“Cartoon, Anti-Cartoon” Revisited

This article, written 25 years ago, was meant to describe my contradictory, almost dialectical relationship with animated cartoons. It ended up being more of a personal manifesto than the reasoned, analytical essay suggested by its title. If I cringe a bit today at the shrill rhetoric (“appalling lack of imagination”; “shocking lack of personal vision”) or the shortsighted prediction that independent animation would be the wave of the future, replacing the “dead-end realm of the studio system,” at least I can claim that youthful idealism played no small part.

“Cartoon” and its negation were important to me because I felt alienated from both the crass world of popular entertainment and the elite world of high art, still in the sway of an abstract vanguard. This was a time when “cartoony” was a pejorative; my generation wanted to change that.

Unlike most independents I had worked in cartoon studios and valued the apprenticeship experience and my rebellion against it — my discovery of another way of animating. In the late 60’s, studios in New York were devoted to commercials or tepid "limited animation" Saturday morning fare. Feature production (“Yellow Submarine” not withstanding) was in eclipse and the short film was an orphaned genre, at least in the U.S.

The 1970’s changed all that. Independent filmmakers (primarily documentarians and animators) emerged as a creative elite, forming associations, getting grants, expanding their audience base. There was a parallel rejuvenation of experimental (formerly known as “underground”) filmmaking and artists began pouring out of schools after studying painting, dance or film. My original article addressed a community of like-minded artists who felt they were on the verge of a great discovery.

To promote our vision independent animators held meetings in downtown lofts arguing about what “independent animation” meant; published a book of drawings and statements; organized special screenings and collaborated on numerous gallery shows. The New York ASIFA chapter, bewildered by this new form of “non-sponsored” animation during the early 70’s, became wholly won over by it by the 80’s.

Now, a quarter century later, the animation landscape has undergone a tectonic shift. The industry has rebounded from its doldrums with a huge increase in production in an almost textbook case of bifurcated globalism, routinely outsourcing 2D animation work to overseas cartoon factories, while keeping 3D feature work at home where, presumably, it will benefit from technological innovations.

Television has experienced an explosion of creativity, first with MTV graphics (often based on experimental techniques), then with more sophisticated series largely due to clever, satirical writing and edgy, self-conscious design (e.g. “The Simpsons,” “Ren & Stimpy,” "South Park").

Film school curricula have absorbed our generation’s paradigm of independent animation production, and digital tools make the process easier. But if my own teaching experience is an accurate barometer, students have become more conventional in their work and more conservative in their aspirations, focusing on their portfolios to get a studio job which (in the U.S.) may be nonexistent.

Another ironic twist began with the fall of Communism. Many of us had been influenced by the graphic audacity, deep lyricism and caustic wit of Soviet and Eastern Bloc animation. This work had thrived because of a need for a kind of private language; messages were implied amidst startling visual experimentation. Now those artists too are cast into a free market jungle where brands and folkloric classics are more important than contemporary ideas.

Is there a future for the independent animator? While short films still aren’t economically viable in themselves, they do act as crucial laboratories of technical and artistic innovation; they offer artists a form for personal expression, a chance to deal with marginal, risky subjects. And today it is more common for animators to work on personal and commercial projects simultaneously.

It may be too soon to assess fully the effect of computers on experimentation in animation, but I would distinguish between production practice and presentation. The former includes grafting the computer onto an existing cartoon, collage and graphic workflow, as well as using the computer as the exclusive tool, as in 3D CGI. The latter includes peripheral developments which in turn fold back to influence what independent artists produce and who sees it. New media such as the DVD have become a cheap, universal vehicle of distribution to mass and niche markets; the Internet makes delivery of animation both free and global; PCs can drive digital projectors in a wide variety of venues, from a multiplex cinema to a storefront gallery or billboard.

When I migrated from film to computer technology to stitch together drawings and graphics, I found that certain intriguing distinctions vanished: photography and drawing melded into one kind of data file; the static image and the movie image lost their paradoxical relationship and became part of the same temporal map; the materiality of the artwork, which often added its own contradiction to film recording, slipped into virtuality. The technology obliterated the visual noise I had become accustomed to. It lurked behind several scrims (software, operating systems, hardware with its own sets of burned-in codes), essentially inaccessible to self-referential art-making practice, yet requiring constant maintenance.

Another problem lay with the unchallenged, unexamined predominance of photo-realism within the computational esthetic. This is evident in both design (in ever more complex rendering of texture, fur, skin and light) and animation (with motion capture naturalism threatening to supplant animation's choreographic invention). Perhaps “lifelike” has become the revanchist cry of all those who hated “cartoony” animation.

For most of us the computer holds enormous promise: cheap software like Flash, intuitive graphic tablets, digital delivery systems for a variety of sites — all converge to enhance production and presentation. Design and animation can be easily synthesized by a single author and distributed on the Web; it can be interactive or in your face.

My generation took an ecumenical view toward experimentation, embracing cartooning, abstraction, puppetry, altered live action and the various direct techniques. This heterodoxy has become even more robust with the digital revolution. And when I fear that technology may inhibit experimentation in favor of the production bottom line, along comes “Waking Life,” Bob Sabiston’s startling cartoonization of live action, or Chris Hinton's scribble-scrabble "Flux." There is even a healthy anti-digital backlash, a return to roots, as in the work of William Kentridge who makes personal narratives by drawing and erasing charcoal.

I cannot help but be optimistic about the future when I regularly encounter animated installations in galleries, or when 11 mostly younger independent animators band together cooperatively to produce a DVD collection of our work called “Avoid Eye Contact.” Sold on our website, it took only 3 months to show a profit (which will finance a second selection of animators). All this with a minimum of organization, meetings, and no manifesto.


George Griffin
NYC 8/2004

(written as an update to "Cartoon, Anti-Cartoon" in The American Animated Cartoon: a Critical Anthology edited by Gerald Peary and Danny Peary. E.P. Dutton, New York, 1980.)