema.It should be a visual storytelling medium.
That doesn't mean it has to be pure visuals, but it is supposed to be a visual medium first.And television is a word oriented, dialogue oriented medium.
Certainly, at least it was for the longest time before prestige TV and very expensive shows like Game of Thrones that look like movies.But honestly, look at Game of Thrones again or even Breaking Bad or any of these shows that people
praise for their cinematic qualities, it's still mostly at its core people having these dialogue scenes with each other.Yeah.
And when you look at those terrible cartoons from the 70s, I mean, hell, all the way to today, look at terrible cartoons now. The worst of them are basically just people sitting around and talking, or standing around and talking.
That's the first, most immediate giveaway that you're watching a cartoon where writers were in charge and not artists or cartoonists, to be more precise.I say cartoonists and artists a little bit interchangeably.
Kind of the whole point of being a cartoonist is that you're not just good at drawing.You can also use your drawings to communicate.And Charles Schultz, Bill Watterson, all of these guys were cartoonists who could draw really well.
And they could also communicate their ideas through the medium of comics.And animation ought to be run by the same types of people who just happen to be working in moving
in drawings, moving pictures, animation, rather than the still image communication of comics.But yeah, the point is, yeah, the writers took over the industry from cartoonists with TV, and it's never completely gotten back in cartoonists' hands.
Yeah, exactly.And it's tragic in a way because I remember you were using the example of John Kay with Ren and Stimpy.And there was, I remember, even like the sound as well.Like I remember the one of my favorite scenes was,
Who is Stimpy's friend where they wrecked everything?
Sven Hoek.Yeah.And then you had that moment where Red's going crazy and you hear those distant distortion sounds and the way that he's conveying it through motion like, and I'm going to hit you and you're going to fall.
There was like a very there was a poetics to that.But then as time goes on, I guess just because like it takes so long to animate, you almost had to like genericize it.
Well, that's that's that's that that scene is an amazing piece of animation, but it's also an amazing piece of directing.And TV was never really.I mean, people say it's a writer's medium and they're correct.It's not often that you see
direction in television, mostly directors on TV shows are just kind of staging things to make sure that it reads clearly.
And that was the incredible thing about Ren and Stimpy was that you felt like you were watching something that was had a directorial vision and a sense of authorship, like by a filmmaker.And part of that is just the fact that there was even pacing.
right?Because that episode Sven Hoek, it's like Sven shows up at Ren and Stimpy's house.Sven is being idiotic with Stimpy and it's happy and it's light and it's carefree and they're making a big mess.
And then Ren comes home and he's horrified by what they've done to the house.And then that horror turns into rage. And then he gets very calm and it's a little bit frightening.He's just got this anger simmering under the surface.
And that's just and that's not just about like the drawings and the dialogue and the. And the animation, it's also about the fact that the mood has shifted.
If you were watching a film and something changes and the atmosphere becomes something different, there's an up and down, there's peaks and valleys.
So that was, aside from everything else, that was one of the most revolutionary things about Ren and Stimpy was bringing back direction to cartoons, which you hadn't seen since.
Honestly, even in the golden age, there weren't that many cartoons where the mood could change like that or there would be ups and downs.Bob Clampett gets rightly celebrated because I think he was one of the few directors who could
take you on a journey in just a seven minute cartoon.Have you ever seen The Great Piggy Bank Robbery?
I think I have a long, long time ago.
Yeah, duck twicey.Daffy has a dream that he's Dick Tracy, basically.
And he goes and he goes to the villains hideout.And recently it became a meme because there's that scene where he's looking at all the different villains and they're surrounding him.But anyways, that's a great example.
That's one of the best cartoons ever made.But it's it's so remarkable because it's only seven minutes long and so much happens and there is. like there's a beginning, middle, and end that each feel separate and different.
And there are these set pieces and stuff.And so yeah, Clampett was one of the great directors of that era because he was a real director.He wasn't just making it look funny and making the timing funny and making it move funny.
He did all of that, but he was also an auteur in a filmmaking sense for animation.
Oh, yeah.Yeah.But because but that's what I mean, like when you look at cartoons nowadays and like in such stark contrast, like I remember I was I was at a family gathering And my, like, almost my cousins are like older Gen Xers, right?
