Reclaiming The Toons
It doesn't matter how old you are; everybody loves cartoons. Unfortunately, Phil Collins ballads, sappy plotlines and old-fashioned moralizing have all conspired to ruin the enjoyment of animation for anyone older than ten. However, the tide is turning as a new wave of artists slowly take over the old guard of Hollywood animation. Simultaneously, other animators from around the world have also begun to gain mainstream acceptance thanks to the success of DVD and the world-wide-web. As well as providing a forum for the new wave of animators to display their work, the internet has also inspired the invention of a new type of cartoon. Flash Animation has helped to inspire even more twisted minds to create all types of ridiculous and satirical short films.
Today's animators are not afraid to push their art through the boundaries of what is considered acceptable in the medium. Flash animation and the internet provide the artist with a censor free avenue to push their ideas as far as possible. Big Jeff TV is the net's newest naughty cartoon and has been brought to the UK by Aardman Animation. Big Jeff TV is their latest addition to a growing portfolio of web animations including the deranged Angry Kid and Aardman's most famous creation, Wallace & Gromit. Big Jeff is the "Aussie With No Cossie", a true blue occer Aussie naturalist with a penchant for international travel, hallucinogens and roller-skating. Big Jeff TV is most definitely only suitable for grown-ups but apart from the obvious nudity and drug references Jeff and his mates provide the viewer with a sweet natured yet irreverent few minutes of light entertainment.
The website (www.BigJeff.tv) includes three short-films starting off with Nepal 1987; Big Jeff and his mate, Barney the Midget journey to India and meet a Yogi sitting atop a mountain. Big Jeff engages the fasting mystic and offers him a natural energy bar, Big Jeff's favourite snack. Of course one should never accept sweets from strangers, especially if they are nude roller-skating Australians. If you have ever wondered what might happen when a tripped-out Nepalese mystic and a six-foot tall blonde Aussie nudist on roller-skates get together this film is surely worth viewing. No wonder Big Jeff is a cult hit amongst Scandinavia 's gay community!
For many, the sight of Big Jeff's wedding tackle dangling precariously close to Barney The Midget's face as they climb up a cliff is a touch too indecent for what they consider the family-friendly domain of cartoons. However, both animated pictures and modern pornography share the same heritage in the moving picture houses of the early 20th Century. Almost as soon as the moving image had been invented people were trying to figure out ways to captivate and titillate paying audiences in equal measure.
Even though Big Jeff TV features full frontal nudity it is in no way pornographic. Big Jeff's naturalism is used as a character trait to differentiate him from his many competitors in Toon World. In this way, Big Jeff is offering something new to mature audiences. The fact that he is naked throughout the series means that it will only be deemed suitable for adult audiences and if it does reach British television screens will be shown after the watershed. In this way, the creators of Big Jeff TV are saying that their show is for adults only. Besides, if it is ok for South Park to depict a gerbil lodged inside someone's rectum and to then make it a recurring character what's so bad about a nude Australian who enjoys roller-skating?
The American animator, Ralph Bakshi was at the forefront of the adult animation revolution. His landmark cartoon, an X-rated adaptation of Robert Crumb's "underground" comic strip Fritz the Cat (1972) is the counter cultural story of free-lovin' felines in the shadow of Nixon and the Vietnam war. Bakshi, all credit to him, was able to prove that there is an audience for vulgarity, politics, drug use and sexually explicit content in animation. By exploiting the "child-friendly" medium of cartoons Ralph Bakshi helped to define the modern cinema audience. Before Fritz there was very little reason for adults to attend an animated movie if a child didn't accompany them.
When it comes to television, American audiences were the first to enjoy a revolution in animated television programs. It was Bakshi's protégé, the Canadian artist, John Kricfalusi who led the charge with The Ren and Stimpy Show, the disturbingly surrealist tale about a talking light-bulb shaped cat and a deranged manic-depressive Chihuahua. Since Ren and Stimpy' s landmark television debut, Kricfalusi has left the series he created allegedly caused by conflict with the show's owners Nickelodeon. Nonetheless, Ren and Stimpy have helped pave the way for every animated kid's show since, from Square Bob Spongepants to The Power Puff Girls.
On January 14 1990, Rupert Murdoch's Fox Network ran the first season of a deeply subversive and ingenious cartoon called The Simpsons. The show introduced us to the deeply dysfunctional all-American Simpson family; the matriarch Marge with her inescapable purple beehive hairdo, Homer the bumbling underachieving patriarch who works at the local nuclear power plant, Bart an anagram for Brat, Lisa the child genius, and little baby Maggie who seems to be the most sussed out all of them. When the show first aired in America it became an instant hit and attracted attention and controversy in equal measure. Everyone from Time Magazine and Variety to the then President of the United States, George Bush Senior, criticized and applauded Matt Groening's creation.
