The Animation Pimp

Every being strives after pleasure, and it is in pleasure that happiness consists.
– Epicurus

There’s a party in my tummy!

(So yummy! So yummy!)

Carrots in my tummy!

(Party-Party!)
– Brobee the green monster

As a parent and the Artistic Director of an animation festival, I get to see a lot of TV animation for kids. Sounds pretty enviable, doesn’t it? Well, it is when you stumble upon godsends like the shows Yo Gabba Gabba or Jack’s Big Music Show (okay, Jack is only animation in spirit).  Otherwise, it’s a pretty hellish experience being forced to hear god-awful music and watch screaming adult-voiced kids, bad animation, idiotic storylines, and annoying dialogue, writing, and plots that read like they’re were made by a factory of Ned Flandersis clones. Trifles, “that are nothing at all, yet a nothing that’s everything.”  They lack an “overflowing abudance, that je ne sais quoi which might even be the soul.”
Yo Gabba Gabba is something completely different. It’s a fresh and inspired crash of generations and cultures that fuses retro sensibilities, dance culture and, incredibly, fun. Not since Pee-Wee’s Playhouse has there been a show that is so cool and fun and different that it appeals to both adults and children. Yo Gabba Gabba also has elements of vintage Sesame Street, U.P.A., and Electric Company. Viewers are approached as though they have minds. They are allowed to engage on their own terms with the show’s various segments.
Moderated by a bright orange attired and wigged DJ name Lance, Gabba (a nod to The Ramones) is like taking ecstasy and going to a rave (something I never did. Too much happiness scared me). Along the way you meet a quarter of friendly monsters, learn to draw from a guy from the new wave band Devo, do some dancing with Elijah Wood and other kids, watch some strikingly original animation (done by the likes of Joel Trussell, Nick Cross and other indies). In short, Gabba is about joy. Sure, there are lessons learned about life, but they are not hammered into the child (or parent). The characters don’t shout at you like you’re an idiot. The obnoxiousness of so much of kids’ TV is nowhere to be found in this paradise.
As there was with Pee Wee, there’s something refreshingly naïve and innocent about Gabba and that’s why it’s so successful. It’s not consciously trying to be hip. It’s just made by people who are having fun and making things they enjoy and love. And that’s the THING. You watch this show and realize what a fucking joy it is to be alive, especially if you’re a kid. That’s precisely why adults love the show too. It transports us back to a pretty fantastic time when every day was an adventure of imagination, creativity and play. Like Jack’s Big Music Show, Yo Gabba Gabba took me out of my seat. The music, stories and characters were alive and fun. It’s like hearing a rocking sermon from the Rev. Charlie Jackson, who after watching Gabba said: “Well if you need it, Gabba’s got it. It’s got everything thing you need. It’s got everything a poor man need.”
The crappy state of most kids’ TV animation makes you wonder if the creators were ever children. Maybe they had miserable childhoods and decided to have revenge on humanity by creating a steady stream of puerile, droning and agonizing screams and visions that feel more like a sampler from a life in hell, than a life here and now.
Yo Gabba Gabba has a soul. It makes you want to get off your ass and live.
Isn’t that everything?
(written for the 2008 Ottawa International Animation Festival)

copyright me (not you).

(written for 2008 Warsaw Film Festival)