So they have kids of their own who are, I guess, now Gen Alpha.And watching, what's that show Teen something, Teen Titans Go? Yeah.And I remember like, I'm like, my God, like, isn't it burning your eyeballs?Like, it's not I couldn't keep up.
I was having an aneurysm almost.I'm like, it's like, everything's like in your face.Like you were saying, there's no real depth.It all looks very, Like all of the tones are of a similar, like on a similar layout.
There really isn't a lot of like depth of field in terms of color choices.It's very like neon-ish and it's in your face.And there really like, is it like, like, I don't know, I guess it's, is it a generational thing?
No, I think it's a, again, I think it's a television thing because TV by its nature is sort of monotonous.Like if you turn on, if you turn on a sitcom,
The jokes are going to be delivered by the actors at a certain pace that's not really going to vary as it would like in a comedy film or a particularly good comedy film where you might have slow scenes and fast scenes and things feel like they're building up towards something.
TV is just monotonous by nature.And it's sort of monotonous even when it's good because, I don't know, you look at the terrible cartoons of the 70s and 80s.
Everything is kind of proceeding at about the same pace, whether it's supposed to be an action scene or a comedy scene or something else. even I don't think Teen Titans go.
I mean, I would never I wouldn't watch it and I wouldn't want my kid to watch it.But yeah, like I can tell at least they're trying to keep things high energy and sort of lively.
But even within that, it's like everything is kind of high energy at about the same pace.It's not you don't get any building up towards something.And
You know, even even some of the better cartoons like SpongeBob or something, they do tend to be a little monotonous, although although SpongeBob did have like Ren and Stimpy people who who worked on it at the beginning and who are working on it now.
And they do have an appreciation for trying to tell stories that that escalate or deescalate or trying to create a mood and an atmosphere.And yeah, not to not have it just be the same thing over and over.
Well, there was recently a clip that you replied to.
I have to read this tweet because I saw this other one who, um, I was actually stunned because it was like one of these people that was like, you know, uh, like had those like kitschy PFPs with like the, the Palestinian, uh, watermelon and the Kamala coconut.
in the bio, but they were even saying like, this is total slob.What's the show from this clip where it's like some of the best 54 seconds of animation and then you said, what's that show?
You said these, these sort of clips always look like PBS kids trying to do Dragon Ball Z. We want our young adult cartoons to have awesome fight scenes like an anime, but we don't want to have it.We have to be better artists to storyboard them.
And it's like very just like high octane super fight, but it's got like the whole girl boss thing.There's like some influences from, you know, Studio Ghibli, not even like anime proper.
It's like very, it's like very much that post Tumblr style that- Yeah, that's a, that's a, that's, that's kind of a perfect modern example of the, of the post Tumblr style, because I'm, I'm looking at the, at a promotional image for the show right now.
And yeah, you can see a direct lineage from, from Steven Universe and Adventure Time, you've got this character whose head is just sort of a round circle.Her eyes are round ovals.
You got those little pinpoint pupils that are a hallmark of all these shows, which really started with The Simpsons.But she's got the noodley limbs.And yeah, it's sort of clearly
drawn so that the Korean animation studios that the animation is actually outsourced to won't will be able to have a faster turnaround but they can never admit that they have to pretend that like oh yeah this is just this is the style it's popular and it's popular because everyone likes it and everyone likes it because it's popular and
Yeah, the villain looks like that character from a regular show.
And never mind that there's dozens of other shows that look just like this.Ours has a main character who's Tai, so that's what sets us apart.We've got that going for us, which is nice.
Oh man, no, but that's, it's really is a tragedy because it, like we were saying about Disney, it really is sort of like the psychic filter for children around the globe nowadays.
And I, I, I shudder to think what, like the influences that Jenna off was growing up with.Well, I mean, yeah.
Yeah.In a, in a way it's, it's a bit like, um, I think animation is going slightly the way of, um, uh,
Well, OK, I was going to say it's going slightly the way of TV and movies where those just don't have as much importance in mainstream pop culture as they used to.
And that's true because ratings aren't just down from 10 years ago on children's networks like Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network and Disney. ratings are down all across the board.People just aren't watching TV like they used to.
