| Thursday, October 14, 2004 |
11:44 - A JibJab Well Done
http://news.com.com/Passing+the+JibJab+presidential+test/2008-1026_3-5408402.html
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CNet has an interview with the duo behind JibJab, the darlings of the political Flash-cartoon world.
So that's where the animation style used in "This Land" and "DC" comes from?
Yeah. Even though it has chop jaws, I think it looks great.
(The puppetlike jaws are) also a part of the joke, and that's what Evan and the guys do. They understand the limits of the technology and make that part of the joke. It's crude, but the art looks great, and the crudeness is part of the joke.
We could use Flash to make perfectly fluid, Disney-quality animation, but it's just that bandwidth and processor constraints come into play. Even with "DC," we ran into a lot of constraints. It has a lot more animation than "This Land," in terms of movement. And processors can choke if you don't have a newer machine.
These guys really can animate well... and as South Park proved long ago (and continues to re-prove every week), there's a real place for talented animators in the world of paper-cutout and puppet-jaw cartoons. I still believe, for instance, that more emotional subtlety is conveyed by the little one-second twitch of Saddam Hussein's eyes as he unconvincingly says "I love you..." to Satan in bed in South Park: Bigger, Longer, & Uncut than in any full half-hour episode of Father of the Pride.
I think Trey & Matt, the Brothers Chaps, the Space Ghost-derived clip-art shows on Adult Swim, and the JibJab guys are all really blazing a new trail here; while traditional feature animation is floundering without a champion, they're showing us that if the writing is good and the heart is solid, you don't even need your animation to look like it's rotoscoped on ones. You can make your stories "read" just as well with a pair of scissors and some construction paper, and create the "illusion of life" just as satisfyingly.
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Brian Tiemann
