chuck jones, american genius

cartoons and gender

by their cartoons shall ye know them

mickey's birthday



Samurai Jack
Certainly the most visually stunning animation on mainstream television is this Cartoon Network series. So abstract and artistic is it that it's a little hard to believe it's on. The color alone is stunning: it seems to radiate palates that you've never seen. What you want to do is just lay back and soak in the visuals.



Ren and Stimpy



The first couple of seasons of Ren and Stimpy constituted the best cartoon series of the nineties: incredibly smart, gross, and funny. It is seriously hard to believe that it was presented on Nickelodeon. It was the product of the warped mind of John Kricfalusi, who apparently lost control of his own characters to the network, which is wrong. Ren is an irascible chihahua, Stimpy an idiotic, sweet cat. The animation was rudimentary in the sense of not having a lot of frames, but had incredible visual flair, a kind of art moderne with references to all sorts of media. The abstract backgrounds were fundamentally innovative. It seems to me that you see the influence everywhere, including Sponge Bob etc. Very odd and disconcerting that it doesn't seem available on VHS or DVD.





The Thief and the Cobbler
One of the greatest animated movies ever made. Richard Williams (who made Roger Rabbit, e.g.) had this in development for thirty years. The final product was bought and bowdlerized by Disney, who incidentally releasede it on the same week as Aladdin, which it superficially resembles, presumably to kill it forever. And yet even with a Diisneyfied soundtrack etc handmade animation has never been wilder, more creative, or more profound. It is a series of incredible visual tours de force: indeed it's almost too much for a sitting. Suddenly you realize that there are a thousand directions animation has never yet gone. It's as if Williams is inventing four-dimensional geometry. Voices include Jonathan Winters and Mathhew Broderick, along with Vincent price in one of his last roles.




Metropolis
Not the Fritz Lang (?), obviously, but rather the amazing recent japanimation, adapted from a classic 1949 manga by tezuka. Visually, this thing is staggering, an infinite profusion of images that is absorbing on many levels. Even many single frames of this thing would be beautiful, or intense, or creative. But string them together and you have something that has to be seen to be believed. The music is interesting too: great swing among other things, and the climax is the apocalypse to the tune of Ray Charles doing "I Can't Stop Loving You." Mind-boggling.



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