They're not going to movies like they used to.But as far as animation is concerned, basically, Japan has won the war here, people.To the degree that kids are interested in comics and animation, they're reading manga and they're watching anime.
And I don't know what else to tell you about that. I don't blame them.
Yeah, of course.I quite enjoy some anime here and there.
But it seems like what's filling in the void is kind of in some ways worse because I mean, I don't know if it could be worse, but there's a lot of like slop content that really young kids are looking at.Like my friend,
My good friend, Frenel Blodart, he alerted people to what his nephews and nieces are watching is like this nugget thing where it's like they're doing like the Cotton Eye Joe song, but they're nuggets. sort of like Skippy Toilet, but it's like that.
And there is like this other thing that's very popular in TikTok with like these road road lights.It's like very like it's almost got like the Spider-Man also.
Yeah, no vibes, you know?Yeah.Yeah, I guess I guess Spider-Man also is yesterday's news.And now we've got a chicken nugget singing Cotton Eye Joe.I hadn't heard of this until just now.And this looks absolutely awful.
Yeah, it's got like Nikocado Avocado when he was still fat.And it's, well, even like, do you have a hot take on the Skibbity Toilet thing or you just prefer to ignore that?I don't know.
I don't know.Haven't we already passed peak Skibbity Toilet?
Or is Skibbity Toilet the movie in the works?Is that going to break all box office records?
I think they are making a movie.I know that they're making a Backrooms movie with Kane Pixels, which is interesting.
Is it like Blumhouse making that?I wouldn't put it past them.
Not Blumhouse, 824.Oh no, really?
I love how A24 started out as this prestigious art house, art film studio, and now they're just like a horror studio.Now they just put out these artsy horror movies.They're the upmarket version of Blumhouse.
Yeah, exactly.Exactly.I mean, they did the Civil War one recently, and I think they produced that other Alex Garland one, Men, which was quite good, but I didn't watch Civil War.
I was going to, but then... Sometimes I don't mind that because I think they're going to be putting out the next version of Nosferatu by that guy who made the Northmen. Oh, yeah, which I like his stuff.
So I don't I don't mind that they're putting out an artsy horror film every now and then if it's something I actually want to see.But hey, you know, maybe they should put maybe they should put out an animated film.I don't know.
Yeah, no, but that's what I mean.Like there is like like that weird attitude in North America because like animation being interpolated is like children.Because, for example, recently I reviewed someone.
Someone wanted me to review the French animation film Fantastic Planet, which I believe was animated by a Soviet animator and very surreal.Very trippy, of course, for the 70s and. I feel like there could be a potentiality for that again.
I mean the Backrooms does have this internet lore that intersects with a lot of, you know, like we all know about like the liminal spaces stuff and it's very like nostalgic in some ways.It's very for the times because
I mean, I could write a whole essay on this about like the backrooms intersects with our fascination with space, because now we live in the age of spaces and like the non space.Right.
And it seems like conveying that, like in a lot of these people that do backrooms compilations, they're quite like they go to great lengths to make it very gritty and like analog and nostalgic.But but I wonder, like if
I don't know.Yeah, yeah.I don't know that I've really seen too much analog horror or liminal horror that seems like it was made by people my age or older who were actually around when things were more analog.
It always seems like it always seems like someone younger than me trying to imagine what that was like and how creepy it must have been.And it's like, well, it it did have a creepiness to it.But I don't know if
You know, like I saw Skinnymarink and I thought it was pretty bad and I could appreciate what they were going for, but I don't know if they quite got there.
It was a bit too drawn out.I feel like it was it could have been shorter, like it could have just been a short and it would have been more effective.
Yeah, but but when it comes to there still is like a lot of design and animation that I like is is its purpose is purely as like. a mechanism of generating discourse, like a lot of that modern style of illustration.
For example, the recent, what was it? The New Yorker cover.I'm sure.
Well, yeah, you mentioned the mammies, the nannies.
You mentioned Humans of Flat and Humans of what gets called Humans of Flat is kind of like a it's it's definitely a part of the same family tree as the as the modern cartooning style, which I guess Bean Mouth is probably as good a term as any.
I called it Bean Mouth all the time, but I don't talk about it so much anymore now because it's like what else is there left to say?But yeah, Bean Mouth, Humans of Flat.