Hide the children, put away your daughters, he is coming. That prevert of the Baltics, Priit Pärn. The barely-a-man looks like a dressed up caveman. Just try and talk to him. Hear those grunts? They’re real. This Estonian creature is a danger to all that is good and righteous and pristine about cartoons. He is everything Pixar is not: dirty, preverted, confusing, intellectual, some even say, funny. This is why the American authorities have him on their watch list. They wait for him to stumble so they can haul his ass to Guantanamo Bay and make him carrots (raw) and listen to ABBA.
Why you ask?
I have asked and no one seems to have an answer. One investigator likened the Pärn experience to getting a BIG box at Xmas. You open it to find another box, then open that box to find another box. Yet, unlike my experience of finding just a tiny box of nothing at the end, Pärn viewers will find something that confuses them. They don’t know what to make of it. Is it a joke? Is it a deeply spiritual gift? What the hell is it?
Can you blame people for their befuddlement? The guy makes Breakfast on the Grass, a film that criticizes a society that everyone around him has been told to love. Did he not get the memo? Then, when his peeps do get freedom, he makes this Hotel E that asks if Western ‘freedom’ is really an ideal freedom. Is it any sort of freedom at all? What a nerve this Pärn creature has? How dare he ask such questions after his country has shifted from Soviet control the glorious wonders of globalization, Tom Cruise and McDonalds?
Then comes 1895. Some folks ask him to make a film celebrating the birth of cinema and Pärn goes and makes a film that questions the necessity of film while suggesting that it’s dumbed us all down a notch because, get this, cinema has become our primary defining point for other cultures. Is he serious? I can’t stop laughing at such anarchistic thinking.
It just gets nuttier from there on. In Night of the Carrots, we’re told that if Y2K (remember when we all thought that every computer in the world was going to crash?) happened, it might actually be a good thing? Treason, I say.
And if his wild, paranoid stories aren’t bad enough, take a look at his drawings. Have you ever seen such vile, childish scribbling? I have a two year old that can draw better than Pärn. If Preston Blair or Walt Disney or any other hallowed voices of classic animation had to watch this anti-Christ of animation, they would race to confession to expunge the sins that Pärn’s “art” might inflict upon their snow white souls.
I need to stop here. Tears and anger overwhelm me. I want to spare you, dear reader, from endless nights of torment and confusion about your life and your world. Life is hard enough. The last thing we need to be doing is thinkin’ about STUFF.
You have been warned.

In Mad Men, advertising guru Don Draper tells a colleague that “advertising is based on one thing: Happiness. And you know what happiness is? Happiness is the smell of a new car… It’s freedom from fear. It’s a billboard on the side of the road that screams with reassurance that whatever you’re doing is okay. You are okay.”
On the surface, everything about Mad Men seems to confirm Draper’s words. As we enter the world of the Sterling Cooper ad agency with newcomer Peggy (a mousy suburban girl who seems completely out of her element), lush ‘50s and ‘60s iconography saturates the screen.  Then we meet Draper, the man who has it all: great job, beautiful wife and kids, lovers, respect of his colleagues. He is Mr. Cool. We arrive seeing our preconceptions about this ‘innocent’ era confirmed. Everyone smokes, drinks, and dresses smart. The ladies giggle when their asses get smacked. The office is like a scene from an advertisement. Everyone looks fabulous and are having the time of their lives. Everything is okay.

Or is it?
Despite being set in the often luscious sights and sounds of a bygone era, Mad Men is one of the first TV shows to deal seriously with the complex and often contradictory relationships between our work and home identities — and the more general, and rather hefty, themes of identity and desire in the modern world.

Many TV shows have been set in offices. But most have done so in a satirical and comic fashion (e.g. Mary Tyler Moore, Murphy Brown, The Office, WKRP in Cincinnati).
That’s not to say that comedy cannot serve as a relevant and potent depiction of the complexities of everyday life. Mary Tyler Moore was a landmark show that depicted the life of a working single woman. Both versions of The Office deal humorously with the problems we have bordering our work and personal spaces. In fact, the British version was such an uncompromising depiction of office realities that it was often more tragedy than comedy. Everyone has worked with an offensive twit like David Brent — or more accurately, everyone has a bit of Brent lurking inside them (which was what made the show all the more uncomfortable to watch).

Work dramas have — and do — exist, but they have almost always been set in high-profile workplaces to which few of us can really relate. Homicide: Life on the Street and Hill Street Blues dealt with cops; L.A. Law and Street Legal with high-powered attorneys; E.R. and St. Elsewhere with doctors.

While these shows did delve into the working and domestic lives of their characters, they rarely did so consistently and meaningfully, often relying on insipid soap-opera hysterics.  Outstanding shows like The Wire did explore their characters difficulties balancing job and family, but the series never really delved too deep into their psyche. Jimmy McNulty, for example, was a guy who lived through his job and lost his family as a result. Why McNulty is the way he is isn’t explored — ignored as was David Brent’s background and childhood in The Office.

The distinctiveness of Mad Men stems not from its many themes (which can be found on any soap opera, let alone other office dramas), but from its willingness to explore these topics (adultery, repressed sexuality, identity, racism) in a restrained and subtle manner that routinely asks the viewers to piece things together.
Like an onion, each episode of Mad Men strips away a layer of a character, showing us that these people are not at all the happy, flawless folks we assumed them to be. Don Draper, in particular, is a mess of contradictions, a man who is very quickly losing his grip on the domestic and professional identities that he’s created for himself — even his name, as we learn, isn’t really his own. Don is a hollow man, a blank slate adrift from the world.

