The Animation Pimp

Do you loathe Christmas? Are you tired of those schmaltzy fake feel good holiday films that wax bad poetic about the true meaning of Christmas? Here’s an essential list of holiday viewings for the Christmas curmudgeon.

#10 It’s a Wonderful Life, Frank Capra, 1946
Take away the deux ex machina inspired resolution and you’ve got one very bleak film noir. It’s got suicide (sort of), drunks, death, sleaze, corruption, and child abuse.

#9 Edward Scissorhands, Tim Burton, 1990
It’s not technically a Christmas film, but with all that snow and Danny Elfman’s christmas friendly soundtrack, it sure feels like one. Regardless, they don’t come much more twisted than this tragic tale of a Frankenstein-like being (Johnny Depp) who is left with scissors for hands after his creator (Vincent Price) dies suddenly on Christmas.

#8 Female Trouble, John Waters (1974).
When bitchy teenager Dawn Davenport (Devine) doesn’t get Cha Cha shoes for Christmas, she goes crazy, attacks her parents, and runs away from home to become a fashion model/mass murderer. Now, that’s a Christmas story!
#7 Merry Freakin’ Christmas, Corky Quakenbush, 1996-2006
A delirious dvd collection of stop-motion parodies made for Mad-TV by animator Corky Quakenbush. Includes the hilarious Clops (where a heavily intoxicated Santa gets pulled over by cops and tells them he had “just a couple a nogs at the pole is all occifer.”) and the Rudolph parodies: Ragin’ Rudolph, The Reinfather, A Pack of Gifts Now. “The ho ho ho horror” (www.spacebassfilms.com)
#6 South Park: Mr. Hankey, The Christmas Poo, Trey Parker/Matt Stone, 1997
The idea of a kid believing that a talking piece of poo comes up the toilet bowl every year to bring gifts to fiber fueled kids is a fine ode to the ribald tradition. And the quartet of foul mouthed, self-absorbed children is darn close to the true nature of many half pints at Xmas.

#5 Christmas Holiday, Robert Siodmak, 1944
Gene Kelly. Deanna Durbin. All the makings of a classic Hollywood Christmas musical, right? Wrong. In fact, this film noir has little to do with the holiday season. After Christmas Mass, Durbin breaks down and tells a stranger how she discovered her husband (Kelly) was a murderer. One of the most bizarre entries in the classic Hollywood pantheon.

#4 Black Christmas, Bob Clark, 1974
Looking for a good dose of anti-Christmas Story, well look no further than its director Bob Clark. Before terrorizing us with Ralphie, BB guns, and leg lamps, Clark directed Black Christmas. During the Xmas holidays, a psycho menaces a gaggle of sorority girls. The film is bit cliche today, but it’s easy to forget that this was the pioneer of the slasher genre. With a cast that includes stellar Canadian thespians Andrea Martin, Margot Kidder, Art Hindle, and Doug McGrath (Pete, from the legendary Goin’ Down The Road) Black Christmas is a creepy Canadian classic guaranteed to take the life out of Xmas.

#3 Silent Night, Deadly Night, 1984
On Christmas eve, Little Billy sees his parents raped and murdered by a madman dressed as Santa Claus. Living in an orphanage, Billy, who is haunted by his parents’ death and hates Christmas, is treated brutally by the head nun. At 18, Billy gets a job at a toy store. Life is good until the store Santa gets injured and Billy is asked to take his place. Wearing the costume he has fear his whole life, Billy finally cracks and goes on a Christmas Eve killing rampage chanting “PUNISH!” before he kills. Until the generic slasher stuff begins, Silent Night is actually a pretty interesting character study.

#2 Star Wars Holiday Special, Steve Binder, 1978
Warning: Do not watch this sober or alone. It may cause confusion, pain and severe depression. Chewbacca and Han Solo battle Imperial Forces to get the Wookie home for his version of Christmas called Life Day. Along the way, we endure: a ten-minute opening spoken entirely in Wookie grunts; bizarre and painful cameos by Art Carney, Bea Arthur and Harvey Korman; and a foggy looking Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher later said she couldn’t remember making the show) attempting to sing. Like a car wreck, you can’t help but look, no matter how painful what you see might be.

#1 Bad Santa, Terry Zwigoff, 2003
There is no meaner, nastier Christmas film around than this hyper cynical tale about a pair of crooks (Billy Bob Thornton and Tony Cox) who pose as a store Santa and elf in order to rob department stores. Outstanding performances by Thornton and Bret Kelly (the kid) overshadow equally brilliant bits from John Ritter (”he’s not going to say f*** stick in front of the children is he?) and Bernie Mac. A dark, twisted and dysfunctional masterpiece that is guaranteed make your Christmas misery blissfully satisfying.
Originally appeared in The Ottawa Citizen, December 2006

One of my favourite pieces. Written for the Ottawa Citizen in September 2007 just before Jarv and I went to see The Who.

1982. I was 15 and angry, real angry. I’d just been told that my father wasn’t really my father. In one sense, I was relieved. I never liked the guy much anyway. At least now I knew I wasn’t his blood. But now my birth was now clouded with mystery. If I wasn’t his son, whose was I? Fuelling the fire was a tormented mother who refused to discuss the truth of my origins. All of this unfolded during an already fragile time. I was a teenager in high school. Every day was a major battle to uncover your self and purpose. Now this struggle was vanquished into a litany of meaningless anger, sex, rebellion, and alcohol.

Then there was light in the form of an English rock band called The Who. I’d never heard of them before, but there was a buzz about the band throughout Brookfield High School. Apparently they were embarking on a farewell tour and playing their final date in Toronto. Everyone was talking about it, envious of those who had the money and ability to journey far south to Toronto. For those who didn’t have the means, there was an option. The farewell concert was being aired on national television. With my school chum alongside, I sat in the basement of our Hunt Club garden home on December 16th, 1982 and embarked on a journey that would follow me to this day.

There was no magical moment or song that triggered it. In truth, I probably just wanted to fit in, to embrace something that would define me, that would provide me with some form of accompaniment along the way to wherever. Whatever it was, from that night on I became obsessed with all things WHO.

Fortunately, my classmate Deannie was a massive Who resource and she filled me in on the band’s history. First she told me that their original drummer, Keith Moon (“Moon the Loon” as he was nicknamed), had died in 1978 after overdosing on pills he was taking to curb his alcoholism. Then she led me to Richard Barnes’ book, “The Who Maximum R&B”. Filled with a ton of photos and anecdotes that traced the band’s roots, the book became my bible.

Then, using all my measly part time job earnings, I went on a manic Who shopping spree. I bought records, posters, t-shirts, buttons (which I still have today). I was SO addicted that I even bought an unused Who ticket from my colleague at the Airport Drive-In (where I worked during the summers). Soon, my room was entirely covered with Who posters and flags. In a sense it was all quite superficial, but that soon changed as I began to dig deeper into the music and band members.

Initially, I was drawn to all the members of the original Who. They were all so different from quite different from one another and had a distinct personality. Singer Roger Daltrey was the macho pretty boy. Bass player John Entwistle was the quiet anchor who let his play do the talking. “Moon the loon”, naturally, was the clown/wildman. Then there was Pete Townshend, the band’s guitarist and main songwriter. This gangly big nosed geek was the sensitive, moody one. The Who’s uniqueness stemmed from their wildly diverse personalities. Together they brewed a storm of emotions that seemed to articulate all my own confusion and rage towards myself, my parents, and the world.

I soon became enthralled with Townshend. What made him so unique was not only that he was the driving force behind The Who’s music, but that he seemed so familiar. In a sense, Townshend lived through the other members of The Who. Each of them possessed attributes that Townshend wished he possessed. As such, he was a chameleon of sorts, a drunken clown like Moon one minute, a macho man like Daltrey the next. Through his interviews and lyrics, I discovered a multifaceted and fragile character prone to moodiness, contradiction and an obvious identity crisis. Like the rest of us, Townshend is equally brilliant, stupid, funny, crass, caring and cold. He’s prone to pretensions, is a hypocrite, contradicts himself, and says and does things that make you cringe (e.g. He once said he knew what it was like to be a woman; then there was the whole child pornography fiasco). That’s the beauty of Townshend and the Who. More than the Stones and The Beatles, they were all there for the world to see: zits, warts and all. What made him so special was that he was aware of his complexities and contradictions. They were all their in the songs.

In the 1970 song, “The Seeker”:

I’m looking for me
You’re looking for you
We’re looking in at other
And we don’t know what to do

Then in “The Real Me” from Quadrophenia:

I went back to my mother
I said, “I’m crazy ma, help me.”
She said, “I know how it feels son,
‘Cause it runs in the family.”

Can you see the real me, mother?

And perhaps most famously, “Who Are You”

Well, who are you?
I really wanna know
Tell me, who are you?
‘Cause I really wanna know

But for me the song that said it all was a relatively obscure little solo track that Townshend recorded in 1977 called “Misunderstood”:

Just wanna be misunderstood
Wanna be feared in my neighborhood
Just wanna be a moody man
Say things that nobody can understand

I wanna leave open mouths when I speak
Want people to cry when I put them down
Don’t wanna be either old and young
Don’t like where I ended up or where I begun

As my parent’s marriage came crashing down in the late 1980s, Townshend became the Greek chorus of my youth, guiding me through divorce, depression, anger, and alcoholism. Like Tommy, I became the deaf, dumb, and blind boy. I shut myself off, locked away in my room with The Who. I learned to play guitar and spent most days and nights trying to play every Who song I could while sneaking beers and drinking myself to sleep. Like the protagonist in the band’s first hit, “I Can’t Explain,” The Who expressed the words and feelings that I couldn’t yet find.

The one major disappointment of my Who obsession was the lack of, well, Who. With the exception of a sloppy Live Aid performance, the band had remained ‘retired.’ I had to make do with old Who bootlegs or the occasional Townshend solo album. Then, in 1989, a small miracle happened. The Who were reuniting for their 25th anniversary. Once again they were ignoring Ottawa for Toronto. It didn’t matter. This time I was going. In the moment, it was a great thrill to hear them live, but in hindsight, it was a big disappointment. Entwistle, Daltrey and Townshend were accompanied by about a fifteen-piece band. The result was a tempered, watered down performance. This wasn’t The Who. This was like seeing a good Who cover band backed by the Benny Goodman orchestra.

