| Monday, April 1, 2002 |
02:33 - Tartakovsky, Mako, Jack, and Steven
http://www.denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2002/04/SamuraiJack.shtml
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Earlier tonight, we were watching Conan the Barbarian on the big-screen TV downstairs. It's a lavishly designed movie, the Fellowship of the Ring of its day, and realized in a detail that the best of today's movies don't often match-- with consistency of style from the characters' costumes to the technology to the language and the lore. It has its drawbacks-- Arnie could barely speak coherent English at the time, not that it mattered much, and so many of his lines were indistinguishable from Stallone's boxing-ring squalls. But on the plus side, it had Mako.
Mako is the freaky witch-doctor-looking wizard in both Conan movies; he's the gravelly-voiced narrator who makes every line sound like he's holding back laughter at the world of the mortals. I'd wondered what had become of him-- he seemed to have vanished after Conan-- but as Steven den Beste points out in a welcome non-war-related post today (linked above), he has resurfaced in an even more fun role: the irresistible villain Aku in Samurai Jack.
I tell you, den Beste must have been reading my mind-- I was just gearing up for a post of my own about Samurai Jack and its artsy, lingering, self-assured lavishness. And I would have said almost exactly the same things, too, right down to his choice of favorite episode.
Genndy Tartakovsky is certainly among the very best animators alive today. His first series, Dexter's Laboratory, was a masterpiece. Now his second one, Samurai Jack, is even better and there couldn't be a greater contrast between the two.
It's classic cell animation, and it's being produced by Hanna-Barbera for the Cartoon Network. If you haven't been watching this series, you're missing something special.
(It should be noted, with some sadness, that the current season of Dexter episodes are quite awful-- largely because Genndy is off doing Jack, his new flame. The new Dexters are off-model, cliché, uninspired, and seem to borrow their stylistic direction as much from the H-B gunk of the 60s as from the 50s-retro Ren & Stimpy mode that continues to be popular among those who think the ability to emulate a 1952 Frigidaire ad is all it takes to be the next John Kricfalusi. Dexter isn't worth watching these days, more's the pity. But we certainly got a good run out of it.)
What Tartakovsky brings to Cartoon Network is an artistic sensibility-- one that has enabled the type of cartoon that has suddenly made the medium respectable again. See, there's this spectrum in cartoons:
Limited animation/Strong script ------------------------------ Lavish animation/weak writing
For far too long, cartoons have tried to live over on the right, on the assumption that cartoons could insult the viewers' intelligence, repeat plots and clichés ad nauseum, clone shows from each other, and provide a return on investment purely on the strength of animation that looks good. Hence Scooby-Doo, The Superfriends, and the whole crop of 60s and 70s Hanna-Barbera claptrap-- though, importantly, the animation in those shows was crap too, purely because of anemic budgets. If they'd had more money, they would have put it into animation quality, however, which is the crucial point; otherwise, the scripts would have been better to begin with. Animation costs lots of money, but good writing can be done on a shoestring if you have the right people.
Well, Tartakovsky is the right people. He understands that what the TV animation industry needs is stuff on the left end of the spectrum: limited animation, with writing that screams. And even more importantly, he brought this insight: Design the show to look good in limited animation. If the character design and the timing are done right, as they are in Dexter and The Powerpuff Girls and Samurai Jack, you can get away with inexpensive sprite animation with lots of repetition, localized body-part movements, and directorial techniques that in lesser hands would be considered "cheats": long slow pans, freeze-frames, repeated animation cycles, and background-less disembodied-head scenes. These things work in Tartakovsky cartoons, because the show is designed to take advantage of those techniques, to revel in them. The thick outlines and stark geometric designs work perfectly in the Flash-style animation where realistic human motion would never make sense.
All the most successful shows on Cartoon Network lately have been limited-animation. Space Ghost really kicked it off, and it's already become an archetypal icon: it made an art form out of recycled animation, because the writing was dead sharp, and a lot of the humor explicitly followed from the camp value of the animation's limits and repetition. (All my friends and I can do the Space Ghost power-band-arm-spin move-- a motion so intoxicating in its humor value as to have inspired this whole new revolution almost single-bandedly.) And now we have Adult Swim, Cartoon Network's collection of "cartoons for grown-up tastes", showing in the 10:00-1:00 block on weekend nights, comprising further subversive paeans to well-written limited animation such as Home Movies, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Sealab 2021, and of course Space Ghost-- plus newly minted premieres of shows that operate on similar sensibilities. Home Movies is pretty grim to look at, but the writing is top-drawer-- and it lends a lovability to the art that never would have been possible if it had looked better in the first place.
A perfect example of this mindset at work: When Cartoon Planet, the whimsical Brak-song-heavy spinoff from Space Ghost, was being shot, they hired a professional bodybuilder-type dancer to don the Space Ghost costume and dance around for the commercial-break interstitials. Yes, it looked really good... but that was the problem. It looked too good. It was completely wrong for the atmosphere they were trying to create, the freedom and democracy of the new form of animation. So they got Andy Merrill, the voice of Brak and one of the chief writers, to squeeze his rather dumpy butt into the Space Ghost suit and prance around. It looked unutterably ridiculous... and it was perfect.
It's not just Cartoon Network, either; look at South Park for a perfect example of what can be done with genius writing (Trey Parker is my hero-- he and Tartakovsky no doubt admire each other, especially considering the South Park reference in The Powerpuff Girls; in the "Patches" eipsode: "Guys... he tripped me. Seriously.") and what has to be the most limited animation on the planet today. Some may disagree with me when I say this, but I think South Park is one of the most visionary shows of our time-- as much for its embrace of an insanely ascetic animation medium which has grown into its own self-defined art form as for its incisive, infuriating, uproarious, insightful, and above all human writing.
Now, this isn't to say that lavish animation is dead. Far from it. Traditional shows that exploit outstanding animation standards are better represented than ever, what with the WB-descended Batman Beyond and Justice League, and the more-than-surprisingly witty and edgy Baby Blues. These shows are great-looking, but they aren't stuck at the extreme right of that spectrum; they have the budget for both good art and awesome writing, and so they shine.
But limited animation is still the hero of the day. It's so liberating to the creators that Cartoon Network can afford to do custom-animated shows like JBVO (where Johnny Bravo, armed with a library of pre-animated moves, hosts a write-in cartoon request show) and the Friday night Cartoon Cartoon with a rotating "host", animated to introduce the new shows; not to mention all the outstanding, irresistible ad interstitials featuring the Superfriends and the Powerpuff Girls. All the focus is given to the writing; the genius is allowed to flourish. And then the animation is laid on top to give it life, but not much needs to be added.
We've come a long way since the dismal 60s, when Huckleberry Hound and Yogi Bear were the edgiest voices on TV animation. (Tellingly enough, they made their mark through being limited-animation as well.) But what we have now is the true realization of the Jay Ward dream, where animation is the zest that brings life to an already golden script, rather than a crutch that props up writing that barely deserves to be credited.
Eventually the wheel will turn away once again, and shows like the ones that Tartakovsky does so well will fall out of favor. But in the meantime, let's revel in the joys of what we have: The impossible size and foggy, Myst-like mythical worldbuilding of the first "Scotsman" episode. The bone-chilling threat of the Jack-killer robots with their Vietnamese-esque armor and their Episode 1-battle-droid-with-actual-menace voices. The three minutes of silence as Jack meditates his way into a new form of sensory awareness before he attacks the tower with the wishing well.
Mako must be having the time of his life.
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