April 20, 2004
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Every Friday 6.30pm on Cartoon Network Australia (and in Asia) is something called Toon-O-Scope, where they focus on a cartoon character, a bit like ‘Star of the Week’, we presume. These next couple of weeks the spotlight is on RRRR-Rikochet! We’ve just learnt that he’s a bull-ish Taurean (like me).
Attack of the Giant Red Octopus (Pin Pin le lapin) is another amazing piece of work by Studio Tanuki, the French animation team behind Catfish Hotel. It’s fascinating to see Europeans doing Japanese style animation in a time when most mainstream American cartoons are leaning towards an ‘anime’ look and feel.. We like that wacky French-Japanese hybrid sensibility…
Preston Blair gifs! (linked from Cartoon Brew.)
There’s a great interview with Bill Plympton (also linked from Cartoon Brew ) where he says:
“I have three rules about how to make a successful (short) film that you’d want to get in THE ANIMATION SHOW. And the three rules are: one, make it short. Not above five minutes. Simply because it’s harder to sell a film that’s ten minutes or fifteen minutes. It’s harder to program; film festivals find it hard to program and television stations find it hard to program. Two, make it cheap. Now, with the advent of the computer and flash and other programs, it’s a lot easier to keep the budget very low on your film. When you shoot it on film, you use big cameras and all of that stuff. Three, make it funny. If you make a funny film, everyone will want it. I don’t know why that is with animation, but most people, when they see animation, they want to laugh.”
You could also apply these rules to making a pitch pilot for a TV series. In the case of Rule #1, we think it’s not so much distribution-related as that most people (including network execs) have short attention spans.. Sometimes less is more. Also contrary to the above, we have found that most TV networks will not program anything under 11 minutes or in some cases half an hour…
Rule #2 makes total sense. But how do you justify this when you have to hire a team and pay people to work on your project? It would have to be a pretty awesome project if artists are willing to work for peanuts… Either that, or you have all the time in the world…
Like everyone else, we envy Mr Plympton and Don Hertzfeld for being “independently successful making their films without investors or government sponsorship or independent wealth.” and continue to be baffled by how they manage to do this and keep up the high spirits.
Rule #3 … Funny, wacky, zany, silly, action, mega…
Eddie: Maybe we need to break more rules.