The Who’s influence on my life lessened as I got older. There would be a Who period every year where I’d blast a few albums, strum a few power chords. Maybe a disappointing new Townshend recording, a box set, a memory, or booze triggered it. Whatever it was, the Who never quite left my side.

I had another opportunity to see them again in 2000. A friend bought me a ticket to see them in New York (cause once again they weren’t coming to Ottawa). This time it was worth it. We had great seats on the floor and the atmosphere was electric. Gone was the Benny Goodman orchestra. All that remained were Townshend, Entwistle and Daltrey. Accompanying them were longtime keyboardist Rabbit Bundrick and Ringo Starr’s son, Zac Starkey on drums. Starkey was an amazing find. He had idolized Keith Moon as a boy and was the perfect replacement. Starkey brought stability and energy. His playing seemed to transform the others. They played with a fire that had been lacking for a long, long time. That night in New York was my Who heaven.

The band’s revitalized performances encouraged Townshend. On his blog, he began hinting that a new Who album was not out of the question. Every Who fan took these words with a grain of salt. Throughout the band’s history, Townshend had a love hate relationship with this thing called The Who. Every few years, he’d say that the band was his albatross and that he would never play with them again. Then he’d just as quickly turn around strap on his guitar and hit the road with them. Even this I understood. It was similar to my relationship with my parents and brother. Every year, we’d tell each other to get out of our lives. Time would pass and suddenly we found ourselves back in each other’s lives. Then there’d be another fight and we’d be on the outs again. Our dysfunction was simply because none of us could be truthful with one another. No one could say anything but hate. Was it the same with Townshend?

Things might have gone on like this if not for the death of John Entwistle on the eve of their 2002 North American tour. Always the man between Daltrey and Townshend, the bridge so to speak, Entwistle’s death forced Daltrey and Townshend to deal with each other once and for all. Then and there, The Who was reborn. They released their first two original songs (including a tribute to Entwistle called “Old Red Wine”) since 1982 on a greatest hit’s compilation. The songs weren’t classics, but they showed that there was still a spark left.

Finally, this year, some twenty-four years since it began for me and (apparently) ended for them, it’s started again. The Who’s first album since 1982’s “It’s Hard” is due in October and they’re embarking on a world tour that includes, for the first time since a 1969 performance at Capital Cinema, a stop in Ottawa.

I’m almost 40 now. I’ve overcome booze, found my real father, got married and have two kids. I’m living in a very different world than I did in 1982. I have no idea if Townshend’s new songs will speak to me. It doesn’t matter. It’s a bit like family and friends. You don’t necessarily agree with everything they do, but at the end of the day there’s an unshakable core that connects you, a spark that keeps the flame going. All that matters is that after 24 years of chasing ghosts and demons, The Who and me are here, now.

Ottawa Citizen review of local poet, Shane Rhodes.

In an increasingly fragmented world that often suffers from historical amnesia life is often, as Ottawa poet Shane Rhodes writes, “a story, like most, built by absences and fleeing.”

In The Bindery, Rhode’s new collection of poetry, he examines these themes through both literal and mental travel. “Chunks of the book germinated from my travels in Mexico, India, across Canada and in Argentina,” says Rhodes. “Other parts of the book came from a more complex thinking of travel — what travel means now, how travel is linked to colonization, the history of places and the subjective surface living that travel necessitates.”

In the first part of the book, Rhodes writes from Mexico and Argentina. The poems dash back and forth between the lyrical and the historical as Rhodes weaves the personal and public, fusing the romanticism of the past with the reality of the present. In “A Note from Zacatecas,” Rhodes moves through a painting of Saint Francis in a convent in Zacatecas, through the rich history of the convent itself to its barren present where “bells continue to ring, …gathering what remains of the faithful.”

“This is one of my main concerns in the book,” says Rhodes, “living within a continuous present where historical depth impacts and is part of the here and now. Certainly this is true with art and the art I refer to in the poems — I am fascinated that we so often, in our consumption of art — do not regard the historical landscape in which they were produced and the mesh in which they fit.”

In “A Picture of Brueghel: Landscape with Icarus Falling”, Rhodes uses the famous painting to ask if we are even capable of seeing the truths around us. As Icarus falls from the sky and crashes to the water, slave ships sail nearby. Both actions go unnoticed by a farmer. “Everyone,” writes Rhodes, “sees nothing at least once in the life of a tragedy.”

“Icarus,” adds Rhodes, “is unimportant in the painting both to recall the myth but also because he really is unimportant when you see the historical moment he is falling into. For me, this need to go beyond surface understanding of things, events, subjects and the lyrical/artistic understanding (which does not, at its worst, understand politics, social movements, historical event and even the means of production as part of what something is but only as contextual filler for art pamphlets) that has built up around them is vital to better understand where we are in relation to the past that got us here.”

The title piece is a collage of 99 fragments that are reminiscent of the philosopher, Heraclitus (who is quoted in the poem), the Gospel of Thomas, and notebook scribbles. The fragment that perhaps best sums up the poem is #97 where Rhodes writes: “Small pieces of the world snap together fall apart.” Through these series of broken passages, thoughts, and quotes, we experience the world as a fleeting series of moments. There is a sense of longing for a connection as we are drowning in a changing, fleeing tide of absences.

“The Bindery,” says Rhodes, “ is a play, an experiment, a feature on dispersion and cohesion — how fragmented an argument can get but also how an argument can emerge from fragmentation. A weakness of so much literature I read (and art I see) is its inability to invite the chaos in — there is something that happens in highly fragmented pieces that you don’t get with conventional lyrics.”

Rhodes’ writing is also an attempt to demythologize poetry and shake it from the shackles of the high brow. His poems are, as he says, “the jottings of a person living, moving through art, through history, through places, through books.” They don’t need to be read in cloistered solitude. “It is travel poetry,” says Rhodes. “It is also poetry to read while watching TV — those useful numbers helping you so you don’t lose your place (and even if you do lose your place, so what) and so you can also easily eat your TV dinner.”

Pretty familiar rant from me. This is basically a variation on some old Pimps that were turned into a piece for The Ottawa Citizen.

I’ve never liked the term “adult animation” because it suggests that animation is then by nature something for children; a dominant presumption that couldn’t be further from the truth. We don’t call The Departed or Capote or Brokeback Mountain ‘adult’ cinema -we all know what ‘adult’ cinema really means anyway – so why on earth must animation be defined as such?

As the latest releases of the Looney Tunes Golden Collection and, to a lesser degree, Walt Disney Treasures reveal, if you go back to the very beginnings of animation you see that cartoons were actually made for the amusement of adults. All of these classic Warner Bros. cartoons that many of us grew up watching as kids were originally made primarily for an adult audience. Even the early Walt Disney films weren’t made for kids. Goofy, Donald, and the Warner Bros. cast of characters were in fact parodies of adults. Through their exaggerated antics (e.g. Donald’s insane temper), the animators playfully mocked just how pathetic and foolish human beings could be. In that sense, the only thing ‘kiddie’ about these works was that they revealed the child in the adult.

Even before Warner and Disney, animation Pioneers like The Fleischer Brothers (did you really think that Betty Boop was made for kids!?), Winsor McCay (Gertie The Dinosaur), Emile Cohl, and Otto Messmer (creator of Felix The Cat) all made animation films for an adult audience.

Somewhere along the way things changed. Disney started making features like Pinocchio, Bambi and Dumbo that appealed to adults, but were now softened for children. Then came television and Saturday morning cartoons and the rest is history.

Animation has certainly grown enormously during the last fifteen years. Today, animation is everywhere: commercials, video games, music videos, and mobile phones. In truth, animation has become so prominent that there are few feature films that exist which do not contain some form of animation. King Kong, Spiderman, Revenge of the Sith could easily qualify as animation films. This growth spurt has also seen animation’s palette widened considerably. Two decades ago, animation was dominated by the realistic Disney style. Today, we can find an array of techniques and styles being incorporated into commercials, TV shows, and films. The one thing that, unfortunately, hasn’t changed is the content. Each year I see almost 2000 new animation films from around the world. Many of them are beautiful, poetic works that rival any of the great arts. Unfortunately, unless you go to festivals, you probably won’t see these films. Television and cinemas aren’t all that interested in this kind of animation because they believe that animation is made for kids, tweens, teens, and twits.

We’ve heard all this talk about animation growing up and how there is more adult animation being produced than ever. But just how adult are they? Every so-called adult animation show that has aired over the last decade (from Pond Life and Bob and Margaret to Family Guy, South Park, King of the Hill and, of course, The Simpsons, all rely on gags and laughs. I don’t mind having some laughs, but now not only is animation forced to live with this infantile label, it’s also expected to always be funny. It’s pretty much the same with feature animation. With the exception of Waking Life, A Scanner Darkly, and a handful of obscure foreign features (e.g. The District from Hungary), adult animation is limited to a few lame in-jokes (e.g. Shrek, Ice Age, Hoodwinked) so that mom and dad can enjoy the ride too. However, the idea of making serious animation about real-life issues seems alien to television and movie producers, and by extension, most of their audience.

Now, I’m not asking for heavy-handed Ingmar Bergman chamber dramas. What I’m looking for is something that has personality, humour and yet is mature and reflective. The Sopranos, Lost, The Wire, Deadwood all deal with those issues of life, death, sin, salvation, loyalty, violence, sex, power, etc. They sometimes lead you to reflect on an issue in your own life (e.g. Deadwood, The Sopranos and Lost might trigger reflection on morality and personal responsibility). It’s as though making serious animation is about real life issues is a sin of sorts.

