So THIS is what John K was trying to warn us about!

                                

source image is from Kotaku

Sorry you had to see this!  I ran into it this morning.  

Apparently, the long-in-gestation Pacman CG cartoon is finally approaching in 2013.  It recasts the iconic video game character as a high school kid.  And he's being paired up with superfluous, tertiary sidekicks.  They are just as bland and boring as he's become.  What is this airing on?  Why, Disney XD will be licencing the show for air! 

OK, that it airs on Disney XD should be a red flag for why this crap is designed as is.  The producers obviously want to appeal to some audience of hip tweens of the sitcom variety.  That's what this Pacman cartoon is, a sitcom!  It's what happened with The Looney Tunes Show as well, in an effort to be hip and modern.  Whatever that is.  Who is really the audience for this?!

This sitcom-esque modernization is becoming a chronic problem, it seems.  The once-proud producer of cartoons, Nickelodeon, airs a shizz-ton too many live-action sitcoms. The aforementioned Looney Tunes got shoehorned into the format, with clumsy results.  Are we in the 1980s cartoon environment, where everything with marquee value is getting retooled for marketability and focus group audiences?  What cartoony franchise will fall to this treatment next?

I tried my best to remember my choice of words when I first saw this image, and read the article in question.  This looks atrocious!  I know we've had lots of cartoons based squarely on video game franchises.  But this once again shows how the caretakers of this franchise miss the whole point of the character.  

Utter blandness, unwanted, and out-of-place.  And ugly, they all sum up what's wrong with this picture.

Hell, even if the 80s cartoon of Pacman was super cheesy, at least it wasn't quite as conceptually stupid as the new one!

There's plenty of other news

I am writing in regards to some good news.  I enjoy journalistic writing, yes?  Two weeks ago, I wrote to the school paper, the Spectator, in response to a call for writers unto the Community section.  And yesterday, Sunday, I got a response back!
I've got my first scoop this week!  It's top secret, for all you blog readers.  I'll say it involves an interview.  What an exciting prospect!  What does it say when I'm more excited about writing than I am about finishing my Flash short backgrounds?

Jan Berenstain, 1923 - 2012

                                       

Earlier this afternoon, I saw the news that Janice Berenstain, cartoonist, illustrator, and writer, has died Friday at 88.  She, along with her late husband Stan, is best known for creating and authoring the Berenstain Bears series of children's books.

                                    

I grew up with those books, a rite of passage, an indoctrination to literature, among other things.  Even if they were aimed for young kids, they had a wry sense of humor, purpose of message, and a cozy sense of family values.  Perhaps what helped the books appeal to me as a young fledgling was the identification factor and the use of mammalian characters as the focus.  I read them religiously for plenty of years, including the First Time and later Chapter Book series...

                                                 
Of course, She and he were also accomplished cartoonists in their own right.  They used to draw cartoons for Colliers Magazine, and had compilations of their work assembled to book form.  As you see above.  I must profess, their earlier artwork circa 1950s-60s has a playful, loose, funny look to it that I prefer to the more recent books.

But the fact remains that, I haven't read their books since, like, the 1990s.  Like 1996-7, even!  I don't even have my old Berenstain Bears books anymore, obviously.  Obviously, save for the excellent, informative autobiography, which may be out of print.  But it has an appreciable amount of information that's not available elsewhere.  For instance, the two's early careers, and the way they intertwined over time.
                                                           

Kids back in the day thought I was crazy for reading, let alone mentioning, these books.  A lot of kiddos didn't actually know who the Berenstain Bears were!  Well, they meant something to me.  They spoke a universal appraisal of growing up and the establishment of family.  Jan, and her brand of humor and values, will be missed.

Fresh from the headlines! Rango wins Best Animated Film!

Congratulations to 'Rango', and the entire crew, for winning for Best Animated Film of 2011!  I'll check in with my recap of the entire Oscar winners later.

What's the deal with BHM?

I noticed I haven't seen enough lip service towards Black History Month this February.