And that New Yorker cover isn't as stylized as Humans of Flat, but it certainly feels part of a kind of nondescript style where it's sort of like intended not to evoke any strong
reactions on a visual level, because you look at that New Yorker cover and you just sort of read it on a surface level.And it's purely illustrative.It's not it's not.There's no exaggeration.There's no heightening of anything.It's a very bland look.
It's kind of like a style that's the absence of style.
Yeah, exactly.And it's really not about a unique aesthetic.It's not about an artistic quality, for instance.It's purely designed as a discursive mechanism for whatever agenda they wanted to push.
And I was actually driving for my girlfriend, and I was actually I was listening to Red Scare breakdown.I don't know if I should admit this.I listened to Red Scare, but I was actually listening to Anna and Dasha break it down.
It's basically, it really works on a lot of like those upper middle class white liberals that quite enjoy reading the New Yorker because it's like this form of like faux sophistication.And it's like they love being guilt tripped over.
But the point being is that it's not about the art itself.It's really about the messaging.And the art is conveying in the most simplest terms possible.Yeah.
Yeah, well, I mean, to New Yorkers credit, they have had artists like Daniel Klaus and Ivan Burnetti, like really good, good cartoonists do covers before.
And the thing about an artist like Klaus in particular, who I think is one of the all time great comics authors, he can render someone's face or expression or a moment in such a way that he gets so much across just in the subtleties
of their body language and the composition of the image and that's you know that's really the opposite of the of the purely the purely functionary style of the of uh the cover the the nanny cover yeah and of course i mean all these people uh
I don't know, those people are going to be replaced by AI art probably and there's this good.
Yeah, they ought to be because what's the difference?Because they're like, we have we have a lot of AI artists already.They're actually human beings.
I might as well be AR.All these people on art Twitter, if you want to call it that, they've had this crusade.I know talking about AI art is sort of passe, But they have this crusade for intellectual property rights and for copyright.
And I could remember when it was the left anarchist position to be against IP, to be against copyright as an inherently fascistic and power imbalanced system that's wielded by corporations.But now they love it.There was this photographer, this
woke Korean photographer who had this painter did this painting of one of her photographs of a woman but it was like he only changed the garb that she was wearing and she ended up suing him and and they all love this they cheer was a super mega viral tweet and all these like things about um
like and there's been like a number of like huge super viral discourses around AI animation and art like we all know the uh the infamous completion of the Keith Haring piece.
Oh yeah.Keith Haring, one of those ancient astronauts of the Humans of Flat style.
Yeah, exactly.But it's very funny how there has been this sea change.Is it just purely gut level, I'm reactionary about the things I love?Or are you seeing that they're forming these
thoughts or discourses around animation and copyright and that AI is going to threaten them on such like a fundamental level.Is it purely just mercenary or do they actually?
Oh yeah, oh absolutely.They all think they're temporarily embarrassed Matt Groening or Vivzie Pops.Like they think as soon as they come up with that one cartoon character they're going to be rich.Boom.
So yeah, this pop actually did do it, though.She didn't come up with that one character, right?
Well, that's why that's why they hate her.That's why they hate her.That's why they're saying like, oh, all her all of her characters look the same like and yours don't like you guys are all drawing like each other.
There's like there's a thousand cartoonists drawing in the style that you're drawing in.Like, sorry that Viv's pop is doing something that's inspired by Joan and Vasquez instead of Pendleton Ward or or or Rebecca Sugar.
That's crazy, because a lot of these people, they look like Vizpop.They have the same style.It's like there's a million copies of her, but they hate her now?I didn't know this.
I think, yeah, no.Vizpop gets a lot of hate, and Hazbin Hotel gets a lot of hate, specifically from Tumblr artists who I really think it's just jealousy.
You're still in the ghetto.Yeah.
Yeah.I really think it's just jealousy because what she's doing is is not revolutionary at all.But it does feel like a little bit of a throwback, at least to something like Invader Zim.And and I don't know if they feel like that's retrograde.
They feel like, well, we're we've moved beyond that now.We've we've smoothed out all the angular, sharp edges of of the Joan and Vasquez influence.And and we're not doing that anymore.And how dare she have a success with that?But
Yeah, that that original has been Hotel Pilot actually does have some nice animation.And I think that's the reason why it sold is because it did have some nice animation.