In a sense, the situation resembles what animators in former communist countries had to go through to get their films produced. In Estonia (a former Soviet republic), for example, some animators made subversive films that criticized the struggles and brutality of Soviet society. To escape the wrath of the censors, the artists had to cloak these critiques behind obscure symbols and metaphors. The few shows I’ve seen that touch on adult themes (e.g. Batman: The Animated Series, Samurai Jack) do so superficially, as though they’re afraid of being too mature.

It’s not like it hasn’t been done before. Ralph Bashki made a number of animated features (Fritz the Cat, American Pop) in the 1970s that were aimed squarely at adults. Japanese anime – which has a massive worldwide following – produces an array of complex, serious films (e.g. Akira, Ghost in the Shell) and shows). In the 1990s, Peter Chung’s MTV series, Aeon Flux - which was a cross between science-fiction, James Bond, Roadrunner and Coyote, and Michelangelo Antonioni films - found a sizeable cult following (and was recently made into a live-action feature film).

And of course, if you want a real gauge of just how mature and articulate animation can be, just check the list of prizewinners at any international animation event. Some of the most recent Academy Award winners like provocative, poetics animation works like Ryan, The Man Who Planted Trees, The Moon and the Son,, and Father and Daughter.

Animation is routinely hailed as the great liberator, an artform that can take us to new realms of possibilities. Animation can shatter the laws of physics and excavate the imagination and soul like no other art, so why is it that television and feature animation remains stuck in that old habit (now masquerading as truth) of being nothing more than a raucous, naughty, cutesy, infantile medium for toddlers, pre-pubescent man-boys and other associated virgins. It’s about time that someone came along and shook this oh so tiresome ga-ga giggling snort snort fart chuckle muffled laugh medium out of its semi-soiled training pants.

Perhaps it’s not animation that needs to grow up, but us.

Do facts alone convey the essence of a story? Isn’t it just as likely that a person, object or event remains unseen, uncovered only through our senses and imagination? Four recent works that fuse elements of documentary, art-house narrative and animation—Ann Marie Fleming’s The Long Magical Life of Long Tack Sam, Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini’s American Splendor, Paul Fierlinger’s A Room Nearby and Chris Landreth’s Ryan–challenge our understanding of what can be revealed dramatically in a film. They demonstrate that animation, unbound by rules of gravity and logic, can be used to take us towards a deeper understanding of the world around and within us.

Today, more than ever, we’re seeing documentary and fiction films using animation to enrich projects by giving them new possibilities of space, texture and humour. Even TV animation has taken the authentic route with MTV’s Downtown, which, for the pilot episode anyway, used actual street recordings from a New York neighbourhood. Oxygen network’s Drawn From Life by Paul Fierlinger used real interviews to tell stories of everyday American women. And Saturday Night Live continues to feature an animated segment called Fun with Real Audio, which takes actual recordings of celebrities and political figures, and places them in a different context in order to satirize the speaker.

Perhaps the most famous animation hybrid is Richard Linklater’s Waking Life. The rotoscope-style animation software created by Bob Sabiston serves a variety of technical and conceptual purposes for Linklater. First, the rotoscope technique – which, in a sense, allows the filmmaker to trace over the photographic image - complements the ambiguous dream/wake duality of the film: it’s reality and yet it’s not. Secondly, the animation serves as a visual springboard into the minds of the various characters, bringing their theories and perspectives to life. Finally, the animation becomes an active participant in the film in that it caricatures the characters as they speak. Different artists were used for each scene, giving each space and character a unique personality. This adds another layer of existential fragmentation while, at times, playfully poking fun at some of the characters. At the same time, the lack of a cohesive style along with the shifting, floating, dislocated backgrounds and landscapes keeps the viewer on edge, at a distance.

The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam
Ann Marie Fleming’s new feature-length documentary The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam, ‘stars’ her great-grandfather, a world famous vaudeville artist, magician and acrobat. In it, she uses animation for transition scenes, animates old photographs and comic books, and re-creates some of Sam’s old acts.

“I first started using animation because I didn’t have any actual footage of his act,” says Fleming. “I had incorporated animation into many of my other films and I am always drawn to use it to represent things that cannot be represented by live-action: counter-stories that show metaphorical political and emotional states.” Sam becomes an almost living, breathing character. In old photographs we see eyes, hands and legs move. “Somehow animating the gorgeous old photos and illustrations gave the film a contemporary look,” adds Fleming. “I didn’t want Sam to be some historical footnote.”

Like her great-grandfather, Fleming is also a magician of sorts. “Animation is the legacy of magic, the great grandchild,” states Fleming. “The first filmmakers were magicians. The first films were collaborations between photographers and magicians. In some ways, animation is the magic in the film.”

American Splendor
While animation doesn’t play a major part in American Splendor, it serves as an important tool in conveying the film’s themes of perception and identity. When the “real” writer Harvey Pekar, played by Paul Giamatti, anxiously waits in line behind a slow old lady at a grocery store, an animated version appears as his conscience. Very quickly, the scene shows us that Harvey’s anger has less to do this with the old woman than with his own existential frustrations.

In a key scene, when Joyce, Pekar’s future partner, arrives at a bus station to meet Harvey for the first time, she is unsure which drawn version will greet her. Pekar had famously worked with many different artists, and each had their own take on him. As she waits, we see a trio of cut-out and drawn versions of Harvey.

The film is bookmarked by two scenes that place Paul Giamatti’s Harvey within shifting animated and composited backgrounds. These are minor parts, but they add humour to American Splendor and could not have been conveyed as effectively in live-action. The use of animation also enriches the ongoing notion that there is literally, no single Harvey Pekar, but many.

Paul Fierlinger
One of the most consistent users of the animation documentary is American Paul Fierlinger. While animating for Sesame Street in the 1970s, Fierlinger worked with voice actor Jim Thurman whose direct speaking delivery was warm and unaffected. Fierlinger was influenced by Thurman’s technique, eventually using it for a film called And Then I’ll Stop (1989), which featured a handful of alcoholics recounting their battle with addiction. Much of the film’s power comes from often harrowing, unscripted first person voices. Fierlinger’s drawings are stark and minimal as they take us into the minds of each addict. Fierlinger has since made many interview or direct speaking films: the autobiographies Drawn From Memory and Still Life with Animated Dogs, the Drawn From Life documentary series and the recent PBS production, A Room Nearby.

“When you turn on the radio,” says Fierlinger, “within two seconds you can tell if the voice you hear is that of a news reader, an actor or an authentic human being who was recorded on location. The pictures I draw to our sound tracks are just illustrations of the voice. Of course it’s not all that authentic by then, because the pictures I present, the music, the editing–all of those old crafts–will distort reality nicely so that we can have a credible story, too.”

Similar in structure and tone to earlier animated documentaries, A Room Nearby mixes Fierlinger’s own insights about loneliness with stories told by real people, including film director, Milos Forman. Fierlinger’s sketchy, unpretentious drawing style accompanies each of the stories. Fierlinger’s greatest strength is his ability to find interesting, articulate and sympathetic people. The unaffected nature of each speaker derails any speck of sentimentality. The exception is Forman’s tale, which at times betrays the authenticity of the other stories because we see that he’s reading from pages he has written.

Oddly enough, Fierlinger is finding more success with his work on the documentary circuit. “Perhaps it’s a fresher way of presenting personal observations,” suggests Fierlinger. “Talking heads are to be avoided as much as possible in real documentaries. Everybody knows those to be a cop-out, unless you find a talking head of Rasputin. But talking heads in animation are fun and quirky; just think of Creature Comforts.”

Animation’s cold shoulder is somewhat surprising given the power and uniqueness of Fierlinger’s work. Fierlinger does tend to repeat himself stylistically, but that can be said of most animators. Perhaps there’s a feeling that Fierlinger relies too much on his soundtracks. Without the unaffected, warm voices, would Fierlinger’s images be enough to hold our interest?

Ryan
Chris Landreth’s (The End, Bingo) project, Ryan is one of the most anticipated short animations of the year. Ryan is based on interviews Landreth conducted with former NFB animator, Ryan Larkin. A one time Oscar nominee, Larkin fell on hard times and now lives at the Old Brewery Mission in Montreal. He earns his living as a panhandler. The interview in the film takes place in an old, run down cafeteria, which is filled with an assortment of, literally, broken characters.

Landreth, using Maya software, recreates Larkin as a fragile, incomplete person. We see a portion of a face, but much of Ryan’s body is twisted busted or just not there. As Ryan reflects on his life, Landreth uses animation to create spaces that simply would not be possible in live action. In one poignant scene, we see a young, complete Ryan, with hippie threads and long hair, come to life in his award-winning film Street Musique. He is filled with joy and soon begins dancing with his creations. Occasionally, we hear from other observers. Landreth also shows us his motivation: he sees elements of his mother in Ryan’s life.

Chris Landreth has created a technical and conceptual marvel with Ryan. In revealing Larkin’s inner landscape, Landreth has delivered us into a deeper, richer reality. We see the ‘real’ Ryan Larkin that our eyes cannot see.

A Hybrid Future?

When Disney announced in 2003 that it wouldn’t be making drawn animation films anymore, some began to fear that the form itself might disappear, to be assimilated into a new digital world. Certainly, with the onset of recent technological developments, animation is changing but it’s always been changing. Like any art form, animation is not – or at least, should not be - some staid process. It has always been in a constant state of flux; facing new technologies and concepts is not exactly new.

There is no doubt that animation is taking on a new hybrid-like form. However, films like Waking Life, Ryan and The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam show that the genre and its techniques – not to mention its concepts - are far from extinction.

In embracing old and new technologies, leading-edge artists and their films show that animation - for all its potential paradoxical and fantastical possibilities - can actually take viewers to deeper, more realistic, levels of human understanding than conventional live-action or documentary work.

In this sense, animation might just be the pivotal ingredient in a new 21st century art form.