Peggy, the seemingly meek secretary, turns out to be an ambitious woman who wants to be equal with her male colleagues without accepting the pre-existing roles available to her (the ad men believe these are the only two types of women: Jackie O or Marilyn Monroe – in other words, the mother and the whore. Peggy, fittingly, remarks that she doesn’t identify with either of them). Her determination to be treated equally is so fierce that it becomes psychotic (After getting knocked up by a colleague, she refuses to admit to herself that she’s pregnant – even as she’s about to give birth.  She then refuses to even look at or care for the child.)

Mad Men is a cast of floating identities. We have no idea what to expect from them because they don’t even know what they’re going to do next. Mad Men defies expectations by refusing to succumb to ready-made categorization. Things change in an instant, without any logical explanation. The characters are inconsistent, hypocritical, surprising and confusing – like us.
It would be a mistake to assume that Mad Men is a show solely about a bygone era. Certainly the series addresses a pivotal time in American history, when gender roles were beginning to be shattered and opened up. Masculinity is in crisis. Women are on the verge of gaining power in society. Roles are changing. The rise of advertising and how it has affected (and created) modern identity is also a prominent theme of the series. However, take away the clothes and settings, and not all that much as changed. We’ve just become more repressed. Bottles are hidden in desks. Smokes are taken outside. Sexism lives but lurks behind closed doors. Advertising is ubiquitous.
Whereas The Office, Mary Tyler Moore, 30 Rock and other office comedies take a more laissez faire approach by asking us to just laugh off our absurdness, Mad Men asks uncomfortable questions about the human condition with the hope that we can change and learn to live comfortably in our skin. As Don says in season two (quoting a poem by Frank O’Hara: “Now I am quietly waiting for the catastrophe of my personality to seem beautiful again, and interesting, and modern.”

Best short animation of 08.
#1 –by a mile
I am So Proud of you, Don Hertzfeldt

like watching the world through the eyes of a fly. Absurd, tragic, hilarious, poignant depiction of identity, family, life.
No particular order for the rest of the mortal lot:
Chainsaw, Dennis Tupicoff, Australia
Letter to Colleen, Andy/Carolyn London, USA
Drux Flux, Theodore Ushev, Canada
Skhizein, Jeremy clapin, France
Seemannstreue, Anna Kalis, Germany
Cattle Call, Mike Maryniuk and Matt Rankin, Canada
Presto, Doug Sweetland, USA
Muto, Blu, Italy
The Comic that Frenches the Mind, Bruce Bickford, USA
KFJG No 5, Alexei Alexiev, Hungary

—

2009 should be an interesting one with new films expected from Chris Landreth, Wendy Tilby/Amanda Forbis, Priit Parn, and a few other heavy hitters. ‘Course, they could all suck too.

Animation lost a pal late last night…and more than that the world lost another good person. And I don’t mean that in a glib, he’s dead so let’s say only nice things sorta way. Emru Townsend was truly a good person. He was compassionate, sharing and positive to the point of making me uncomfortable (hey, that’s just me. It’s easier to be cynical). We weren’t buddies, pals, chums, bros, but we did know each other for about 12 years. I am forever grateful to Emru for being the first person to publish my writing on animation. It was in his beloved magazine Fps. I submitted a piece just for the heck of it and was quite pleased when Emru accepted it. It gave me confidence as a writer and told me that, hey, maybe this is a path I want to explore. So, selfishly, I thank you for that Emru.

What’s with animation losing good young people lately? Helen Hill. Wendy Jackson Hall. Emru Townsend. I guess the gods above, below and beyond don’t like the toons. Assholes. It’s not fair. It sucks.

Meantime… I send all things good to Emru’s family…and especially to Vicky, Max and Tamu.

Drivin’

Nifty cover by, who else, Theodore Ushev for upcoming book. First one I’ve written that doesnt have anything to do with hockey, animation or my fucking childhood. Fiction, you might even call it. I wouldnt though. Non-fiction? No, not really. Does it matter?

Frank Remley has a job at a parking lot. He’s not happy about it. As cars and people come and go in the parking lot, Remley sits on his ass thinking much too much about things that happened to him and his friends in cars.
Due out in 2009 from Bunkpress Press

Interview with Kenneth J Harvey for Ottawa Xpress prior to his appearance in Ottawa at the writer’s festival.

Interview with Canadian writer Bill Gaston for the Ottawa Xpress

http://www.ottawaxpress.ca/books/books.aspx?iIDArticle=15375

http://www.ottawaxpress.ca/books/books.aspx?iIDArticle=15430