How to use this Page

The new "Powerpuff Girls" revival gets its first Emmy nod, and so does the last episode of "Phineas and Ferb."

The post 2016 Emmy Nominations: Just the Animation Categories, Please appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

Some may have been perplexed by the "yaoi" element in last night's South Park episode but it's turns out that Trey Parker and Matt Stone were just ripping the lid off a long existing shocking secret about Craig and Tweek. Here's the startling truth!

Some popular animated programs are being recognized for the first time this year.

Viacom, the parent company of Nick, MTV, and Comedy Central, insists it's still relevant. No one else thinks so.

Is the Peabody Awards the only prestigious awards event that actually 'gets' animation?

These cartoonists stood up against intimidation and fought for their right to freedom of expression. Let us celebrate their victories.

The nominations for the 66th annual Primetime Emmy Awards were announced this morning, and the big animation news isn't who was nominated, but who wasn't: "The Simpsons"

Disney’s Mickey Mouse short Croissant de Triomphe picked up another Emmy—its third one—for Outstanding Short-format Animated Program. The award was announced during the 65th Annual Creative Arts Emmy Awards, held on Sunday, September 15.

The short had already won two Emmys in the juried Individual Achievement category. The large number of Emmys won by the short does not necessarily mean that it is the best of the new Mickey shorts, but only that it was the short chosen by Disney to be submitted for Emmy consideration.

In the Outstanding Animated Program competition, South Park won for the episode “Raising the Bar.” It is the show’s fourth Emmy Award in that category. The series was competing against episodes of Bob’s Burgers, Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness, Regular Show, and The Simpsons.

Ryan Quincy worked for well over a decade as part of the South Park production crew as an animator, animation director and supervisor. On the side he also created several music videos over the years which can be seen on his website.

After a long period of development and pitching that began in 2008, which included three shorts produced for FOX, Ryan’s show Out There recently premiered as IFC’s first animated series.

Ryan shared some artwork and photos of whiteboard doodles from the production which is written and boarded by Ryan and a small team in Los Angeles, and then sent to Bento Box Entertainment’s satellite studio in Atlanta, which draws from the talent pool established there by the various Adult Swim productions.

I was considering using some business-jargon to describe this bi-coastal production to a draw contrast with shows that ship animation to Asia–“in-sourcing” came to mind–but while trying to verify if I was using the terminology correctly I came upon this gem on Wikipedia, and decided to call the whole thing off:

The prefixes to “-sourcing” and “-shoring” remain in flux: Outsourcing gave rise to the term in-sourcing, and offshoring resulted in on-shoring. However, onshoring is sometimes called in-shoring. Insourcing is sometimes named “backsourcing”. Insourcing may be done by “onshoring”, “offshoring” or just “remotely”.

Anyway, the animation is done in Atlanta.

Ryan says that he drew from his childhood experience growing up in the midwest U.S. when he created Out There. The quirky designs of the characters also stem directly from the type of doodles that Ryan says he has been drawing since he was a kid, drawing inspiration from the work of Dr. Seuss, Maurice Sendak, Ub Iwerks, Jim Henson and a stew of others.

I’ve always known that South Park is produced on an uncommonly fast production schedule, but I never realized how brutal that schedule is until I watched The Making of South Park: 6 Days to Air. The 42-minute documentary, which debuted last fall on Comedy Central, is currently available to view on Netflix streaming, which is where I saw it.

The bulk of the behind-the-scenes footage was filmed over the course of a week in April 2011 as Trey Parker and Matt Stone worked on the season 15 premiere episode “HumancentiPad.” Directed by Arthur Bradford, the film is filtered through the experiences of Parker and Stone, who lead the writing and production team through the show’s insane six-day production schedule, in which an entire half-hour episode is written, recorded, and animated entirely in Los Angeles. To put that into perpsective, most other animated TV shows have production cycles that last anywhere between 3 to 10 months, and are animated in far-flung studios halfway around the world. It’s understandable why South Park seasons are broken down into seven-week cycles because it’s hard to imagine them maintaining that pressure cooker environment for fourteen weeks in a row.

The production schedule, however, also plays a role in the show’s ability to remain timely and relevant in a way that few other animated shows could ever hope to be. In many ways, the pace of production—and resulting comedy—resembles live-action productions like Saturday Night Live, The Daily Show, and other late-night talkshows. Parker, who is the show’s primary writer, discussed how the discipline of a tight schedule prevented him from overthinking ideas:

“I always feel like, ‘Wow I wish I had another day with this show.’ That’s the reason that there’s so many episodes of South Park we’re able to get done because there just is a deadline and you can’t keep going. Because there’d be so many shows that I’m like, ‘No no it’s not ready yet, not ready,’ and I would have spent four weeks on one show. All you do is start second guessing yourself and rewriting stuff and it’s get overthought and it would have been 5 percent better.”

Also surprising was how creatively involved Parker and Stone remain in their creation. After sixteen seasons, they are still calling the shots, and they don’t appear to have surrendered their creativity to the big Hollywood machine. Compare that to a show like The Simpsons, which is run by a gaggle of writers and producers, and would probably roll along fine even if its creator Matt Groening ceased his involvement.