This man was born in the wrong century. He should have been a sea captain in the 1800’s.
Sterling Hayden’s Agent

What confuses me is I ain’t all that unhappy. So why do I drink, I don’t know.
Sterling Hayden

It must have been in the early 1990s when I first came across this strange figure called Sterling Hayden. A friend was taking a film noir class and they were showing the films at a local art house theatre. There were two films that night: Underworld U.S.A by Sam Fuller and The Killing by Stanley Kubrick. The Killing struck me most because of its bizarre plot, bizarre characters, played by bizarre B actors like Elisha Cook Jr. and Timothy Carey. Most notable though was the protagonist who delivered dry, monotone lines as if he had a million better places to be. He turned out to be Sterling Hayden. I rented a few of his other films like Dr. Strangelove and The Asphalt Jungle and found equally captivating apathetic performances.

Hayden, as it turns out, was an interesting fellow off the screen. In life, Hayden had sailed around the world by the age of 20, ran guns for Tito, ratted on fellow commies during a HUAC hearing, headed out to see again, against court orders, to Tahiti with his four kids, wrote two acclaimed books, was an alcoholic, got busted for weed possession in the 1980s, all the while beginning to resemble a Greek god with his long white hair and freakish moustache-missing beard.

To look at Sterling Hayden, you’d be tempted to open up a bag of clichés: “he was a man’s man”, “after him they broke the mould.” But beneath his macho armour was a feckless boy. He was the classic ‘live for the moment not in the moment’ kinda guy, always running off towards the next destination before finding time to savour his last achievement. He ran away from home to go to sea. He ran away from sea to go to Hollywood. He ran from Hollywood to go to war so he could make Madeleine Carroll long for him. He stood 6’4”, had blond hair and was a guy who captured people’s attention. He joined the commies to show a woman, who he probably wanted to sleep with, that he wasn’t all talk. He ratted to save his floundering career. He was one of those guys who always needed drama and when it wasn’t around, he’d create it. Then when life fucked him over, as he expected it would, it only confirmed his belief that life was a piece of shit. He couldn’t even keep his name straight. At different periods, he was known as Montaigu Walter, Sterling Walter, Buzzy Walter, Sterling Hayden, Stirling Hayden, and John Hamilton! In short, Sterling Hayden was a fucked up human being just like you, your dad, and me.

He was born Montaigu Relyea Walter, but a godfather apparently convinced the boy’s parents to call him Sterling. His dad gave up the ghost when he was nine, his Mom married a guy named James “Daddy Jim” Hayden, and Sterling Walter became Sterling Hayden. Life with Daddy Jim was no picnic. Daddy Jim was a loser. He was eternally on the verge of landing ‘the big deal’ that would elevate the family from poverty to wealth. At different times, he even set the family up in a posh hotel, enrolled Hayden in a rich kid’s school, and bought two cars in one go. The pot of gold never came and instead the family moved from town and town, often in the middle of the night, to avoid creditors. Hayden’s life was, not surprisingly, fairly miserable until they moved momentarily to a place called Tumbler Island in Maine. In this seaport town, Hayden found escape from the sour, frightening loneliness of a depression that ate away at his parents. After Daddy Jim turned deadbeat and bailed on the family, Hayden ran away and landed a few small jobs on ships. Despite constant advice that he return home, Hayden was sea driven. Over a fairly short amount of time, he proved himself a worthy seaman and by his early 20s had sailed around the world. As he became more known, local papers began to follow his exploits. It was here that the demon seed of Hollywood was first planted.

After winning a boating race in Gloucester, Massachusetts, a newspaper article featured a shot of Hayden and talked about his Hollywood good looks. The lack of economic and domestic stability that came with a life at sea led Hayden to consider the Hollywood possibility, but not before he first helmed his own ship. When that ship went tits up, Hayden, already insecure about his sailing abilities and feeling pressured to help out his financially and emotionally starving mother, went to New York and through some friends managed to land a screen test with Paramount producer, Edward Griffith. While he figured he flopped his screen test, apparently Hollywood knew better, and signed him. His first role was opposite Madeleine Carroll. The two fell in love almost at once and from there on Hayden listened to his groin rather than his head. After begging his producers to loan him money to buy a schooner, the insecure Hayden, fearing that Carroll was falling for another man, decided to quit Hollywood and join the war effort to impress the cause-loving gal.

Hayden’s war years alone would make a good yarn. He went to England for commando and parachute training, returned to the U.S. after he busted his ankle, tried to become a Lieutenant in the Marines, but was rejected. He returned to sailing briefly, married the now suitably impressed Carroll, changed his name to John Hamilton, and joined the Marine Corps. Deciding he loathed the service, Hayden pulled some strings and got himself hooked up with the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the U.S.’s first intelligence unit. As an OSS member, he found himself all over the Mediterranean running supplies and guns, primarily to the Yugoslav partisans through German occupied areas. By 1946, he was back in Hollywood with a Silver Star, a citation from Tito, a fascination with communism, heavier drinking bouts, and, ironically, an ex-wife. All this nonsense for a woman who was long gone by the end of an adventure he started to win her affection.

During 1946, Hayden gets a couple of acting roles, buys another boat, continues to flirt with communism, and drinks and fucks his way through most nights. Finally, when a Hollywood gal tells him he should shit or get off the pot, Hayden once again succumbs to his fear and joins the Communist party. He goes to a few meetings, stays quiet and listens loathingly to the hyperbolic pretensions of the other members. “The appeal was manifold.” Hayden told Tom Snyder. “To begin with I just came out of a couple of years of WW 2. I wanted to appear to be tough. I had profound admiration for the partisans. I came back to Hollywood and part of me believed in the ideas that these people were fighting for, but I also enjoyed the fact that I could go to dinner parties and begin talking this way. I got out because I’m not a man who can take discipline.” He realized, too late, that he’d made a dreadful mistake.

Meanwhile, Hayden was about to make another poor decision. In 1947, he met and married Betty-Ann de Noon, a young woman he met on Laguna Beach. Within the year, Hayden realizes he’s mistakenly joined another party. Meantime, the doomed couple live on a ship, he makes more films (“abortions,” he calls them) and she bears him a couple of sons. In the next decade, the couple marry and divorce three times, have four children together, and go through a nasty custody battle.

The 1950s started out pretty well. Hayden was offered a part in John Huston’s film, The Asphalt Jungle playing hoodlum Dix Handley, a farm boy eager to earn money anyway he can so that he can return home to buy the family farm. Hayden had hoped that Jungle would lead to a flood of good offers, but none came. He began to wonder if his communist activities (however superficial) might be a cause. As such he arranges to meet with FBI officials so he can clear his conscience and clarify his relationship with the communist party. Afterwards, he finally understands Faust. He has sold his soul to save his ass. But he was wrong, his confidential meeting reaches the press and just when he thought the commie bullshit was behind him, he is called before the House of Un-American activities. During the 1951 session, aired on CBS-TV, he ratfinks his way back to work. “I did it because I was weak. I didn’t want to go to jail,” Hayden told Tom Snyder. The roles begin to pull in for the stoolie. America’s new golden boy is even offered the role of Tarzan—but turns it down—and then makes a series of interesting films that expanded his range ever so slightly: Andre De Toth’s Crimewave, Joseph Lewis, Terror in a Texas Town and two more very fine roles as the title character in Nick Ray’s Johnny Guitar (1954) and another Johnny, Clay this time, in Stanley Kubrick’s early masterpiece, The Killing (1956). Despite his rapacious success, Hayden was drinking steadily, seeing a shrink, buying and selling boats, and struggling to avoid financial collapse, in part because of a long and nasty custody battle that finally saw him ‘win’ his children in 1958. But by 1959, he was on the run again.

In the spring of 1958, Hayden again decided to bail on Hollywood. This time he would sail around the world. He planned to take a crew and his four children aboard his schooner, Wanderer and set sail for the South Seas. Problem was that his wife got wind of the plan and had her lawyers ask for a court order to prevent Hayden from taking the children on the voyage. When the ruling came down in favour of the wife, Hayden ignored it, borrowed some money, and in January 1959 sailed to Tahiti, a fugitive from justice. Along the way, crewmembers bail, he is stranded in Tahiti with no money, fails to write the great novel that is in him, and is unable to make a promised documentary film of the experience. He returns in 1960, where he is forced to go to court again for another custody battle. Amazingly, he turned up a winner again. He was sentenced to five days in jail and ordered to pay a fine of $500, but the sentence was suspended.

In late 1960, Hayden met and married another woman, Catherine (Kitty) McConnell. McConnell seems to have understood Hayden more than his past wives and the two remained together until his death in 1986. By this time, Hayden was taking on fewer acting roles. However, he did take on a couple of notable roles including the lead in a John Frankenheimer adaptation of William Faulkner’s The Old Man (Hayden was so terrified of the live aspect of television that he began fasting to calm his nerves), and a towering performance as Colonel Jack D. Ripper in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. Hayden’s beautiful psychotic Ripper was largely influenced, again, by his inability to feel comfortable on Kubrick’s set. “My father had to do one scene about 40 times.” Says son, Andrew, “He couldn’t get the scene right, but Kubrick said that’s what he wanted, the terror and intensity.” Ironically, Hayden’s Ripper was a fanatical anti-communist convinced that the communist had infiltrated the drinking water of America.

Hayden, at long last, found his writing chops, scribbling the candid autobiography, Wanderer (1963). Following the completion of Strangelove and Wanderer, Hayden turned his attentions almost entirely to writing. “I immediately thought I’d try a novel.” Hayden said. “I worked for five years, about as hard as I was able. I had $68.000 in advances from Doubleday. I did 2 complete 1500 page manuscripts.” For whatever reasons, Hayden was dissatisfied with the manuscripts and turned more and more to alcohol. “There’s something glorious and savage about that direct relationship between cigarettes, alcohol and writing.” By this time, Hayden had purchased an 1890’s railway car and was using it as an office. There were days when he didn’t drink until the afternoon, and there were days when he was spiking his morning tea with booze. He’d stop drinking here and there, but when he began to feel well again, he immediately returned to the bottle. Hayden’s fear of sobriety was common. He was terrified that he would become a dour dullard. “When I say I’m gonna make a force drive to stop or go dry out somewhere in Pennsylvania, does this mean that I’m never gonna go to Paris, sit in a café, drink and laugh and watch the world go by. Let’s face it, alcohol has a million good functions.” But the good it apparently brings was nowhere near Hayden as he found himself unable to write anymore. He went for treatment, attended AA meetings, but nothing did the trick. “The diabolical thing is you’re always more drunk than you know. The way you feel is where you are and booze could take me higher in fifteen minutes.”