It got me to thinking: do we really need to have a Black History Month?  Where Americans are liberally reminded of the things African Americans have done in our recent history, for the better?  Respect and constance are eternal, no matter what race.  You don't see a White History Month, for example.  It has nothing to do with race, but I suppose there's Presidents Day to make up for that.  And they're all white.

The reason I say all this...is because I just saw a BHM poster for this event today.  Maybe I just wasn't paying attention?  Too, no network or cable station is running PSA pieces on the subject.  And I seldom watch TV.

Looney Tunes Vs. Dreamworks: My take on the comparisons

A lot of persons wiser than me have discussed the similarities of two particular animation houses, one historical and the other still in operation.  As you might have guessed, it's the Warner Bros. studio which produced the Looney Tunes shorts, and Dreamworks Animation Studio.  The latter also specializes in screwball, wise-acre animation.  I was thinking about the two of late, in light of watching lots of great Looney Tune shorts and seeing trailers for Dreamwork's upcoming Madagascar 3.  (As a side note, their Oscar nom Puss in Boots is one of their best films yet, people.)
In my mind, the Looney Tune shorts of Warners are the better comic animations.  Warners has the best stable of cartoon characters of all time, arguably, with lots of personality and wit.  Dreamworks has some great features in their log, but they are so typecast by their propensity towards pop culture references and smart-assery.  In a cynical way, most of the time.  Hell, I refer you to the worst of their films as proof in the veritable pudding.  I know the Termite Terrace crew at Warners did these things too, but the point is, they did it smartly and of higher sophistication.
I have come up with some theories as to why the work of the two studios is so different in quality.

• There is a huge difference in the origins of the artists who made their respective works.  The Warners crew came mostly from the early 1900s, and certainly were bred of the Depression era.  This would have toughened them to be self-reliant, and work harder for what they believed in.  
• The persons that work at Dreamworks, a lot of them would have generated from the 1960s and onward.  If you think about it, this was the era of the rise of hippies, and of entitlement.  Hell, these newer artists (and writers) wouldn't have to work as hard.  That, or what they were raised on gave them an inbred worldview on entertainment.  

