John K on contemporary animated features

That's not a completely inaccurate description of a lot of studio animation - theatrical or otherwise. I think part of why so many of Pixar's film work as well as they do is because it really does seem like the director is the person ultimately responsible for what ends up on screen. He or she may pull ideas from a lot of different people, but the movie is still the director's vision and he or she has the final say for what goes into the film and what doesn't. (This is the impression I get from what I've read and seen about Pixar anyway.) As a result, Pixar has put out some of the best and most personal films I've ever seen come out of a commercial animation studio.

BUT.....

I don't agree with the idea that compromises, concessions, and limitations are always a bad thing. Yes, it's lame when something is added to a movie solely because someone not involved with the making of the film demanded it or the management wanted a scene that would play well in 3D or the ending of the film wasn't testing well with soccer moms or what have you. But it can be dangerous to treat "the artist's vision" as this sacred thing that no one should ever have the right to change or criticize. I don't think there is anything in the Star Wars prequels that isn't what George Lucas wanted to be there, yet I can't say that they're good movies. Or, a little closer to home, look at The Thief and the Cobbler. Richard Williams did not want to compromise on that film at all. One of my college professor was an animator on it and she told me she was averaging about two or three drawings per day and that was considered fine. In the end, the film was taken away from him, reworked into something other than what he had envisioned, and given a brief theatrical release in which it pretty much bombed. I have seen the "Recobbled Cut" and while I think it's a stunningly beautiful film, it is not without flaws, chiefly in the story. When I think about that movie, I remember the amazing animation, but I don't feel any attachment to the characters or plot. It's still debatable whether Williams made the right calls or not and whether he really cared about making a film with a compelling story or was chiefly concerned with the visuals. But I can't help but feel that making some concessions to schedule and budget would have given Williams a movie that was at least closer to his vision than what ended up showing in theaters.

Any film is going to have some kind of limitations. Even if you decide to make and finance the entire thing yourself, you're still going to be limited by your own resources, your own schedule, your own abilities, and your own need to eat. What limitations can do is force artists to try ideas that they might not if they were presented with unlimited time, resources, and freedom to tackle any subject matter. "How do I portray violence without any blood?" "How do I make these toys into a compelling world and narrative?" "How do I make this concept as good as it can be on the budget and schedule that I have?" And an artist who thinks that listening to any kind of criticism is compromising his or her artistic vision may merely be ignoring his or her own weaknesses.

It's easy to romanticize, but the uncompromised vision of a single creator is not automatically going to be good while a studio-produced piece with "many parents" is not automatically bad.
 
I don't get that at all. I very much get the feeling that Pixar is a committee-driven company. The difference is that the team at Pixar actually knows what audiences want and the Pixar creative team have, you know, actual talent. But I definitely do not see Pixar as an auteur-driven company. I could not tell you who directed what by watching any given Pixar flick. They all have a very slick, corporate feel to them.

That's not a criticism though. Pixar shows you that you can make good work by committee. But I have never considered any of Pixar's films to be representative of a singular vision. They deal with very universal themes designed to please a very broad audience; that's why they're arguably the most popular film studio in America, after all. Each Pixar film isn't really representative of one person's obsessions or personal notions. I'll go so far as to say that if Pixar WERE auteur driven, they would have nowhere near the popularity they do now, because individualism is not an attractive quality for mainstream filmgoers.
 
The work of overseas studios tend to be more hospitable to creativity and individualism (as usual); Studio Ghibli's output is less committee-dominated than even Pixar.

Though I'd argue Coraline and Fantastic Mr. Fox were a refreshing step up for animated films, and future ones would do good by following the influence of them.
 
Brad Bird, at the very least, is an auteur. The Incredibles and Ratatouille, his two films, do stand out from the rest of Pixar's work with their themes of exceptionality and persecution, which also fit in with Brad's pre-Pixar film The Iron Giant.

Andrew Stanton could probably be considered an auteur too, given that Finding Nemo and Wall-E both have a similar sentimentality and romanticism. John Lasseter's films are probably the least auteur-y, which makes sense given that he's an executive and his views also bleed in to the other Pixar films to some extent. Pete Doctor, maybe; Monsters Inc. and Up do seem to blend in with a lot of films from Pixar's other directors, but they do have a sort of unique old-school adventure-type feel to them.
 
More of John K's "I know what's best for cartoons but since I can't seem to successfully make any of my own anymore, I'm going to blog about how all the successful ones are crap." I'm getting tired of it. :yawn:
 
I feel the same way. I honestly couldn't care less what the man has to say anymore, no matter how true it may or may not be. He complains and complains and complains but never contributes anything of any value outside of incredibly ugly characters with nipples and crotch bulges. Even his current versions of Ren and Stimpy look horrendous. I have it on good authority that the man has lost his mind. I no longer think he's worth taking seriously.
 
This guy's comment on Cartoon Brew sums it all up nicely:

"Last year we had the following features which were non-commercial creative visions by individual filmmakers:

PONYO
UP! (lets not let its success shadow the fact Disney stocks PLUMMETTED at the prospects of Geriatric and Asian protagonists)
SECRET OF KELLS
$9.99
MARY AND MAX
FANTASTIC MR. FOX
CORALINE
9
A TOWN CALLED PANIC

If he’s talking about Dreamworks, Disney (the usual whipping boys for blowhards in animation), Sony’s 2 features and ICE AGE 3 he can have them, but the major studios’ output COMBINED with ASTRO BOY is still less (7) than all the features I’ve listed above. Even IF all the independent movies I mentioned weren’t getting made, he’d still be spouting the same tired rhetoric in the face of studio films that buck the trend like PONYO, 9, CORALINE, FANTASTIC MR. FOX and UP!
Even A CHRISTMAS CAROL and (since CB has made the idiotic argument relentlessly I’ll stick it to them) AVATAR are “animated features” that are products of singular creative visions.
Once again John K. proves he’s not watching anything actually out there and becoming less and less of a relevant voice in the contemporary animation discussion."
 