Finally, around 1968, a concerned friend came over and told him he was killing himself and that he should maybe try some grass. Hayden was reluctant because his book was a ‘booze book’ (he was also drunk throughout most of the writing of Wanderer). During another visit, the friend left behind some grams and a few months after that, Hayden puffed the weed. “I was down, really down, baby blue, BABY blue. I took my VW and hid it, locked the door [of the railcar] and made a note to myself to remember where I put the keys. I smoked a couple of clay pipes full and I thought what everyone else thinks: nothing’s happening. So I got up to get some red wine, but thought, ‘I don’t want a drink.’ So I sat back and…’well…ok.’”

Of course, grass didn’t solve the problem. Instead Hayden began to mix the two. “Grass in my experience takes me up so high and I find it’s so beautiful I just wanna cool it and you can’t smoke anymore so that’s where the wine comes in.” Hayden’s love of the weed became so profound that he began smoking almost everyday and logging his feelings during each high. Every once in a while, Hayden would continue to fast “on grass, water and headphones.” He felt that it was the best way for the body to get some sleep, to allow it to slow down and rest.

Meanwhile, Hayden grew weary and depressed. He decided to drift. “If the wind goes north, I’ll go south.” He drifted through Europe by car, motorbike and finally a barge (called, The Who Knows?), which he subsequently parked along the Seine in the middle of Paris. He ignored calls from his agent and didn’t read cables. Naturally it was hard on his wife, Kitty. She was social, she liked the land, and here she was, being pulled all over the place by a lonely alcoholic desperately in search of the harmony and serenity that vanished when he was nine years old. “It was difficult on my wife.” Said Hayden. “I really wanted to get away then. I let everything go by, though I was broke. I wanted to write again, but was in no great hurry. It’s a lovely way to live.”

Hayden didn’t see his drifting as escaping. He felt that those who work 9-5 and have two weeks of holidays were the ones escaping. “The home guard. He’s the escapist. An escape into the security of the job.” Hayden was a man of the senses. We have the power to see and feel and yet so few of us do. “Unselfishness is a form of death. You gotta go as best you can. You gotta go alone…or if you’re lucky, you go with a loved one, whatever sex or form…whatever…let her rip.”

“I work when I get broke or when something comes along that has some integrity or guts.” With the exception of a handful of roles including The Godfather, 1900 and The Long Goodbye, Hayden was generally accepting roles for the first reason. His role in Robert Altman’s Noir parody, The Long Goodbye was probably the most memorable of his latter roles. In it he played, appropriately, an alcoholic Hemingway-like writer. It was one of the few roles that Hayden looked back upon with fondness and he attributed his success to “the prodigious powers of pot”. Hayden was stoned throughout the shooting of the film. “That was first thing I ever did that I could actually stand to watch on screen-the first time I wasn’t acutely mortified.”

Hayden was supposed to get the role of the fisherman Quint in Stephen Spielberg’s Jaws, but the IRS levied his acting monies so he was reluctant to take the role in a half-assed film without seeing a goddamn dime. (They also took his vintage railcar and impounded it). Around the same time, Hayden finally completed his first novel, Voyage, which became a massive best seller.

The 1980s provided more of the same. Hayden took on a few roles including a couple of absolute duds (Venom, 1982—which Hayden left because he was too drunk to work, and Gas with Howie Mandel!). In April 1981, Hayden, now 65, was busted at a Toronto airport was possession of weed. “I had 3 1/2 ounces of Lebanese hashish in my pocket,” Hayden told film critic Gerald Peary. Hayden cut off, once again, with no fine and no probation. “I’d only been arrested twice and that was in civil rights demonstrations.”
His final film appearance was as the subject of a German documentary called Lighthouse of Chaos. The film was shot aboard Hayden’s barge and he was in a constant alcoholic stupor throughout the film. When he wasn’t gripping a bottle, he was smoking hash and rambling on about life.

By 1982, Hayden was finally convinced by a doctor that he had to toss the sauce. “It makes combat look like going down an elevator.” He began to settle down as best he could, living a few months on the barge and the rest of the time in Connecticut or California, where he died on May 23, 1986 of cancer.

Hayden could never completely settle down mentally or physically. He tried too hard to find meaning in life. Even if it seemed like he was carefree, he was actually unable to just let go and embrace the stupidity of existence. For all Hayden’s talk about doing what you want and experiencing the natural beauty of life, he was also drunk or stoned much of the time. Hayden was no better than the home guards he criticized, they escaped through domestic security, while he got drunk and fell off barges. Drinking was less a disease than a crutch for Hayden. It’s almost as if he needed uncertainty and instability, but he was smart enough to ensure that his life never completely came unhinged. In the end, he couldn’t even fully embrace a past he longed for because that past never really existed. The past Hayden sought through sailing and writing was the stuff of fairy tales and myths. Hayden became a man in an unfound present looking for something that never was. He was homeless in his homeland. He was homeless in himself.

The root of his frustration and fears may have been the death of his father. Maybe he wanted to show his father he was someone, hell maybe he wanted to succeed where Daddy Jim failed at every turn. Hayden seemed so scared of becoming an average, normal guy. But he failed to see that that was an average, normal fear. We want to carve our own paths. Ironically, Hayden’s struggle to find his rhythm was simultaneously what made him unique and just like every other schmuck. And yet, this is what makes Sterling Hayden so special. He never pretended. He never tried to hide the cracks, the inconsistencies or the darkness that lurked within him. He was just like us.

Some say he was born in the wrong century, but I don’t agree. However unrealistic Hayden’s view of the past might have been, he at least acknowledged their roots. He was exactly what that the amnesic 20th century needed, a man who saw the power in origins. With each vessel he sailed, Hayden embraced the breezes emanating from a time forgotten; he carried them forward with hope that we too might hear their voices.

S’come full circle already? I always thought that 360° came when you were a geezer. I’m only 36. Was sorta hoping I was at/near the halfway point.

In 1992 when I started with the Ottawa festival, I saw Raimund Krumme’s film, Crossroads. Now at that time, I was a film studies student. I had little interest or knowledge in animation. Then came Krumme. I was blown away. The drawing was nothing special, simple, thick black lines. But the ideas, wowee! All this philosophical stuff jam packed into a six-minute short. I think I like this thing called animation.

1996. Just had my first animation article published about - you guessed it - Raimund Krumme.

So if you’re looking for someone to blame for, you know, the whole ‘me making some folks uncomfortable about their (or my?) existence in cartoonland, then hey, Raimund IS the man to call. In fact, next time you see him at a festival just tell him straight up: “Thanks a lot, Raimund. Thank’s a bunch for encouraging Robinson to join our ranks. Asshole.” And then give him a good ol’ forehand/backhand slap. Tell him I said it was okay.

Rather than scribble something that pretends to be new, I’ve pulled out the article I wrote 8 years ago. I was curious to see how my writing had changed and compare it to how I NOW felt about ol’ Krumme’s films. Kinda like when The Police re-did that song. So let’s have a look at some of the main bits and see how it all reads:

The Powers That Be: Raimund Krumme

First off, this title is awful. Titles are important. They set the tone, direction etc… This is a snoozer. Probably the worst title I’ve ever come up with along with this one.

Given the increasing obsession with technology in animation, it’s refreshing to discover the work of Raimund Krumme. Somewhere between Buster Keaton, Samuel Beckett and Chuck Jones, Krumme turns minimalist line drawings into complex, imaginative, and often humorous meditations on class, power, mass media, and with anironic twist, animation itself. Structured around an allegorical journey, Krumme’s exiled Keatonesque ‘everymen’ travel through barren, absurd, and often cruel landscapes in a quest for self-knowledge. And in Krumme’s work, like that of fellow countryman, Wim Wenders, the landscape also functions as an equation of a character’s state of mind, often reflecting a deeper inner torment.

The key to stabilizing the characters’ torments is through power. But power itself is an ever-changing and often superficial entity….

This is TOTALLY wrong.

…Watching Krumme’s creative manipulation of space is not unlike viewing the films of Buster Keaton, Jackie Chan or Gene Kelly, whose physical manoeuvers and astonishing use of space as a supporting character, defy all reason. While academics can ponder over the sociological and philosophical implications of each scene, there is an emotional element at work, contrary to Krumme’s Brechtian ambitions that are quite simply hypnotic. …

Hmm… holy serious man. Where’s the humour, the self-reflexivity, the swearing? This reads like a guy not far removed from University. Not sure if I agree with the landscape stuff anymore cause Krumme’s films don’t really have much in the way of landscapes. The place they’re WONDERING about (yes…with an ‘o’) IS the landscape itself. The landscapes inside folk’s heads—and of course the landscapes are ultimately taking place in Krumme’s head. But wait..the landscape I see takes place inside my head and the one YOU read takes… oh never mind. Check out all those allusions too! Who else refers to Chuck Jones, Jackie Chan and Bertolt Brecht in the same piece? Pile of crock really, just a reflection of my own tastes at the time. Threw in the Jones reference for the cartoon fans. Oh… yeah… the last 2-3 lines are a small bag of garbage. “Quite simply hypnotic!” Sounds like I’m reviewing theatre for the New Yorker.

Born in Cologne in 1950, Krumme spent his post-student years dabbling in a variety of activities. In addition to teaching, Krumme also illustrated, and produced radio plays for children. Krumme’s entrance into animation was, he notes, “quite by accident”. A company approached him to do drawings for a children’s film. He did the drawings, went to the set, and ended up directing the film, a cut-out piece entitled, Phantomes des Chateaux (1980). Krumme would go on to direct three more films for children, Spaghetti (1981) (about a boy who, forced to eat his spaghetti, instead attempts to build his own world out of the food), Puzzle (1982), and And The Chair Flew Through the Window (1984)….

