Well instead of every animator ever I should have just said all of his contemporaries.

But even then, he really does have a nasty habit of downplaying the importance and skills of every animator besides Clampett (and Bakshi and himself). The amazing extent to how much he overates that bastard is pretty irritating.

Clampett is great, but I definitely prefer Jones. Maybe Clampett had better gags overall but Chuck's combination of great sight gags and his terrific signature animation style is what does it for me. Jones didn't really perfect his craft until 1948, but basically everything from that point has been golden, save the weaker Tom & Jerry shorts Chuck made.

Invader Zim though deserves recognition as the show that out-R&S'd R&S.

Also, I think a lot of the reason John K doesn't like to give credit to shows like Rocko is because guys like Joe Murray publicly denounced John for taking a principled stand about what he thought was the best process for creating cartoons. John K's attempt to return Western cartoons to the old animator-driven studio system is absolutely one of the bravest battles that has happened in animation politics of the last 20 years and the fact that Murray would chastise John about it rather than stand in solidarity with him really just makes Murray look like a shill philistine wimp in comparison. Especially when you take my view that Murray was truly a second-rate artist in the first place--far too concerned with the writing and "design" and not nearly enough attention to making the animation itself varied and interesting. Basically when someone like Murray says John is an overly-principled spoiled hack for doing the best thing he ever did, it's ridiculous to expect John to give him any credit either. You'd have to be a saint. At least John has never actually gone out of his way to criticize Rocko--he's just ignored it. Murray is the real douche if you ask me.

I don't see how John K downplays Jones at all. He talks about how great Jones is all the time on his blog. So he likes Clampett more? So what? Clampett is as valid a choice for best animator of all time as anyone else is. It's basically like choosing between Mozart and Beethoven. There's no obviously better answer.

Well John K makes a lot of stupid arguments that make little sense AND his taste is inconsistant.

I think the way he criticizes the animation of shows that put more emphasis on writing (like the aforementioned Rocko, which is definitely inferior to Ren & Stimpy animation wise but it did have some crazy inspired writing to make up for it) is just plain fucking stupid, not all animation has to be approached by his incredibly limited criteria, and the fact that he has the audacity to criticize other animators for stiff animation while being a goddamn Hanna-Barbera fan is just unreal.

Another thing I hate about him is his belief that any animation style that isn't stereotypically "cartoony" is bad. Because he somehow thinks that is the only way animation can be expressive or original. He's truly a fucking moron in that regard.

I think you've misunderstood his position. Hana-Barbara's early style was incredibly fluid and detailed up around until the time The Jetsons started and everything started to stiffen up until cartoons were basically dead by the 70s. This comment of yours makes it sound as if he's a fan of Johnny Quest or something.


The reason he thinks this (which he really doesn't; he's praised non-cartoony things before) is because he was worked for basically two decades straight when he was basically repeatedly told that everything that WAS cartoony was bad, when that's what he wanted to do all along. So it's no wonder that he's a militant cartoony kind of guy. Wouldn't you be crazy obsessed with trying to make everything cartoony and fun and detailed if you were forced to draw shit like this for 20 whole years?:


I wouldn't say that John K has an incredibly limited criteria. This "incredibly limited criteria" is basically to promote a specific type of freedom that John K (and I) believe is still WAY untapped. For me it's pointless to criticize the guy for his tastes. He has a right to them like anyone else and it's not like he's hurting anybody by liking what he likes and not liking what he likes. My problem with John K is that he's so totally in love with the process of animation that he really does underrate the importance of writing and conceptual ideas, and that's the real reason why he hasn't done any good work since the 90s, not because everybody else is suppressing him as he'd have you think. He's too willing to animate any commercial piece of shit so long as he can animate it well. He's definitely someone who needs to be working with good collaborators in order to make good material. Just letting him completely loose to do his own thing results in crap like that retarded Ren & Stimpy Adult Cartoon reboot.

Also, as much as I love the great Ren & Stimpy episodes, I'd say there's no more than 15 episodes that are actually very good, and even less than that which are actually great. His best stuff (Stimpy's Invention, Space Madness, Untamed World) is basically the peak of traditional cartooning as far as I'm concerned, and I'll always give him credit for that, but a lot of Ren & Stimpy (even the early ones) are failures, like Nurse Stimpy. And of course after he left the show it went completely to hell. I know they have their fans and I think Bob Camp is a good guy, but the post-Spumco Ren & Stimpys are really unbearable for me to watch.

The guy has had some bad experience with people, I don't really think that's a great excuse for saying the kind of things he says that are ignorant to such an astronomical degree.

Yeah he's one of the most talented animators out there, but this guy really hasn't done enough truly great work to justify the massive fucking ego he has.

Like what? I'd like specific quotes if possible.