The documentary left me with some questions, too. For example, I had always considered Trey Parker and Matt Stone to be equal creative partners, but Bradford’s film portrays Parker as the captain of the ship. In fact, it’s never made implicity clear what Stone does while Parker is working on the script. Clearly, their collaboration works, but I would have liked to see their unique partnership explored further.

Cartoon Brew | Permalink | No comment | Post tags: Matt Stone, South Park,

Abstract from one perspective, recognizable as animation icons from another. Check out these cartoon-based perspective sculptures by UK artist James Hopkins. Most of his subjects are recognizable even in their distorted form – either way, they are a lot of fun.

Click on thumbnails below to see even more of these incredible pieces of art:

(Thanks, Kelly Toon)

Cartoon Brew: Leading the Animation Conversation | Permalink | No comment | Post tags: Mickey Mouse, South Park, The Simpsons, Tom & Jerry

Tweet

By Mark Peters

It’s easy to find articles about words people hate. Just google for a nanominute and you’ll find rants against moist, like, whom, irregardless, retarded, synergy, and hordes of other offending lexical items. Word-hating is rampant.

So if that’s the kind of thing that yanks your lexical crank, look elsewhere: this column is all about word love, word lust, word like, word kissy-face, and word making-sweet-love-down-by-the-fire, as South Park’s Chef would put it.

These words not only float my boat; they rock my socks and warm my cocoa. I love these words, and this is my attempt to figure out why. If such analysis ruins the love, as so often happens in life, big whup. There are plenty of other words in the sea.

wazoo
We’ll never know why intelligent young citizens become proctologists (or how they break the news to Ma and Pa back on the farm) but we do know that words for the butticular region tend to be vivid and fun. Wazoo is my favorite. The OED traces it back to a friendly suggestion made in 1961: “Run it up yer ol’ wazoo!” I couldn’t agree more with a 1975 example: “Dating is a real pain in the wazoo.”

So what’s so great about wazoo? Studies show you can’t say it and be in a bad mood. Try it and see: wazoo wazoo wazoo wazoo wazoo. It’s funny and silly and a blast to say. Surely, it’s a better world with wazoo in it.

Bonus wazoo words: I am also a staunch admirer of gazoomba, bippy, badonkadonk, bottom, tush, fanny, fourth point of contact, and tuchus.

abyss
My mother always warned me to avoid two things: packs of wild dogs and the abyss. Still, I can’t stop reveling in this word. Part of the appeal is its meaning. You have to love a definition this ultra-hellish: “The great deep, the primal chaos; the bowels of the earth, the supposed cavity of the lower world; the infernal pit.” The OED’s secondary meaning is nearly as cool: “A bottomless gulf; any unfathomable or apparently unfathomable cavity or void space; a profound gulf, chasm, or void extending beneath.”

Also, I love looking into the abyss—except when I make the void jealous. The void is very insecure, you know.

buttmunch
When it comes to a perfect marriage of humor and stupidity, you can’t get any better than Beavis and Butthead, and I have yet to greet the day when I get tired of hearing their litany of immature, silly insults, such as dumbass, bunghole, peckerwood, dillweed, dillhole, and butt dumpling.

For me, the dumbass laureate of these words is buttmunch, so I was pleased to learn its origin in the DVD extra “Taint of Greatness: The Journey of Beavis and Butt-head, Part 1.” As B&B creator Mike Judge tells the tale, “Standards at MTV said no to assmunch. So I said, how about buttmunch? So we started saying buttmunch so many times, and then I just inadvertently said assmunch once. And they just heard buttmunch so many times that assmunch didn’t sound like anything new, so then assmunch slipped past ‘em. And that’s the story of assmunch and buttmunch.”

higgledy-piggledy
My marginally reliable memory told me I first saw this magnificent word in a Bloom County cartoon. Lucky for me and the

Death of the keyboard? (new research shows over 50% of computers purchased for kids under 15 will have touchscreens by 2015. Also ReadWriteWeb asks if the iPad is ready for campus. And Gen Y is interested in TV in 3D) (CNET) (Business Week) - 'South... Read the rest of this post

How should people explore your books in the way way way future?

That question will be answered in the next few years as Google and librarians at Open Content Alliance debate ways to provide universal access to content without breeching the traditional separation between corporations and the academy.

I reported on this almost two years ago and I've been fascinated by the digital library wars ever since. Today, The New York Times outlines the current debate.

In the end, it is our generation of writers that will be most affected by these momentous decisions. I would much rather have future scholars reading our books, letters, and essays in an open digital research library, rather than struggling through some locked-down, expensive, or advertising-riddled archive.

Check it out, and decide what you think...

"But the resistance from some libraries, like the Boston Public Library and the Smithsonian Institution, suggests that many in the academic and nonprofit world are intent on pursuing a vision of the Web as a global repository of knowledge that is free of business interests or restrictions."