I didn’t like these films much. Still… I wish Raimund would go back and try different styles.

….Rope Dance was the first film that enabled Krumme to shift from making films for children towards a more personalized style. In the film, two characters (based on Krumme’s relationship with his father) struggle for control of a rope within a continually shifting rectangular plane. While some have viewed the film, in its seemingly negative view towards the father, as cruel, Rope Dance is an innovative and tender meditation on the transference of knowledge, and with it power, from generation to generation. What elevates the film beyond Krumme’s previous work is his marvelous use of the rope and rectangle. The rope, a symbol of knowledge, undergoes continual shifts in the film as the characters develop. Initially, the rope is a series of tracks that the father lays for the son, then just as quickly the rope becomes a means of control as the son becomes a puppet under the unbearing control of the father. For a moment there is peace as the two swing the rope in unison over the rectangle which has now become a well. Later the son attempts to break free of the rope in order to join the crowd, but the father is unwilling, indeed unable to let go. Eventually the son assumes control of the rope, and in the film’s most tender moment, the son returns to lead the now blind father.

Note the polite structure here. We’re gonna go chronologically. Who were those ‘some’ who viewed the film as cruel? I’ve no idea. Actually I’m spot on here. I just re-watched the film and have to say that I agree with the above. Now that I’m a father, the film’s all that more touching. And for a minute I was thinking… “shit Raimund, this is sentimental, romantic fruit loops.” But then I was thinking about my two non-existent fathers—neither of whom I have contact with—and realize that I’m still connected by a thread because of my inability to get over their shitheadedness. So I’m doing a dance with say 2-3 ropes.

…The result of Krumme’s fascination was Spectators, a biting parable about public reaction using the relationship between a film and its audience. Krumme, who admits to finding the power of the masses, “quite frightening”, was also motivated by the importance in Germany at the time to possess uniform opinions….

In Spectators, the cinema becomes a repressive environment where people lose themselves in a series of images and sounds…..

Spectators reveals, like Fritz Lang’s Fury a fear of the often reactionary and over-emotional power of the masses. Krumme’s frantic, dizzying camera reflects the ever-changing moods of the audience, while the refusal of a central character reflects not only the lack of individuality in contemporary society, but also the need to be led (which is nicely illustrated through Krumme’s nod to Animal Farm where the audience turn into rows of clucking chickens). And again, space plays a pivotal role in the film. In contrast to the open spaces of Krumme’s other films, Spectators offers a constricting, claustrophobic landscape that at once bears a close resemblance to a prison…

This aint bad in some ways. I got the personal stuff (festivals) and the politics (german reunification). Note the references: Animal Farm to show the animation folks that I KNOW and Fury, to show that I KNOW MORE THAN YOU. Too many friggin adjectives though. Writing like a tightass, Hiding behind school book names.

It’s kinda funny that I hate the cinema. It’s overpriced, crowded and you’re forced to check your personality in at the door. Everyone has to react and behave the same. No talking. No mobiles. No laughing when you should be crying. All must applaud in unison.

One thing I missed here was the connection between cinema and society. Cinema aint no different than shopping malls, dinner parties, or getting gas. Most folks hide their essence behind a mask of conformity. We repress all that stuff that we’re REALLY feeling. Course if we express every TRUTH at every turn, there’d be fistfights and chaos. I’m still learning how to suppress truth from others. Funny, cause I lie to myself oh-so-very well.

Like Rope Dance, Crossroads features a basic symbol, in this case, an intersection. A man crosses the screen and walks along the frame of the film. The frame soon becomes a tightrope, then a road which leads to an intersection. Now the man must decide which path to take. In deciding his course of action, he must confront the advice of his shadow and three other men. But the man soon finds that each path only leads him back to the center. Soon, all four characters, (echoing the brilliant scene in Keaton’s Sherlock Jr. that finds Buster trapped within the frame and at the mercy of the editor), enter spaces which suddenly change from corridors to walls. What appears to be hopeful one moment turns to entrapment the next. It soon becomes apparent that no matter how hard the characters try, they simply aren’t going anywhere. But inexplicably Krumme’s characters, in spite of the impossibility of their actions, do go on.

S’bout right. Did I mention that the four characters are all part of the same person? Lot of Heraclitus in this here film in the sense that life is a continual cycle: up = down, beginning = end etc… The Keaton reference is okay, but pushing it a bit, but there is a lot of Beckett influence here. If there was ever a man to do a Beckett adaptation…

Passage, Krumme’s most recent film, merges elements of Leo Tolstoy’s story, Master and Man with a dash of Tex Avery, Fred Astaire and Jerry Lewis, to create one of his most explicit and absurd political commentaries. Two men, a porter and his master, have to cross a frozen pond. Fearing the danger ahead of them, each tries to follow the other, leaving their social roles behind. But once the danger is over, everything returns to its original state.

This is the worst passage (heh heh). I’m not saying a damn thing here….and the Astaire, Avery and Lewis comparisons are embarrassing. I mean it’s got some funny moments…but in that Beckett haha we’re all gonna die sense.

Despite the Tex Avery inspired lunacy of Passage, we should not overlook the value of the message underlying the film: hierarchy is culturally, not naturally conceived.

OH PLEASE! Give me a break mr. Preacher. You’re spouting Prof. hand me downs.

The Magic Flute is technically unlike anything Krumme has done before. Working on computer for the first time using TOONBOX, a 2D animation palette, Krumme, like his characters, entered a new and at times frustrating creative environment. While TOONBOX enabled Krumme to do things he couldn’t do by hand (eg. Changing colours) and relieved him from tedious work (eg. inbetweening), it was not an entirely happy experience. Krumme found that he had to compromise a great deal and that he was often forced into a subservient role with the computer. But Despite his overall unhappiness with the final product, he admits that he would like to work on computers again.

Boring! This is filler, folks. I didn’t like Magic Flute cause it didn’t fit in with my ‘thesis’, and hell, it was just plain boring, but rather than just say I didn’t like it I kept it in to keep the continuity and then just talked about the software to avoid saying anything about the film. You could tell that Raimund was having a hard time with the technology.

In 1994 Krumme was approached by producer Ron Diamond to do a commercial for Acme Filmworks in Los Angeles. And while Krumme is the first to acknowledge the financial rewards of doing advertisements, he says that the offer also gave him a chance to work in a new creative environment. …

…Krumme had come to a stage where he felt it was time to leave Germany….Krumme has since completed a number of commercials and will continue to work for Diamond and live in California for most of the year, returning to Germany for a few weeks every summer.

I visited Raimund with some chums in the late 90s. He lived near some gangland area. I was a bit panicky. Then we get to his house and in passing he tells us about some shooting that happened downstairs. For the rest of the evening, I keep my eye on his huge living room window, ready to duck at the slightest sound.

Also, after teaching at Cal Arts for a few years, Raimund headed back to Germany where he remains. He still does the occasional commercial for Acme.

At the moment, Krumme is storyboarding a new film tentatively called, The Message, which addresses the problems of communication. He is also animating thirty minutes of the film “Harold and The Purple Crayon” based on the classic children’s story. In the future Krumme would like to further explore the computer field, and work in live action with artificial backgrounds.

Obviously, Raimund has finished The Message. It’s ok, but not his best work. It feels a bit dated, something that Lenica or Schabenbeck might have made in the sixties. And by the way, the Harold project never happened. Too bad. I mean that cause it was the perfect vehicle for Raimund’s style.

One of the common criticisms of Krumme’s work is that “it’s all the same”. Not only does this criticism imply that an individual aesthetic is defined solely by its technique, it denies story and plot its rightful place within the artist’s style. And while Krumme’s films from Rope Dance to Passage certainly bear an unmistakable ‘Krumme-look’, it is reductive to reduce these complex and varied works to a single style….

Ya know I’m not sure that I agree with me anymore. Sure, Krumme challenges himself conceptually, but he seems content to keep using the same style and I’m not sure I dig that these days. It’s like Pärn, Schwizgebel, Plympton and Mulloy, they’ve all found their cozy little room in the trailer park of art and seem content to stay there. Personally I find that a bit stagnant. I admire folks like, say, Andreas Hykade , Jonas Odell, Mati Kütt Joanna Priestly, George Griffin, and assortment of others for at least trying out new bikepaths.

But perhaps the most important aspect of Krumme’s work is his craftsmanship.

I canNOT believe that I said this. Attention to craftsmanship is turning animation into an ornament – real pretty to look at, but kinda useless.

Unlike today’s technological dynamos who view craftsmanship solely in terms of technique with scant attention to story. Krumme’s work is inspiring because he merges a deceptively simple story and technique into a creative and complex imagining of contemporary society.

OKAY… I sort of redeem myself here. Raimund HAS some pertinent ideas and isn’t obsessed with technique.

And, in what is perhaps his ultimate irony, Krumme’s basic black and white drawings allow us to see that the reality we take for granted is not black and white.

Even some 8 years later, I still get a kick out of most of Krumme’s work—specifically Rope Dance, Spectators, Crossroads and Passage. Many of the ideas I saw then hold true today and I’ve even seen new threads like the determinism vs fatalism at play in his work that I didn’t catch before. The whole power thing though is wrong. Krumme’s characters fight for a power that comes from freedom.

Oh yeah! Check out that nifty final line. I like it. Course it’s a bit of a contradiction because I’m using that line for absolute- no buts-about- it, closure. Why couldn’t I just stop wherever? Hey wait a second, this is all a bit like a

Written for Animac Animation festival in Spain (2004)

Piece done for the Ottawa Xpress in early 2007. My first cover story actually.

Most of you know how a Canadian (Joe Shuster) co-created Superman, but can you tell me who Canada’s first superhero was? Any idea who Dave Sim, Chester Brown or Julie Doucet are?

Yeah, didn’t think so.

Don’t feel so bad. It’s a story that’s become familiar, tiresome and oh-so Canadian.

Faced with an apathetic and relatively modest public in their own country, Canadian artists are forced to seek U.S. markets to earn a decent living. It happens in film, writing, animation, and in the Canadian comic industry, as Ottawa writer John Bell reveals in “Invaders from the North: How Canada Conquered the Comic Book Universe.”

