What do you think of Cartoon Brew????

G

Glam.Queen

New member
Some may think of coffee with that name. Some may think of a witch's brew with that name.


But really, it's a place to disscuss the animation industry. Hosted by Looney Tunes fanatic Jerry Beck and another historian Amid Amidi, they go for rarities, plugging their events and other's blogs, and most of all discuss news and opinions of animation.



I've seen it change from the early days to a more standard high-trafficking site, and I've posted a lot of postive comments under the name ParamountCartoons (not to be confused with a YouTube user).




But be warned, if you haven't looked at animation on other news sites, you will be outraged and sometimes saddend by posts such as deaths and cartoons turning into CGI/Live Action movies.


It also contains some adult content, but not too much if you're my age.



But still worth looking at.
 
To be completely honest, I only go their on Sundays to read the Sunday funnies. I prefer to get my toon news here.

EDIT: The name makes me think of coffee.
 
Jerry is willing to give things a chance. He changed his mind about his negitive views on Motion Capture when he saw Avatar and he realized his problem wasn't with the medium but with Robert Zemeckis and his films. Plus he appreciates the great artists who works at Dreamworks, even though they are applying their skill to mostly mediocre stories.

Amid is a bit of a fanatic when it comes to modern animation. He had criticized Lauren Faust for working on My Little Pony a few months ago. Now he has called the launch of the Hub "the end of creator driven TV animation". That being said, he has written a great book on 1950s animation called "Cartoon Modern" that I own. He is not a totally bad guy, I just see him as the grouch who only looks at the bad stuff in animation today. In that context, he is like some of the forum members here, only with Walt era cartoons instead of 90s television. *rimshot*
 
Something Awful's two parodies of Cartoon Brew say more about it than I ever could.

(Look them up, they're funny. Sorry I can't link to them, I don't think it's allowed, with the naughty words and all. Just search for "animation" on their site's search, and you'll see two articles mentioning something called Animation Website.)
 
I had them on my Google Reader RSS feed for a few months before I removed them. They're a great source for indie animation shorts and for intricately anecdotal information about the lives (and deaths) of Golden Age animators, but that's kinda it. The more modern and mainstream they go, the less insightful (and more fearmongering) they are. I can get my animation news from a half-dozen other sites and the really notable indie shorts get posted somewhere on my feed.

BTW, I recall that whole controversy about the lack of female leads in Pixar films back when Up was released. As far as I'm concerned, Jerry Beck and NPR's Linda Holmes are both full of it. Beck much more so because of his blatantly sexist dismissal of Holmes' sincere frustration with the lack of female leads from such a beloved studio, which is a valid concern... except Pixar is now making a film with a female star in 2012's The Bear and the Bow (now Brave), yet Holmes prematurely bashes it simply because said female lead (Merida) is a princess? So basically her being a princess automatically negates her from being a potentially compelling protagonist? I'm sorry, that is 100% BS and she should be ashamed for being so closeminded.
 
I avoid Amid Amidi's opinion pieces like the plague, but Jerry Back has mostly good things to say and is much more fair in his criticism than Amid is.
 
I like checking them out from time to time. I do like their Sunday Funnies, showing off some indie animation pieces, events, and their opinions on stuff. Though with the opinion pages, I find myself agreeing more with Jerry Beck opinions rather than Amid. There's something about Amid's opinions like his recent thoughts on creator-driven animation, that make me want to punch something.

With that said, my thoughts on the comment sections? They do provide good entertainment, and most of them know their stuff. I like it when the comments are even more entertaining than the article
 
I used to really like it, but then I realized it really is more like the Something Awful parody of it (a bunch of retrophiles with their nostalgia goggles strapped on a little too tight) I'll still pop in from time to time to see if there are any new pieces of news or new animated shorts worth checking out, but not as much as I used to.
 
I'll agree Amid can be quite negative more often than not, but can you really call someone who is more supportive of independently-production animated works as opposed the stuff made by big media conglomerates truly close-minded?

And yeah, I go there quite often.
 
Yes. Especially if they close their mind to anything that isn't made outside of the conglomerates.

