Channel Frederator Blog

This cartoon short is The Interview (1961). The animated interviewee is Shorty Petterstein, a beatnik character/alter ego created by “sound artist” Henry Jacobs. Jacobs is an interesting and still rather obscure character who palled around with Lenny Bruce and Alan Watts, hosted one the world’s first “world music” radio programs, and experimented with audio collages and tape manipulation way back when such things were a time-consuming pain in the butt!

WFMU has posted MP3s of all the tracks from The Wide Weird World of Shorty Petterstein here.

Henry Jacobs has a website where you can purchase an autographed “Best Of” DVD. Listen to Henry’s 2005 interview for NPR here.

Ernest Pintoff directed The Interview; he’s best known in animation circles for his work at UPA, Flebus at Terrytoons, and his direction of Oscar winner The Critic —with voiceover by Mel Brooks. Len Glasser did the designs—he worked on Tom Terrific at Terrytoons.

Henry Jacobs also contributed to an early 70s oddball animated program called The Fine Art of Goofing Off, which used diverse animation techniques to illustrate meandering free association about the philosophy of pointlessness. 60’s counterculture figures including Alan Watts, Victor Moscoso, and comedy troupe The Committee also contributed to this artifact of Public Television’s early and experimental years.

After the jump, some excerpts from The Fine Art of Goofing Off: [Read more…]

(Just something else I had never heard of until Pictoplasma NYC. I wish that I had seen this in person!)

—Anne D. Bernstein

If you missed Pictoplasma NYC last weekend, there’s an excellent round-up of speakers by Matt Sung at the design:related blog.

I thoroughly enjoyed myself. Highlights:

1. Gangpol Und Mit’s presentation in charmingly fractured English. With catchy jingles!

2. Tim Biskup’s revealing talk regarding his recent “The Artist in You” exhibit. He talked about the need to constantly recreate his characters in order to figure out what they “really mean”. He’s discovered that Helper is not as nice as he first appears–in fact, Biskup compared him to Tony Soprano. “The Monster is what you become when you believe in yourself too much.” (Helper statue photographed by me, at the last Comicon I could bear to attend.)

3. Nattily dressed Fons Schiedon (at top) discussing his work, both commercial and personal. (The character design you see is from Kika and Bob, an animated series that sounds like it was designed to give the animation staff breakdowns, as they travel to a different elaborate location in every single episode!)

4. Studio AKA’s screening of their touching and breathtaking new film Varmints.

5. A kinetic finale by Friends With You, complete with giant bouncing inflatables.

6. And the big revelation of the pow-wow: David O’Reilly’s announcement that he is behind the YouTube phenomenon known as Octocat! If you’ve never seen it, Octocat is a bizarre and seemingly naive series of animated shorts that were posted to YouTube under the name Randy Peters. Some may feel punked when they find out that they were created by an actual “artist”–not an obscure and naive adolescent channeling some kind of Freudian nightmare– but that does not mean that they aren’t strangely moving.

Here’s the first episode of Octocat. The rest are on the jump, including the mind-blowing revelations of Adventure Five.

[Read more…]

Former Poet Laureate Billy Collins loves cartoons!

Back in June, Collins wrote an article for The Wall Street Journal called “Inspired by a Bunny Wabbit” which explained how his poetry has been influenced by cartoons.

“…my own poetry would have not developed in the direction it did, for better or worse, were it not for the spell that was cast over me as a boy by Warner Bros. cartoons. The very first time I heard the pulse-quickening blast of the zany theme music by Carl Stalling–enough to bring any American boy to attention–and saw the colorful bull’s-eye emblazoned on the big screen, I was hooked.”

The article includes the poems “Bugs”, “Porky”, “Elmer”, and “Daffy” (from his first collection, Pokerface).

Porky
Happy only
when he is gardening alone
far from conversation
and the terrible stammering
far from Petunia, nag and tease
just resting on a hoe
unembarrassed
as he contemplates
the blue background of his flat world –
a Zen pig.

So, I was going to post [Read more…]

I’m not a big ol’ techno freak, but Gangpol & Mit just may suck me into the scene with the way they blend animation and music to create a mutant vibe that’s been described as the soundtrack to day care on another planet. Two guys from Bordeaux, France, Sylvain Quément (music) and Guillaume Castagné (graphic design), output a klutzy kool music/video universe that is childlike and threatening at the same time. My brain hurts in a good way!

Hitspaper interviewed them (and the awkward translation from Japanese just makes it even better!)

For more stimulation, transport yourself to their website. Guillaume’s art is showcased at his own site, here. They also have a MySpace page.

Guillame contributes to a more toned-down (no knives!) project for kids called Carton Park with Norman Bambi & Mami Chan of Juicy Panic. See a somewhat Devo-esque performance, complete with alterna-scout uniforms and limboing children, here.

—Anne D. Bernstein