Although L. Frank Baum insisted that his classic “The Wonderful Wizard of OZ” story was merely a modern fairy tale stripped of any unnecessary morality and lessons written for children who were already taught such things in school, historians claim there are many political undertones in the book. Of course, Baum also claimed he was attempting to remove the “horrors” and “blood-curdling incidents” of fairy tales and then included a chapter where hundreds viscous wolves and birds are brutally axed to death by the Tin Man with their rotting corpses lying in piles. So his public commentary on the book should be taken with a grain of salt. The 1939 movie – considered the definitive film version – was made 40 years later, and many of those claimed political icons would have meant as much to it’s audience as an I Like Ike button would mean to us today. There’s still a message in the film, mostly presented in dialog and scenes not in the book – one that takes the book’s theme of self reliance and pushes it deep into secular humanism and, perhaps, even atheism. More »

This is something I noticed a long time ago, but had a hard time getting the footage together to make my point. In comes Youtube and After Effects and any idiot with an inane pop-culture observation can post something hacked together in minutes. So here’s this idiot’s observation. Aparently Darren Aronofsky’s uber violent and relentlessly bleak Requiem for a Dream has a lot of imagery in common with, you’re going to love this, a Dexter’s Laboratory episode called “Topped Off”. I shit you not. Both are about drug abuse (sort of), use split screens, quick montages, and silly sound effects. And, get this, the Dexter episode was released two whole years earlier. More »

There is a growing consensus that the “art world” – that bastion of so-called serious expression – is failing. According to a Time article I just skimmed while rolling my eyes and yawning, many traditional art institutions are losing money hand over fist. Government doesn’t want to fund them, people don’t want to attend, and private donations are not as tax friendly as they used to be. But is it really that the arts need saving or that the definition of art has changed from what we have been taught all our lives? More »

Professional graphics people are a strange lot. On the one hand they embrace many technologies as they appear. Newer and better lenses and imagine sensors, higher DPI scanners and tablets, faster graphics cards, and rarely is a favorite app not upgraded as soon as the new version is released. But like audiophiles who cling to their vinyl, graphics folks can’t let go of their computer displays. Every time there is a major change in displays you will inevitably find a very angry and nearly fundamentalist vocal minority of graphic pros followed by hordes of mimicking amateurs complaining that the new tech is inferior. The difference between the graphic pro and the audiophile is that eventually the graphic pro caves to the new tech and then grows to have enough love for it to hate the very next thing as much as they hated what they are currently using at the time that it came out. What in the world is the cause of this bizarre behavior? More »

Or at least classical Western Art. I’ve been a big believer in Europe’s central place in the cultural world for most of my life now. I lived and breathed the Renaissance and the Baroque in college. And don’t get me wrong, I still appreciate it. What would I have to jerk off to if it wasn’t for Renoir? I mean, who in this day and age takes pictures of sexy, underage, fat girls? No one! More »

I’ve heard a lot of arguments for giving classic cartoons and comics a break for their odd bouts of rather extreme racism. “It was a different era, back then! That was the popular taste, the style of the day! We were at war!” The last is a reference to the buck toothed, bespectacled image of the Japanese in WWII era toons. This last argument falls flat when you realize the Chinese weren’t treated any differently and the caricature existed from the birth of the animated medium until as late as the 1960s (Johnny Quest comes to mind, IYYYEEEEEEE!). The other arguments ring equally hollow. More »

I’ve just finished up a really great project involving a gubernatorial candidate in Florida. The full animation can be found here . The toon is about two students who are hoping to graduate high school. One passes the exit exam and one doesn’t. Even though the cartoon is about making things better for the kid that (unfairly) flunked, I kinda felt – mostly unconsciously – this kid was dumb for failing and his character model’s deevolution throughout the flick bares this. Jimmy looks dumber and dumber as the movie progresses. His first appearance is pretty neutral, just as the original model sheet suggested. More »

It’s that time of year again where we all sit down and watch that masterpiece of holiday angst, Charlie Brown Christmas. More than 40 years after it’s original air-date, this animated short about the corruption and commercialization of a day to commemorate the birth of a destitute carpenter who wrecked the tables of money changers is as relevant as ever. Many critics like to point out the extraordinarily well delivered biblical quotation Linus gives (read by an actual eight year old) to uplift Charlie Brown’s holiday attitude. My personal favorite part is right after the speech when Charlie Brown feels so high that nothing can bring him down. More »

It’s great to get fan mail of any kind. The good stuff is often kinda boring. I mean there’s only so many ways people can tell you they like you. Not that I don’t appreciate it, because I do! But the negative stuff is always the most creative because you never know exactly how someone is going to hate your guts. But then there’s the really weird stuff, like the letters I’ve been getting from a certain Jason Wilson. More »

Even though the NES has been emulated perfectly for nearly 10 years now I was still buying NES carts. The reason was because NES games look horrible when displayed in the accurate, sharp, pixel perfection that a computer offers. A CRT television with its interlaced pixels adds an amount of blurriness to the image that somehow gives it depth, smooths out jaggies, and makes dithers look more like solid colors. After all, the programmers knew the display they were designing for and they took advantage of it with tricks and methods optimized for an interlaced CRT display. Same goes for any 8 and 16 bit system. More »

Anime is a wonderful thing. I’m so glad it’s finally reaching our shores en masse. However, I’m sick of seeing artists merely emulating it. Let’s all remember that animation is an American art form first and foremost. Anime is something that should be admired and used for inspiration, but not out right copied. And I say this not just because some kids are enamored with it enough to make crappy Flash movies on Newgrounds, but because even commercial endevours like Cartoon Network’s Teen Titans – a show produced by the brilliant Bruce Timm who swore Anime barely influenced his work – not only copy the look and dynamics of Anime, but its cultural iconography as well (ie. giant sweat drop to show embarrassment). More »