Wild Animation on the Web
Not surprisingly, many of the cartoonists active on the Web came from television. George Evelyn, currently working with San Francisco-based animation house, WildBrain, began his career at Mill Valley Animation, a subsidiary of Hanna-Barbera, back in 1979. At that time much of the actual drawing — the creation of the tedious in-between frames — was being contracted to overseas laborers, and cartoons had long lost the timeless beauty of the classics that could only come from dedicated artists.
Evelyn places much of the blame on the Hayes Code of 1938, which insisted, for example, that Betty Boop show a little less cleavage and drop most of the sexual innuendo from her lines. As in the case of Ms. Boop, animated shows started to become stripped of their original essence. "People forget that most of the original cartoons were intended for adults and shown at the theaters before films," Evelyn explains.
Now it seems as if the medium has come full-circle, with plenty of animated content targeted at mature online viewers. With cartoons that would never make Nickelodeon's lineup — Icebox's unapologetic Meet The Millers series is a good example — Evelyn believes that the range of creative expression exhibited on the Web will not suffer the same fate as it has with television.
"The audience today is much more hip than it was 10 years ago," he says. "They've gotten a taste for wild animation, and I think they like it." Today's audience will demand creative content with a unified vision, he believes, and Web cartoons will not be sanitized for the lowest common denominator.
"Animation deserves better," he says. "But the borders of the cyber cities are being drawn, even as we speak." The borders are, in some part, formed by filtering technologies that prevent children from jumping from entertainment destination site CartoonNetwork.com, for instance, to sites intended for adults. Evelyn clearly understands these concerns, and will not let his young son see artist Frank Kozik's adaptation of Dante's Inferno - which Eveylyn directs -- until he is at least 13 years old.
Kozik's Inferno is a modern-day reworking of Dante's classic about redemption and damnation, shown at WildBrain. Evelyn says the show never would have made it past television focus groups. But the animation, drawn with the sinful lifestyle aesthetics that the artist is known for, is the kind of work that Evelyn gets excited about.
"A lot of the material that appears on the Web as edgy is crap. At some point people are going to have to focus on quality writing"
"His rock-and-roll, prison-tattoo art sensibility is a perfect look for the subject," Evelyn says. Evelyn has been a Kozik fan ever since seeing his rock tour posters of bands like Nirvana, Pearl Jam and The Melvins plastered all over San Francisco throughout the 1990s. Inferno, featuring a protagonist pig wearing a toga, and the apparition of a rabbit with a lit cigarette in its mouth, stays remarkably true to the original text. Kozik's interpretation of Dante's classic might also prove a more effective tool for students of Italian literature than Cliff's Notes, and definitely more stimulating.
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