To make matters worse, comics, like animation, are further burdened with the misnomer that they only exist for comic and kiddie purposes. Few people are aware that both art forms produce provocative, poetic and deeply personal works for adults. As a result unique comic artists like Chester Brown, Dave Cooper, Julie Doucet and others, remain unknown to most Canadians.

In “Invaders from the North”, Bell traces the highs and lows of Canada’s comic book history from the early –and rather lame- attempts to create Canadian superheroes (Northern Light, Nelvana, Johnny Canuck) to the more mature and unconventional works of contemporary artists. Along the way, Bell touches ongoing problems that have threatened the industry, notably censorship (including a nice anecdote about how a young Brian Mulroney won a debate contest with his denunciation of comics. Perhaps not coincidently, the second censorship movement emerged during Mulroney’s tenure as Prime Minister), U.S. cultural imperialism, brain drain (i.e. when our artists leave to work in another country), and the apathy of the Canadian public.

Bell’s book is well researched and illustrated (highlighted by a nifty cover illustration courtesy of home boy, Dave Cooper), but his argument that Canada has “conquered” the comic book universe isn’t all that convincing. Certainly, a number of Canadians have excelled and achieved international success (most notably Todd McFarlane), but to say that Canada has had a significant impact on the comic book industry (the way, say, that Canadians have had on the animation industry) might be stretching it. It’s also a shame that Bell doesn’t give us more insight into the work of many of the artists. Too many are given quick mentions. Only Chester Brown receives a detailed critical and biographical examination. Still, these are minor quibbles. Bell’s book is passionate, informative and long overdue. Hopefully, it will kick start more detailed writings about some of Canada’s unsung contemporary comic artists.

Chris Robinson interviewed John Bell via email to discuss his book and the problems facing Canadian comic artists.

When did you first get interested in Canadian comic history and why?

- I started my research on Canadian comics about thirty years ago. At that time, I had read quite a bit about the history of American comics and realized that our own comic-art tradition had been ignored — like much of our popular culture.

You talk a lot about the early attempts to make distinctly Canadian superheroes, but it seems to me that it’s not really in the Canadian tradition to create such a world.

- That’s true. I think that Canadians are too sceptical about power — and perhaps even heroism — to fully embrace indigenous superheroes. Although Canadians have played — and continue to play — an important role in the superhero field, it remains in many ways an American genre.

Is it too late for us to create a superhero? Isn’t it time we just say forget it and embrace Seth, Dave Sim and their ilk?

- The superhero genre has certainly faltered at times, but it will persist. It was once aimed at twelve-year-old boys. It now seems to be produced for twenty-two-year-olds. Perhaps this is progress.

Should we just accept that ‘artistic’ comics has and will, like poetry or artistic animation, always have a relatively small, cult audience? Is that really such a bad thing?

This is an interesting point. Comics are no longer a mass medium and must thus find a new audience. However, as Drawn and Quarterly has demonstrated, that audience will likely be found by packaging and presenting comics in a new way and in new venues. The resulting audience will likely be somewhat smaller — but hopefully bigger than that for Canadian poetry (and I say this as a former editor of Arc)!

Few people realize that there’s a long history of animation in Ottawa, can the same be said of comics?

- Dave started working at a very young age with an Ottawa small-press comics creator and publisher named Barry Blair. Blair was later involved with an Ottawa-based alternative-comics company called Aircel. Among the other notable creators who have been associated with the city over the years are Stanley Berneche, Pat McEown, Dale Keown, Denis Beauvais, Ron Sutton, Stuart Immonen, Greg Kerr, Tom Fowler, and Troy Little.

Why don’t you give other artists the same detailed exploration that you give Chester Brown.

In addition to a general survey of Canadian comics history, I thought it would be useful to provide two in-depth studies; one focussed on a theme within our comics tradition, the other on a single creator. Admittedly, choosing one creator was very difficult; however, I decided to focus on Chester because the trajectory of his career encompasses most aspects of the post-1975 revolution in Canadian comics. I also very much admired his dedication to his art and his fearlessness.

Comics have it seems almost swung too far to the adult/mature audience leaving almost nothing for kids anymore.

-For someone who grew up during the fifties and early sixties, when comics were omnipresent, it is shocking to see how few titles are now aimed at kids. This has to have a negative impact on the audience for comics. It’s probably not a fatal mistake, but it is a signficant oversight.

Okay, geek question, who would win a battle of Canadian superheroes?

- Nelvana would trounce all the guys. No question.

Another Ottawa Citizen piece.

K.C and the Sunshine Band closing the Blues Festival!?

It actually makes sense, sort of.

“We were a rhythm and blues/pop band,” says Harry Casey (the “K.C.” of the Sunshine Band) about the roots of a band that was as big (the first band since the Beatles to score four #1 hits - Shake Your Booty, Boogie Shoes, Get Down Tonight, That’s the Way (I like it) - in one year) as you could get in the mid-1970s.

Fortunately – or unfortunately – K.C. and the Sunshine Band got swept into the disco wave that began in the mid-seventies. “There was a little resentment when it first started happening,” says Casey, “because we were really pre-disco. It was our sound that became what disco is today. I thought that when they renamed it they had once again slighted r&b as being something so popular. Even today they call it hip hop, but they won’t give r&b its due.”

But perhaps it’s disco that hasn’t received proper credit. Since the term was first used around 1973 (when it referred to music that was made for discotheques), disco has been slammed and ridiculed as a lame period in music history. For many, the term disco conjures memories of John Travolta strutting on the dance floor in his white suit and button down shirt from the film, Saturday Night Fever, or the shrill voices of the Bee Gees, or, worse still, Rick Dees’ novelty hit, Disco Duck. With its unsightly fashions, cheesy strobe lights, mirrored walls, and exclusive clubs, disco was viewed as a reflection of a crass new conservative and Narcissistic generation.

“Nonsense,” says Will Straw, Professor of Communications at McGill University. “Disco was, in a sense, what happens when city dwellers (blacks, Hispanics, gays) produce a culture which also appeals to white city dwellers, both middle class and working class (e.g., Saturday Night Fever.)”

If anything, disco and 1970s dance culture was an extension, not a rejection of the social movements of the 1960s. It was almost as though the new generation was saying, “look, enough talking, enough protests, let’s just shut up and dance.”

“To me the seventies was a celebration of what everybody picketed for in the 50s and 60s,” says Casey, “for peace, love, harmony etc… the seventies was a celebration of it all finally happening.”

“The late 1960s was all about the so-called rainbow alliance, where all of these groups could be more powerful if they came together and supported each other’s causes,” says Tim Lawrence, author of the acclaimed book, Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-1979.

“By the early 1970s,” Lawrence continues, “these radical movements were largely in retreat, and my own sense is that the trajectory of these movements carried on, but in other forms. One of the most important of these was the dance floor, an underground and protected space where people could get on with their thing — express themselves — in relative privacy.”

In a sense, disco and dance culture did what rock, rallies, and protests couldn’t achieve. On that dance floor, race, class and sexual orientation vanished.

By the late 1970s, disco had become so popular that it became, as all things commercial invariably do, the target of ridicule and hostility. A Chicago DJ named Steve Dahl initiated the most infamous anti-disco stance. When the former rock station announced it was becoming a disco station, the Detroit DJ was livid and decided to do something about it. In 1979, Dahl asked listeners to bring their disco records to Chicago’s Comiskey Park (home of the Chicago White Sox) so that he could blow them up and end disco forever. As Dahl lead a chant of “disco sucks”, fans stormed the field and set fire to thousands of disco records. The event did not alone kill disco, but it certainly triggered its death knell.

Disco certainly wasn’t the first commercial craze to hit society, so why was there so much venom and hostility directed towards this seemingly utopian sub-culture? “In part,” says Lawrence, “the backlash was homophobic and racist and sexist — it was about white straight men who normally enjoyed occupying the centre stage of culture and politics feeling that they had been marginalized by a popular culture that was most obviously enjoyed by gay men, African Americans and women — so they wanted to seize back the centre ground.”

But it wasn’t just disco haters who turned on the genre. “DJ and dance aficionados also turned against disco,” adds Lawrence, “because the genre was “exploited” in the aftermath of Saturday Night Fever, when the major record companies jumped on the bandwagon and thought that anything they put out with a four-on-the-floor bass drum would sell records. A lot of it was simply awful music and it didn’t sell.”

These events played out during a testy time in the U.S. which was undergoing a economic recession. Disco provided people with easy outlet for deeper frustrations and fears. Before the decade was done, disco – and with K.C. and The Sunshine Band- put away its dancing shoes.

Disco became big again in the 1990s when a wave of 1970s nostalgia emerged. Casey, who had retired in the mid-1980s, came back just in time. Today, K.C. and the Sunshine Band are a popular touring group, but will anyone admit being a fan? Despite the passing years, disco seems toexist, like candy, as a guilty pleasure. Those who admit to getting down on occasion to “Boogie Man” (and I’m one of them) or “Stayin’ Alive” do so with the wink of an eye. On a cerebral level, we’re aware of how cheesy the lyrics are and how goofy the dance moves were, yet on a purely sensual level, we can’t help but shake some booty to the music. It just feels too damn good.

“Music in the present divided us,” says Straw. “Music from the past becomes everyone’s property, even if we hated it at the time. The surest way to get people dancing at a wedding is to play a popular 1970s disco song. So it’s mostly about how music ages, I think, overcoming polemics and taste war and becoming shared heritage. Disco is easily revivable now because it’s lost the faceless anonymity for which it was criticized in the 1970s.

For Harry Casey, the answer is simpler: “It was great music. You can’t deny it. The music picks you up and makes you feel good.”