Thirded. The man reminds me of Michael Morocock and how he continually calls out and scathes better known creators to increase the profile of his own work. The man's opinion is at best a rant, and at worst a plea for attention.
 
I once heard that the creation of Invader Zim involved killing several children.

O.K., so, that's the type of production I draw a line at. Anything else? If the end-result is good, I couldn't care less. Sure, "committee-made" films are often awful, but giving the creator complete control over the product isn't sure to result in gold either - as the creator of Ren & Stimpy Adult Party Cartoon should know.

Now, when people take an existing production and butcher it for a local release (like Miramax did with The Thief & the Cobbler, and 4Kids did with everything) then I have a problem. But for the most part, I don't see why, as a consumer, I should care how an entertaining film was made... as long as it's entertaining.
 
John K is a good animation historian and he argues a good case when it comes to what makes a good piece of design. I, for example, totally agree with his opinions on the look of Shrek.But his social, political and thematic interests are very much out of date with today. He's still working within a very simplistic mindset that cartoons should be all about simplistic visual gags and juvenile wordplay.



I'm quite surprised at how John is able to articulate exactly what makes Ed Benedict's Hanna Barbera designs work, but then he goes ahead and draws his own "Ren and Stimpified" versions of them which seems to totally go against the appealing design sense he purports to champion in Benedict's designs. Baffling.
 
Is that a joke, or are you serious?

Anyway, I almost always prefer films either made by auteurs (Ghibli) or by a committee of actual talented artists (Disney) or by a some sort of working combination of those two systems (Pixar) over films made by executive committees. Yeah, creative works can be horrible, but they tend to be the type of horrible you can MST3K or write angry articles about on the internet. Exec-driven horrible tends to be the worst kind of horrible: the boring kind.
 
Are you kidding? John K still dresses and acts like it's still the 1950s/60s. Part of him is trapped forever in that era and he doesn't seem to be capable of living and thinking in modern times. Bob Clampett cartoons are great. I think we can all agree to that. But every cartoon doesn't have to be like one.



http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2010/04/specific-acting-sven-hoek.html

Look at this blog post from last month. All of this stuff was drawn my John himself. I can't believe how darn appealing all of this is. What happened during the last two decades that made his drawings style look so horrid?
 
Why do some of you guys want to trumpet and get worked up over things this guy says? If he wants to be relevant he needs to make another cartoon. A good one that proves that what he's saying is correct. Otherwise he's just a washed-up crank.
 
Read my post above again. :)

Originally Posted by Leaping Larry Jojo
But his social, political and thematic interests are very much out of date with today. He's still working within a very simplistic mindset that cartoons should be all about simplistic visual gags and juvenile wordplay.
 
Hmm, I remember a certain someone who also HATED Tiny Toons (and most cartoons you grew up with), yet was treated like a god around here.

Yeah, John K may be past his prime, but you can't deny his influence in modern animation; and yeah, there are a lot of shows and movies as terrible (if not worse) as the ones from the 70s and 80s.

On a side note, APC was nowhere as good as the original show, but it's not the abomination many claim it is. It had pretty good animation and art design; had John K's original vision been shown first, it still would have been a hit since there was nothing like that before.
 
I was going partly on what HG Revolution said and partly on hearing anecdotes like how Finding Nemo evolved partly from Andrew Stanton's own realization that devoting all of your energy to keep you kids safe can actually keep you from doing a good job of parenting. Or how Cars was inspired by John Lasseter taking some time off to travel with his family and coming to appreciate the need to slow down every once in a while. But if you don't see it that way, it's fine. I have no more special insight into the process than anyone else and i could be wrong. Maybe it's not so much that the director is the ultimate guardian of what the film is and isn't about, but that everyone at Pixar who has the power to make decision about the film understands or at least respects what the film is about and doesn't try to push it to be something else.



I am not a big fan of John K. and I'll readily agree that he became a bitter old crank at a rather young age (though not entirely without reason) and that he's kind of a one-trick pony with a mixed track record. But I don't think his opinions - or those of someone who has never made any suceesful animation or any animation at all - are completely invalid. I frequently disagree with what he has to say, but he does sometimes come up with something that I find insightful. A lot of modern studio animation does involve a lot of compromise, and not because the end product isn't something John K. likes. Again, whether those are good or reasonably compromises or ones that ultimately hurt the final product is another matter entirely.
 
You can't deny the influence of his past work "on" modern animation. He has no influence "in" animation anymore, so I see no need for people to continue putting so much weight on what he says.
 
I don't think the problem is so much that animated flicks nowadays are headed by large groups, but that they are headed by large uncreative groups who only care about money. That's why there are so many CGI and 3D movies. That's why less and less characters in movies are voiced by trained voice actors and more by celebrities. That's why story plots are getting more and more generic and commercialized for the "optimum profit". Sure, movies like those of Dreamworks make a lot of dough, but are they ever hailed for being artistically creative?

Where Pixar differs on that note, as another poster pointed out, is that Pixar is run by a large group that actually likes and enjoys good and creative animation. If they make money while doing what they're doing, then cool, but they do care about the creativity that goes into a project.

I don't think that nowadays it's even possible for one person's vision to be the sole factor in the creation of a feature. That's something that's much more feasible on television cartoons (but even that doesn't happen as much as it should because of TV executives).
 
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