George Bush said The Simpsons was a celebration of dysfunctional families and accused the show of attacking America 's family values. In a speech to the National Religious Broadcasters convention at the time, President Bush said, "The nation needs to be closer to the Waltons than the Simpsons." Soon Bart's most famous one-liner, "Eat my shorts" was echoing across canteens, assembly halls, classrooms and homes around the globe. As it turned out, The Simpsons proved a hell of a lot more popular with the American public than Bush Senior ever did. In a canny twist of fate, the longest running animated television series in the history of television looks set to out last the second Bush in the White House.
Big Jeff, Homer Simpson, Buzz Lightyear, Shrek and their many animated compatriots are perhaps even more popular with adults then they are with children. These new characters are much more complex than Mickey and Co. They are evidence of a willingness by the major studios to allow more sophisticated material into their animated films and programmes. Finally, grown-ups are reclaiming cartoons for their own entertainment.
Britain 's own Aardman Animation's clever use of pastiche and homage in their films is one of the main ingredients of their success. 2000's Chicken Run is a sly re-make of The Great Escape but this time the audience follows the exploits of a group of incarcerated chickens awaiting the chop on a commercial chicken farm. Aardman is one animation studio that understands the importance of spoofing modern cinema's rich history as a way of entertaining both its child and adult audience, while also using these touches as an effective narrative device. Wallace & Gromit's second film adventure, The Wrong Trousers is one of the first stop-motion features to incorporate action set pieces as seen during the film's gripping finale. The Wallace & Gromit films (A Grand Day Out in 1991, The Wrong Trousers in 1993, and A Close Shave in 1995) are extremely popular with everyone from small children, who laugh at the duo's slapstick comedy, to adults who can appreciate the creator's many knowing nods and winks to Hitchcock, B-movies, sci-fi, kitchen-sink melodrama and noire.
Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away and Sylvain Chomet's Belleville Rendezvous are just two examples of the international appeal of moving cartoons. These adventurous storytellers prefer to use the more traditional methods of animation to create their fantastic worlds but also incorporate some computer generated elements. Both of these films have become massive international hits thanks to worldwide distribution deals and rocketing DVD sales. It would be unfair, however, to associate the current wave of cell shaded animation with that of the golden age of Disney where such famous retellings of classic fairytales like Snow White and Cinderella had families flocking into cinemas. Much of today's cell animation also incorporates CGI elements just like Japanese anime has done since the early nineties. Later in the year we should see the release of Ghost In The Shell 2 and Appleseed. Both are extremely popular, not only in their native Japan but also amongst comic book geeks and cinephiles in the West whose appetite for Nipponese sci-fi and fantasy was first wetted by Katsuhiro Ôtomo's 1988 epic, Akira.
The death of traditional 2D style animation has been wildly exaggerated. What's really dying is the Disney version of it. Once upon a time the name Disney was the surest way to make box-office gold. These days Disney is more likely to produce a Treasure Planet sized turkey than another box office behemoth of Lion King proportions. Perhaps the demise of Disney's animation department was caused by the company's over reliance on tried and tested formulas. Or perhaps it was the departure of Jeffrey Katzenberg in the early nineties that signalled the end of Disney's monopoly on animated features. However, taking into account the dismal failure of Dreamworks' (Katzenberg's new studio) own attempts at capturing the public's attention (Eldorado anyone?), there can be little doubt that if a parent has to take their kid to see a cartoon, it'd better be entertaining for them too.
CGI has helped to create believable worlds and characters that reflect the human love affair with personifying animals and inanimate objects. It may sound weird but all of us, at one time or another like to pretend that our pets can talk back to us. Dancing broomsticks, talking toys, neurotic fish, and complex furry blue monsters are all part of this shared imagination that is inside all of us. The fact is we all enjoy travelling away from reality and asking ourselves the perennial fantasist's question, "What if"?
Dreamwork's Shrek has shown us the other-side of fairytale fantasy, while Pixar's Toy Story has shown us what really goes on in the toy box at night. Pixar are set to further cement their reputation as the Microsoft of CGI with the release of the soon to be released The Incredibles, the story of an average family of super heroes living in a comic book world and will feature the voice-acting talents of Samuel L. Jackson and John Goodman. But are the studios about to hijack the CGI bandwagon and roll out less than average movies as a result? Garfield, the adaptation of the hilarious comic strip will star a digitised cat with the voice of Bill Murray in an inspired piece of casting but early teasers are not promising. Nonetheless, the release of Shrek 2, Shark Slayer and The Incredibles this year will undoubtedly cement animation's place at the top of the Hollywood money tree.
Fairytales, toys and comic books have been around for a long time and we have all grown some sort of attachment to them. Once upon a time children were scared into bed by their mother's tales of wolves and little girls, houses made of candy and witches that eat naughty kids. As time has progressed we have adapted and added new myths to the cannon of children's stories. Today we are more likely to tell our little ones that Freddy Kruger will get them if they're naughty. Tales of space battles, orcs and elves, cyborgs from the future, gangsters, cops, Jedi and enchanted young wizards are the new mythology of this age. It is only natural that our films and cartoons reflect it, and a modern adult audience that never wants to grow up laps it all up. Just make sure to leave some for the kids.
Jerome Mazandarani
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