{"id":38590,"date":"2018-01-05T00:01:06","date_gmt":"2018-01-05T08:01:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/?p=38590"},"modified":"2018-01-01T13:20:39","modified_gmt":"2018-01-01T21:20:39","slug":"animation-anecdotes-344","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cartoonresearch.com\/index.php\/animation-anecdotes-344\/","title":{"rendered":"Animation Anecdotes #344"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kricfalusi Explains<\/strong>. In the Los Angeles Times Calendar<\/em> section for August 9, 1992 about the Ren and Stimpy<\/em> television series, animator and director John Kricfalusi asked, \u201cHave you been following the press? Some it really bums me out, particularly the Time<\/em> magazine article. It was ignorant. You\u2019d expect it to be the most intelligent. They made us sound like child molesters, like all we care about is disgusting people. Of course, we do want to disgust people, but that\u2019s not all we do. We go for both the highest common denominator and the lowest. What we do is avoid the middle.<\/p>\n\"\"\n

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\u201cToo far to me would be disembowelment or something, blood spurting everywhere. The booger jokes are completely harmless. The grosser you can draw a booger, the funnier it is.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s this impression that I only want to do cult animation. That\u2019s people\u2019s fear, and they want to tone me down so I\u2019ll appeal to a more popular audience \u2013 which is crazy to me. Because the last thing I want is a cult following. I don\u2019t want ten people watching the show. It\u2019s a popular medium I\u2019m using and my influences are popular.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\"\"Beastly Voice<\/strong>. In the Boston Globe<\/em> May 15, 1992, Kirk Wise, co-director of Disney\u2019s Beauty and the Beast<\/em> (1991) stated that when looking for someone to provide the voice for the Beast, \u201cWe needed someone who could sound like an eight foot tall hairy monster and at the same time express the warmth, sincerity and intelligence of a human prince. Robby (Benson) was the first person we heard who actually managed to combine both in a believable way.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The Wisdom of Bakshi<\/strong>. In the Los Angeles Times<\/em> July 27, 1988, animator and producer Ralph Bakshi said, \u201cI\u2019m an artist and I\u2019m very passionate about the art of animation. That\u2019s the truth. I grew up in a time that if you were reading a comic book, you were a moron. Your mother hit you on the head. What I did (in animation) in the \u201870s were political and social films, very personal statements. Mighty Mouse<\/em> represents me wanting to entertain people. This isn\u2019t a stance I \u2018m taking for commercialism. I\u2019m allowing myself to have more fun. I want to make people fall on the floor laughing.\u201d<\/p>\n\"\"\n

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Ruth Warrick on Song of the South.<\/strong> In the Boston Globe<\/em> newspaper for November 14, 1986, there was an article about the fortieth anniversary of Disney\u2019s Song of the South<\/em> (1946) screening in Atlanta, Georgia to benefit the restoration of Wren\u2019s Nest, writer Joel Chandler Harris\u2019 home.<\/p>\n

UPI writer Bill Lohmann interviewed actress Ruth Warrick, one of the last surviving performers in the movie. \u201cI was absolutely horrified when I came to the first showing (premiere in Atlanta) and found Jim Baskett (who played Uncle Remus) was not there. That just seems so impossible now. The point of the picture is that Uncle Remus was the wise one. He was full of love, joy and humanity. He was the hero. The white folks were kind of stupid and foolish. As far as I\u2019m concerned, this is a very pro-black representation.\u201d<\/p>\n\"\"\n

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\"\"Cartoon Suicide.<\/strong> In 1992, there was controversy over an episode of The Simpsons<\/em>. \u201cWe opened the show with Bart and his class watching a scratchy black-and-white film about zinc,\u201d said creator Matt Groening in an article in the L.A. Daily News<\/em> February 15, 1992. \u201cIt was a send up of those cornball education films we were forced to watch when we were growing up. In the film a young boy imagines a world without zinc so he loses his car, girlfriend and more. Distraught, he puts a gun to his head but nothing happens because there was no zinc in the firing pin.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe wakes up thinking \u2018Thank God I live in a world of zinc\u2019. I thought it was really funny. Does this encourage teen suicide? If anything, it possibly cheers up suicidal teens by giving them something to laugh at.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a lot of material in the show that might be beyond kids but my experience has been as a kid and in talking to kids who watch the show is they love not being talked down to. The scene was obviously outrageous. There are so many taboos in television these days, and so many taboos in animation, especially because it\u2019s considered a \u2018kiddie\u2019 medium.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve rejected that label for The Simpsons<\/em>. It\u2019s a family show in the broadest sense. If anything is going to cause kids to consider suicide, it\u2019s the bad cartoons on Saturday morning.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\"\"Admiring Chuck Jones<\/strong>. In the Orange County Register<\/em> October 22, 1989, animator and producer Chuck Jones said, \u201cI don\u2019t mind people admiring me if they want to but I don\u2019t think it\u2019s very logical. It\u2019s not like I was St. George knocking off some dumb dragon or anything like that. First of all, you\u2019re talking about something I did a long, long time ago. Secondly, we were doing things that were not expected to last a lifetime. We figured they\u2019d last about three years and then disappear forever. Remember there was no television back then and no place for the cartoons to go after they left the theaters.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut I\u2019m not trying to demean what we did. I always took the work very seriously and I\u2019m proud to have been associated with the work we did. It\u2019s just that adulation is impractical and makes me uncomfortable. Nobody noticed us back then. Nobody called us geniuses. And we didn\u2019t feel like artists. We were just trying to make people laugh.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Voices for Bluth<\/strong>. In 2002, animator and producer Don Bluth said, \u201cThe voice is the soul of our characters. The actors come with great personal and professional experiences. Once they know who the character is, they bring a whole new dimension to it. When we imagine our character’s personality, we review other films (usually live action movies or TV shows) to find a similar role played by various actors. Sometimes it’s their acting skills, sometimes it’s “type”, sometimes it’s just the sound of their voice. It’s very important to the building of the characters, so we do it carefully.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn Anastasia<\/em> (1997), we worked hard at getting some “Meg Ryan” in the Anya character. We actually videotaped a voice recording session of her, for the animators to see her act. We also provided \u2018live\u2019 actor’s reference for the animation of the human characters in most of our films. Many times we ask the actors to look at films done by the voice actors and then incorporate some of the voice actor’s traits in their performance.\u201d<\/p>\n