It's because of the ego that he has any good material. He may not have as much good material to his name as Jones, Clampett, and Avery, but that's because he worked in a pretty repressive era and had to fight tooth and nail like a confident dickhead warrior for every little bit of creative freedom that he got, and he certainly has more good stuff to his name than any of his contemporaries if you ask me. I guess maybe Bakshi has more that you could say is quality, but none of it is as good as the best John K stuff. Basically, his ego doesn't really come from the work he's done. I think he developed an ego working under idiots who didn't know the first thing about animation, and it was his ego that made him confident enough to make the best Ren & Stimpys as good as they are. Really, I'll never understand why people lambast artists for their egos. The ego is where good art comes from. It's not like you personally have to deal with the guy.

Whatever the case, nobody can claim to know more about the traditional animation process than this guy. He doesn't just study the directors, he knows the names and styles of every single individual animator and layout artist. He has an encyclopedic understanding of that stuff, and I think he deserves our respect for helping to increase appreciation for those virtuosos.

Also I never got the dislike for Nurse Stimpy, I found that one to be pretty funny, the whole bath scene is one of the classic R&S moments for me.

I think the first two seasons of R&S were great overall. Even the Bob Camp era had it's moments but I agree that it really went downhill, you just can't keep a show like that going without the visionary behind it.

Personally, besides R&S, The Adventures of Mighty Mouse, the Spumco flash shorts and those awesome music videos for The Rolling Stones' Harlem Shuffle and Bjork's I Miss You, I don't think John K has done much else that can compare to those. The Yogi Bear cartoons were pretty good but nothing great, and I remember seeing a couple of episodes of Super Ripping Friends and being very disappointed, granted that was a long time ago. Quality over quantity I guess.

And the Adult Swim Ren & Stimpy cartoon was just a fucking travesty. I definitely hope John K achieves his dream of bringing Ren & Stimpy back but WITHOUT throwing in all the random "adult" stuff just to please network executives who want a South Park competitor.

Nurse Stimpy has some alright jokes, but something about the animation in that episode just seems stodgy and less alive than some of the other stuff of the era, which is why I think it's a failure.

Honestly, there's probably more John K material you like than I do. But I just respect the guy and his opinions a whole lot I guess. The best artists very rarely have the most reasonable opinions overall, but they are very specialized and so often have great insights into specific parts of their art that people with more reasonable overall opinions don't have.

Anyway, I've been looking at all the Jones shorts in my Looney Tunes Golden Collection and I had to take a few screengrabs because I'm totally in love with some of this layout art, which is just as good as some of the "high modernism" of the era. Check these grabs from the intro to "Deduce, You Say!" Most people just ignore these aspects because they're waiting to get to the characters and story, but there's beauty in every frame of this episode:

And just to prove I don't hate everything that came out of the 80s, dig:


I love it when animators are this expressive in their movement. Here's another fascinating one from the 70s by the same guy:
http://www.tudou.com/programs/view/xGv156tNeoM/

I just love animation so much I can appreciate many approaches to it. I love cartoony animation, I really love surreal animation (like the aforementioned Cruikshank), but I also greatly admire the technical perfection of Disney's work and animators like Don Bluth and Richard Williams.

Miyazaki is definitely my favorite animation guy, he's a great example that animation doesn't have to be "cartoony" to be incredibly imaginative and expressive. Anime may lack the fluidness of the best western animation but the best of it compensates with great design and creativity, like Gainax's best work.

Next time I get a bunch of weed and free time I'll go on a Miyazaki marathon; it helps me appreciate things that I otherwise don't. I'm not sure what's keeping me from going crazy about his stuff already. Something about it just sits there for me, though I admire it in a removed way.

Someone who knows my animation tastes pretty well says I'm more likely to like anime by Studio 4C, Production IG, and Gainax than I am to like Miyazaki though.

Wow, now that's what I call a LOT of Clampett and Avery influence.

So I'm in the midst of downloading all of the Looney Tunes Golden Collections that I don't have. So far I've got all the Clampett toons downloaded and I've just thrown them all in one big file and renamed them so that they sort by year and month and date of production. I plan to watch them all very closely in chronological order to see his development. Then I plan to do the same with Jones, Freleng, Tashlin, and Davies--just to get a good strong sense of the individuality of each of their styles--and then when I'm done with them I'll get the Tex Avery MGM torrent and do the same with him (in combination with his Warner Bros stuff too of course). Yay! I think because of the ways these toons are packaged it's hard to watch them chronologically like you easily can a feature length director's discography, so I'm looking forward to really delving into the evolution side of things.

I think he might have also done a Weird Al video for his 2007 album.

I haven't seen John K's "Beany and Cecil" revival from the late 80's after he left "Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures" (which I maintain is probably the most important and influential American animated series in the past 25 years). Apparently they were along the same lines of "Mighty Mouse: TNA" except the censors were too strict and it didn't even make a double digit episode count.