• The Warners artists didn't have the distractions that the Dreamworks guys have today.  Technology, man.  It's both a blessing and a curse.  I could argue that without computers and cellular portable phones, the Warners artists just had each other, their desks, and whatever crazy inspiration it was to entertain and satirize.  They lived it, and were paid by it.  My theory is that the Dreamworks crew, while super talented, are of a generation where it's way easier to slag off because shiny things are everywhere.
• Two fold: The two houses are of different entertainment environments.  There's a gap in the quality of writing between the two realms of animation, additionally.  Yeah, pardon my terrible sentence construction!  But, I think it's totally true.  The 1930s through the 1950s, say, were the Golden Age of Hollywood anything.  The standards were higher then, it seems.  We got so many freakin' great movies from that time, from 'Oz to 'Wind, and 'Kane to 'Rain.  The same applies to animation as well.  They developed the medium from crudeness to higher low art at the same time. 
• Animation experts should know that the 1960s saw a gradual decline in the quality of animated productions.  Warners didn't escape it either, as the studio as it was since 1930, closed in 1963.  Over the next few decades, things mostly got worse across the board.  TV production (or lack of good production) increased and theatrical shorts went into decline.  Worse still, titanic figures that shaped the medium were either retiring or passing away.
• And this brings us to Dreamworks again.  The Animation Studio proper was founded in the mid 90s, releasing their first works in 1998 (Prince of Egypt from the studio proper, and Antz, by PDI who would be folded in the studio later).  The point of this history lesson is?  Dreamworks was born of a more modern, business-driven, cynical era in Hollywood-dom.  They only made it worse for their reputation when they saw their 2001 release, Shrek, become a massive hit.  And from public reception, they took away the wrong things from the film's success.  Namely, the soon-grating pop culture jokes.  Which brings us to...
• There's a gap in the quality of writing between the two realms of animation.  At Warners, there were great names to contribute to the success of the shorts.  I think of ignoble writers like Michael Maltise, Warren Foster, and Ted Pierce.  They were obviously smart, funny guys who understood character and story structure.  You could say they respected their audience, a lot of adults with an interest in comedy.  
• With some of the Dreamworks films, eh...  Look back to Shrek for a second.  It was responsible for really popularizing pop culture references in animation for a new generation.  This has always been around, absolutely.  But Shrek crossed into it's references being hit-you-over-the-head and obnoxious.  Not so hot with adult, and intelligent, viewers.  It worked with this film, I'll concede, for it did have it's purpose to jab at Disney and the perception of what their films were like.  It was, in effect, a dichotomy.  However, where it went wrong was when Dreamworks grafted this humor style onto every freaking movie they did!  It started with the 2004 release Shark Tale, used unnecessarily in a film that didn't need it.  These references were not jokes!  The humor delved into references, contemporary puns, and seedy, non-paid-for product placement.  And they did variations on this system for as many films more.  And then, many animation upstarts not named Pixar started doing it.  The writers weren't helping.  They were Hollywood jerks who wrote some awful scripts that animators were forced to work on.  And the story team on these films couldn't fight it.  This style was everywhere by 2006, and it's saturation threatened to destroy the credibility of CGI features.  It's not wrong to have smart ass, knowing humor in your animated film.  It just has to be done well, and the bad CG films of the mid-2000s didn't do it well.  It took Dreamwork's own Kung Fu Panda (2008) to set things right again, if only for a little bit.  It reminded us that sincere storytelling is much more important than the surface attitude your filmmakers and studios are trying to sell, losing sight of why they were doing it in the first place.
• As a side note, there was a difference in what audience the studios were making cartoons for.  As said, the Warner Bros. shorts were mainly aimed at adults, and made for movie theaters.  Dreamworks makes cartoons, features and specials and shorts, aimed seemingly at this metamorphism of audiences.  Any given day, their works find appeal with the broad audience, and the lesser of their kind is visually striking and connective with kids.  After all, isn't it belief among the snarky and super-rich that kids are stupid, and will buy anything?  Yeah, it's called 'phoning it in'.  Warner shorts are appealing to kids, too.  But that started as their exposure on TV and in merchandising increased over the years.  Only for them to go off the air a few years ago, making it hard for kids to recognize those great cartoons.  And only now have they come back, but that's a whole 'nother issue.

The thing to keep in mind is that, with any art form and production, the circumstances of how they came about are what define their quality control.  The Looney Tune shorts continue to be beloved and funny, despite that they may reference things from WWII and movie stars that are long dead.  The best of Dreamworks will share that timeless quality, I would hope.  The aforementioned 'Panda, How to Train your Dragon, and Puss in Boots not only have doses of humor, but as features go, they tell timeless stories not encumbered by lame, dated jokes and a false impression of hipness.  They have a lot of breadth, and respect the audience in equal measure.  That's why no one gives two, frank shits about Bee Movie or Monsters Vs Aliens, for example.  They lack sincerity, and a good laugh or too.

Well, shit!

What the hell am I doing? The research process for that Illustration project

The road to get to my first inconsequential Illust. piece, it was a long one.  There were plenty of ideas and permutations that got rejected by the writ large class.  And if you don't like indecisive artists, oh my god!
Here they are below...

It may not look like it, but this image was meant to invoke American immigrants from the early 1900s.  The people somehow didn't like the concept.

Art Deco influenced (see reference of style below)

 

"Bats in my Belfry"

A woman getting chased by a buffalo.  This one went over well, actually

Some more concepts: a guy with a skunk, and a crucifixion by bed

The below of this sheet was what went over best.  A cat bossing a dog?  This had much possibility!

A hawk chasing a dude

...And having him raise the hatchlings.  A pure cartoon concept.

Iconography...  A dude wearing a paper bag over his head, while hitting a bong.  'Cause it's ok!

Inspired by those awful extreme collages from the 90s. Sorry I couldn't find reference imagery, but dammit, they do exist!  (It's a dude blasting music, unable to get to work.)

Here's the thing that held some of these back from glory.  There's obviously a reason they didn't like them.  There was controversy over whether the images related to the article we were illustrating.  The article in question being about Making excuses for skipping work.  Was I successful in pertaining to this subject?  Probably not.  But at least one of them led to the core of the piece.