I won't go that far with Amid, but he gets cranky sometimes :-)

DISCLAIMER: He recommended yours truly for those Animation World Magazine reviews you may have read in 1999. He took on The PJs, and I got the following:

Dilbert (episode #1)
Family Guy (Episode #1)
Powerpuff Girls
Ed, Edd, & Eddy
A Little Curious
Batman Beyond (episode #1 & 2)
 
I go there, I get a fair amount of my animation news from there, and I sometimes participate in the discussions there. I think they've had and continue to have some very good information on the site and cover some animation and animation related topics I might not otherwise be aware of. I think Jerry Beck is a very smart guy who has written some very insightful pieces on the site. I was dismayed by his use of "Chick Flick" in the title of the article on the NPR opinion piece, but I don't think he meant it to be as dismissive as it ended up sounding. I think Amid Amidi is also a very smart guy, though one who's far more likely to irritate me than Jerry Beck. He has his opinions and sometimes they differ from mine and that's fine. What bothers me is when he goes beyond opinion into personal attacks or assertions that he knows what's best for everyone. I was not thrilled with him insulting the animators at Imagi shortly after the studio closed. I didn't care for him implying that he somehow knew what Lauren Faust and Craig McCracken's dreams as young animators just starting out were or should have been. And I thought it was pretty ridiculous and hypocritical when he attacked and insulted the work of an animation professor who dislike a poster done for Ottawa on the grounds that the professor should have been more open-minded about it, something Amid does not have a great track record of doing.

But overall, I like the site fine and make daily stops there to see what's going on.
 
Just as i was going to visit that site, i saw this discussion and quickly reminded on how i got infuriated a few times by their posts. Sometimes by consequitive posts, like three days in a row.
 
Let me condense a college thesis-sized post full of anger and vitrol into a slightly-paraphrased Webcomic Overlook quote:

Have you ever run into someone who was so obnoxious and off-putting that even when they said something you agreed with, you'd take the opposite side on principle alone? That's Cartoon Brew.
 
Having actually had a lovely brunch with Jerry Beck in LA back in 2006, and having interviewed him for the old rabroad News Podcast, I have to say that regardless of how he might sometimes come across on Brew, he truly loves animation, and when Pixar brings to the table for girls what they do for boys, he'll be the first to glow about it. After all, he's been enamored of anime, including the largely female-centered Ghibli films since before anyone besides his old Streamline studios was bringing things over with any regularity. He's a real gem of an animation fan, and really just an amazing guy to talk to. For someone who is usually credited with being an animation historian, he's had his fingers in many events in animation history than people realize. If you ever get the chance to talk with him in real life, I highly recommend it. I assure you, he loves all animation as much as you do, probably more.

That said, Brew really is a blog at the end of the day. There is a lot of editorializing on it, and it's user base attaches itself to that site because of it. I do find Amid to be almost comically negative at points, but I also understand from dealing with other people from that generation of the animation fandom why they have certain, deep caveats about things like cartoon tie-ins for toylines with hyper-PC casting (protip: they did result in a decade or so of mediocre cartoons with sometimes silly casts whose only benefits were providing campy nostalgia and a training ground for animators who'd go on to make rad creator controlled shows that had genuine merit.) Some of their views may seem narrow at best in the modern context, but they are more fears born out of experience rather than just crankiness or actual narrow mindedness. Like I said, if you put something quality in front of them, they'll usually bite, even if it is actually quite forward and different. Well, Jerry will atleast and that's part of why the blog works - they balance each other out sort of.

Beyond that, it's not like every facet of the animation fandom doesn't have it's unrepresentative, biased, probably-offensive-to-someone blogs. The classics fans/animation purists get Cartoon Brew, the moe lovers/moe haters get Sankaku Complex and even the relatively reasoned bunch here at Toon Zone gets a blog where I get to trash a whole bunch of anime for the same exploitative moves other fans adore (and then I get to laud similar base moves as genius statements.) Blogs aren't news, they are opinion sections, and if you don't feel the opinion, read something else or use the comments section.

:anime:
 
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