It wasn't just, you know, people tend to think of animation in terms of designs, like, you got to have the right art style, you got to find a certain character design.And obviously, that stuff is important.
But the reason people don't talk about animation anymore as a way for artists to express themselves is because it all got outsourced so long ago, and it's not even done here.
There was a clip from the show Big City Greens, which drove me up the freaking wall. It was an episode where, Dino, are you familiar with this show?
Yeah, if you look it up, it's definitely drawn in the modern bean mouth style we're talking about.
Oh, this one.Yes.They got like the... That guy, okay, they got like, I guess he's a Trump character, but they got this guy that looks like... What was his name from Billy and Mandy, the black best friend, Alvin, or what was his name?
Hey guys, you know that guy?He looks like him, like he looks like the best friend from Billy and Mandy.But yeah, go ahead, Big City Greens.
Billy and Mandy is one of those cartoons I didn't think was that good at the time, but I look back on it now, it's like, oh, I didn't know how good we had it.
Is this like Gravity Falls, right?Like it's the same,
Oh, I mean, I would put Gravity Falls in the same bean mouth category as these other shows.But there is this scene from an episode of Big City Greens where the characters learn how a cartoon is made.
Ha ha, very self-referential, very third wall breaking, fourth wall breaking jokes.But there's a joke where it's like, OK, well, all the storyboards and drawings for the cartoon are done. Now we're just going to send it to Korea.
And they and the joke is that it's like launched on a catapult to Korea.And they they say some kind of incantation, like make the drawings move, make the drawings move.And I watch this and I'm like, Oh, yeah, that's that's really funny, guys.
It's really funny how the And animation, which is one of the most authentically, originally American art forms of the 20th century, like jazz or baseball or the mystery story, which precedes the 20th century.
But it's like, yeah, we sold our birthright.Ha-ha.The industry, Hollywood sold its birthright when it comes to animation for a mess of And now kids want to watch anime instead.And it's really funny how how that happened.
It was like, yeah, you know, you're you're talking about the controversy over AI.It's like. There's this union group called TAG.I don't remember what it stands for.
But there were these videos that were narrated by Adam Conover from Adam Ruins Everything circulating on animation Twitter, where he's talking about how, oh, the animation industry is run by these corporate shills who are so greedy.
And it's like, yeah, that's true.And he's saying, and they're trying to replace artists with AI.And we've got to protect animation jobs.It's like, protect animation jobs? Like, where have you been?
Since the 1980s, any studio that wants its animation to look halfway decent has been outsourcing to Asia.Why don't you focus on bringing that industry back over here?I think that might create a few more animation jobs.
This is literally woke neoliberalism.I hate the term woke, by the way.I'm saying it way too much.But colloquially, it's literally like, a more like fair.It's like fair use coffee on Starbucks.
It's very much like a neoliberal solution to what is ostensibly a activist problem that just creates more problems.
It's like it's same with like the New Yorker illustration where I think it was my good friend Kashiwagi that had that tweet that went viral about like modern feminism isn't like really
isn't really addressing the problem of women being exploited for their labor, rather it's just outsourcing the problem to the third world.And we have to feel guilty about that.
So it's like, okay, you can't, the big evil AI art is going to replace animators, but the jobs are already being outsourced.So it's like, well, we need to protect the industry.It's not about pretending like protecting the actual creators.
It's really just protecting the industry as it currently is.
Well, right.They care about protecting industry jobs now that it looks like above the line industry jobs might be at risk.That there might be AI programs that could generate some character designs that some executive would sign off on.
as opposed to someone having a cushy character designer job.
No, exactly.That's what I mean.It really is just displacing the problem.Whereas I guess AI could potentially do a lot of those in-between jobs that are very tedious when it comes to animation.
I'm very optimistic about AI replacing everybody. Uh, not, not when it comes to stuff that matters, but when it comes to like designing kids cartoons, yeah, sure.
They, they look, you know, they're already designed by human AI already because they're, you know, they don't look very original to me.Do you see a lot of originality in, in animation today?
Disney had to step in when every browser started getting its own AI image generator.
Disney had to step in and tell some of these AI generators like, hey, stop making it so easy for these posters to make fake Disney movies about 20th century German man.
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