Artist and animation historian Amid Amidi has a great piece on the Cartoon Brew blog about how focus grouping and executive decisions have ruined the current state of television animation. The main thrust of his piece has to do with the idea of creators pitching their shows, and that sometimes too much energy is put toward making a show seem appealing to a network executive rather than focusing on the actual quality of the show itself and making something audiences will truly enjoy. He points out that lionized directors from the Golden Age of animation such as Bob Clampett, Chuck Jones and Tex Avery were unhindered by such bureaucratic bullshit and allowed to create cartoons on their own terms that are still enjoyable even today. Those old cartoons are not only great works of art, but they transcend generations. My own nieces and nephew enjoy Tom and Jerry and Bugs Bunny as much as I did as a kid, just as my father enjoyed them long before I was born.
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Good book: Cartoon Modern
Sometime ago I had a brief e-mail confab with Amid Amidi, a cartoon historian and writer who also worked for Spumco, John K's animation studio. We talked about a book he was working on titled Cartoon Modern: Style and Design in Fifties Animation. That book is now available for purchase, and I recommend it to anyone interested in this particular era of animation and design. The book is filled with wonderful production stills and sketches from the television age, and Amidi goes into great details about the production studios (Hanna Barbera, Terrytoons, etc.) as well as all the great artists of that era who took a new direction from the animated images of the 30s and 40s and introduced a brand new modern aesthetic: Tom Oreb, Maurice Nobel, and the recently deceased Ed Benedict, who was able to create distinct characters for Hanna Barbera on a low budget that are still admired today. Amidi also has a Web site called Cartoon Modern, and he runs the Cartoon Brew site with fellow animation buff Jerry Beck.Amid Amidi speaks to TV Squad
I'm a great admirer of Looney Tunes and animation from that era, so it's no
surprise that I found Amid Amidi's blog about style and design in
1950s animation to be quite interesting. He also has a new book, Cartoon Modern: Style and Design
in Fifties Animation which comes out this year. Amidi has written extensively on animation and design for
several publications, and in 2003 he worked on Ren and Stimpy: Adult Party Cartoon for Spike TV. Given the
opportunity to speak with someone who has worked in the industry and who has a knowledge far exceeding my own, I asked
Amid to sit down for a brief e-mail confab. Here's what we talked about:
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