Never imagined I’d give this much energy to a show I loathed. Money talks. Originally written for The Ottawa Citizen
If cocaine was the drug of the 1980s, Miami Vice was its TV equivalent. Everywhere you turned in the mid-eighties there it was. Guys with pastel coloured clothes, loafers, sunglasses, and carefully coifed hair. If the high school preps weren’t blasting Jan Hammer’s synth-driven Miami Vice anthems, they were playing pop music from the show. There wasn’t a hit song of the time that wasn’t featured on the show (Phil Collins can thank the show for much of his 1980s fame). Even the two stars, Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas – ala William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy- recorded their own awful records. Miami Vice worship was so intense that my mother even named one of her cats, “Tubbs”.

I didn’t get it then. I don’t fully get it now. Today, removed from it’s original context, Miami Vice comes across as a fusion of the campy Pamela Anderson show, V.I.P and the stylish pretensions of C.S.I. Regardless, there is no denying that Miami Vice was a TV revolution in its time. No TV show before or since has had such an intense and wide spread cultural impact. Fusing MTV, fashion, and Film Noir, Miami Vice turned the tired cop show genre on its rump. Along the way, the show influenced the sounds and fashions of the eighties and made Miami – previously considered a haven for geriatrics – one of the coolest cities in the world.

It started with two words: “MTV Cops”. The author was then NBC President, Brandon Tartikoff. MTV had begun broadcasting in 1981 and had become a massive success with young audiences. Tartikoff wanted to figure out how he could bring the MTV style to network television so that he could attract younger viewers with money to spend. He took his piece of paper to a former Hill Street Blues writer/producer, Anthony Yerkovich. Yerkovich, as fate would have it, was working on a movie idea about a pair of Miami Vice cops. Yerkovich (who supervised the first five episodes after the pilot, then left to develop film projects for Universal) was had long been fascinated with Miami. “Even when I was on Hill Street Blues, I was collecting information on Miami,” he told Time Magazine in 1985. “I thought of it as sort of a modern-day American Casablanca. It seemed to be an interesting socioeconomic tidepool: the incredible number of refugees from Central America and Cuba, the already extensive Cuban-American community, and on top of all that the drug trade. There is a fascinating amount of service industries that revolve around the drug trade–money laundering, bail bondsmen, attorneys who service drug smugglers. Miami has become a sort of Barbary Coast of free enterprise gone berserk.” Tartikoff liked the idea and gave it a go.

The TV cop show had traditionally been for an older adult audience. Their protagonists looked, well, they looked like regular cops. They were middle aged, not particularly attractive and didn’t really care about their clothing. Miami Vice changed that. Miami Vice cops would be young, good looking and well dressed. Sonny “James” Crockett (Don Johnson) is an ex-college football star who lives on a boat with his pet alligator, Elvis, drives a Ferrari and wears pastel coloured linen shirts, t-shirts, loafers. Ex-New York cop Ricardo “Rico” Tubbs (Philip Michael Thomas) is more stylish, wearing Armani suits (Typically, the duo wore at least different Ricci, Versace and Boss suits in each episode—always in shades of the show’s approved colours like fuschia, pink, green and peach.) Their clothes and lifestyle immediately stood out. How could low paying cops afford expensive clothes and cars? Well, Crockett and Tubbs weren’t normal cops. As undercover agents, the producers realized that the duo could legally use confiscated material for their work. Besides, if the duo were to play convincing underground drug runners, they had to look the part.

But it wasn’t just the clothes that made the show, there was also something different about the sound and look of the show. With it’s use of pop music of the time along with flashy Film Noir inspired cinematography, Miami Vice looked and sounded like it was a movie. The series was shot on location to give the show an added sense of realism and the music was prominent that it became another character. Inspired by MTV videos – which relied on gestures, looks and music to tell a story – music became another way of conveying the story to the viewer quickly and without words. In the pilot episode –and for many, the most defining image of the series – Crockett and Tubbs drive through the dark and slick city streets of Miami as Phil Collin’s In the Air Tonight plays over the scene. Crockett is exhausted and on the brink of collapse. He’s dealing with a failing marriage, an unhealthly lifestyle, and he has just learned that one of cop friends is leaking information to the bad guys. Using Collin’s sombre song, the stillness of the Miami night, and the dazzling clash between the city street lights and the smooth black chrome of the Ferrari, the producers convey Crockett’s emotions without using a single word.

Miami Vice used both original music and popular songs of the day (which was uncommon on TV because of the high price of buying the music rights). Jan Hammer, a Czech-born composer, who made the music in his home in upstate New York, created the show’s memorable synthesizer drenched score. Accompanying Hammer’s scores were a variety of pop hits that were in regular rotation on MTV. Songs by Tina Turner, U2, Roger Daltrey, Glenn Frey (who also appeared in a number of episodes), Frankie Goes To Hollywood all appeared as musical interludes on Miami Vice. Once the show became popular, musicians were lining up to get heard on the show (Eventually, a Miami Vice soundtrack was released on record. It was an instant best seller - unlike the dreadful recordings by Johnson and Michael Thomas).

Another innovative and influential aspect of the show was it’s multiracial cast. Tubbs and Crockett were the first black and white cop team since The Mod Squad and I Spy. Accompanying them was a cast of Latino cops and villains that reflected Miami’s multiracial population. What made the casting even more modern was that they didn’t stereotype Latinos as the bad guys. In fact, many of the crooks were white guys and Crockett and Tubb’s grim and mysterious boss (played by Edward James Olmos) was Latin American. This was a far cry from the very white world of Adam 12, Dragnet, Streets of San Francisco and most cop shows.
Image didn’t tell the whole story. Underneath this neon pastel glam was a dirty, unsavoury world where druglords ruled and cops routinely sacrificed their lives for lousy pay. In fact, contrary to its MTV inspiration, the Miami police department is a pretty barren and ugly place. The male cops look old and tired in their casual beach shirts and the female cops walk around in hooker costumes. In most cop shows, the lines between good and evil were clearly drawn: cops were good and criminals were bad. It was a black and white world where every crime was solved, every criminal punished. Crockett and Tubbs were different. They weren’t great cops and they didn’t always get their man. Often, they allowed personal emotions to get in the way of their work. It was sometimes difficult to tell if they were chasing a criminal because it was their job or because they wanted retribution (e.g. in the Pilot episode, Tubbs wants to kill the drug lord who murdered his brother). The lines between good and evil often blurred. It was hard to tell who was good and who was bad. Crockett’s wife even tells him in the pilot episode that he’s just the flip side of the same coin and that’s he more interested in the action and style than with good and evil. It would be a common theme throughout the series. In many episodes, cops turn out to be bad guys. In one episode, Crockett suffers amnesia and turns to a life of crime. This was virtually unheard of for a TV Cop show and it certainly inspired later shows like NYPD Blue, Homicide: Life on the Street and The Wire.

When Miami Vice debuted in 1984 it was not an instant hit. It didn’t help that NBC put the show on Friday evenings against Falcon Crest, a popular CBS soap opera. Very quickly, though, people caught on to the show’s glamourous style, explosive action and charismatic leading men. By the summer of 1985, Miami Vice reruns were finishing in the Nielson Top Ten and it was becoming a ‘must see’ show. Before the end of the first season, Miami Vice supplanted Hill Street Blues as the top cop show on television and earned an astounding 15 Emmy nominations.

Miami Vice then exploded off the screen and into the streets. Kenneth Cole introduced “Crocket” and “Tubbs” show. Macy’s opened a Miami Vice section in their young men’s department. “The show has taken Italian men’s fashion and spread it to mass America,” Kal Ruttenstein, a senior vice president of Bloomingdale’s told Time Magazine in 1985. “Sales of unconstructed blazers, shiny fabric jackets and lighter colors have gone up noticeably.” TV Cops had never looked better.

The rest is television history, but as an old pre-Greek philosopher once said, “the way up is the way down.” Given its enormous cultural impact, Miami Vice’s fall came almost as quickly as it rise. Critics complained that the show was all style and no substance. Even one of show’s directors, Lee Katzin, admitted “the show is written for an MTV audience, which is more interested in images, emotions and energy than plot and character and words.” St. Elsewhere producer, Bruce Paltrow (father of Gweneth) was more blunt. “It’s hip and glib, but not very deep.” In 1989, the pink neon sign was pulled and Miami Vice was off to TV heaven.

Twenty-years later, Miami Vice doesn’t hold up too well. In one sense, the show was so influential that much of what it pioneered feels so commonplace and cliché today. The show also relied so heavily on music and fashions of its time that –unlike unfashionable shows like my personal fave, Columbo – it looks dated and tacky. Still, Paltrow was pretty much spot on in his criticism of the show. Despite it’s air and pretensions, Miami Vice is not a deep show. It wants to be in some ways (the moral ambiguity of its characters), but rarely is their any depth to justify the emotions the characters are feeling. In the first season, for example, Tubbs falls hard for the daughter of the drug lord (Calderone) who killed his brother. But there is nothing in the episode—aside from some glossy MTV love scene – that justifies this intense love affair. In the end, Crockett and Tubbs are simply not believable as undercover cops. How are they able to keep going undercover in the same city again and again? How is that the drug guys don’t recognize these two mavericks of style? And if they’re undercover, why are they hanging out at the police station (I asked my ex-undercover cop uncle and he confirmed that an uncover cop wouldn’t be hanging around the station. In fact, most cops wouldn’t even know who is or isn’t undercover.). In the end, Miami Vice was nothing more than a cool looking poser feigning a world weary cynicism and moral ambiguity that it didn’t fully experience, earn, or even understand.

Critiques aside, Miami Vice’s cultural impact cannot be denied. The show breathed fresh air into a dead Television genre by moving away from the simplistic preachiness of cop shows towards the more shadowy and contradictory world of Film Noir, and also spawned a new breed of hollow buddy/action films (from Bad Boys and Rush Hour to, ironically, the new Miami Vice feature). While the show’s dark tones were inflated and superficial (much like C.S.I. today), it’s willingness to explore darker themes did open the door for more complex cop shows like Homicide: Life on the Street, NYPD Blue, and The Wire. For that alone, I’m almost willing to forgive Miami Vice for littering my late teens with Jan Hammer, pink shirts, loafers and a housecat named “Tubbs”.

Almost.