john k: wheat from chaff
Posted by dermot on April 25, 2009 at 2:46 pm
In my previous post, I cited some excellent posts by John Kricfalusi on the subject of writing in animation. The problem with JK’s posts is separating the wheat from the chaff. In the comments to that piece, I mentioned the issue of “signal to noise” on his blog.
Here’s an exampe. John makes the assertion that “everything went to Hell after the hippie revolution. Even bad taste.”
Ignore for the moment that Correlation does not imply Causation, or that an LSD fueled show such as John’s “Ren and Stimpy” wouldn’t have gotten off the ground in the “Golden Age”. One also has to wonder how long a temperament such as John’s would have lasted in the pre-hippie, highly disciplined, deadline oriented workplace of the WB/Tom & Jerry shorts.
Not very long, I’d hazard to guess.
John isn’t alone in suffering from the delusion that the era prior to 1960 was the high point of design taste, and that everything went to hell subsequently. I’ve seen this in other animation studios, and it’s a goddam tragedy. Look at the work of the designers/cartoonists of the 1920s if you want to see real talent. See Winsor McCay et al. Compared to their work, it’s been downhill all the way.
Why this fetish for the fifties? I suspect it’s childhood nostalgia. I can wallow in 1970s nostalgia, those being the years of my childhood. I don’t fool myself though - that was a horrible era by any standard. Sufferers of 50-itis wallow in the faux future of flying cars, cities on Mars, and the assorted pop culture of that age. They also manage to ignore the racism, bigotry, casual sexism and the McCarthy witch-hunts.
Cherry-picking. We’re all vulnerable.
No. Any understanding of the decay of the collapse in design standards will be incomplete unless you back further than “the hippies”…unless you’re turning into an old reactionary. The rot began with the mass production process of the Industrial Revolution.
For more information, read about William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement:
Willam Morris & Arts & Crafts google search.
Now, before I go off on a tirade that nobody will read, let me articulate why John’s post is so irritating. It’s all too typical of animators to be myopic - so focused on the trade that they forget about the bigger picture. Not to be snide, but too many cartoonists spend all their time watching and reading - cartoons. More time should be spent reading about history; architecture; politics; economics (the Khazzoom-Brookes is a hoot!); music (classical, folk, etc); archaeology; ad nauseum.
The animation world would produce far meatier fare if more animators broadened their horizons. That said, back to decline.
What followed the industrial revolution was a slow decline in standards of design and craftsmanship as manufacturing went from a hand-made craft to a machine made production line. The pre Industrial Revolution was similar to the Medieval Guilds, where apprentices learnt from Masters, on the job. Traditions were passed down hand to mouth - skills painfully acquired over many centuries. With the advent of Industrialisation, this would slowly fade, eventually to be replaced by Henry Ford’s mindless production lines, and later, even more mindless robotic production lines.
Even the modern educational system was tailored around the production line - the prime motive of which is to train children to sit still for eight hours and obey orders - thereby qualifying them as production line cogs and docile “consumers”.
The decline in standards in trades didn’t happen overnight or equally. Some held out longer than others, and some staged reactions - such as William Morris. In architecture, a final stand was made in the homes of the Arts and Crafts movement, exquisite homes that could be afforded by everyday people, not just the rich. Here are three typical Craftsman Houses (note the human scale; small windows to maximise cooling in summer and heat in winter; elegant proportions; attention to detail; the wide porch, allowing shade and seating to residents; and finally, harmony):
In contrast, here are some typical McMansions - many of which have been abandoned by their hapless and tasteless owners, due to the economic crisis. (Note the inhuman scale; enormous windows, which will make cooling in summer and heating in winter expensive or impossible; the huge garage doors - a sign that the buildings are built for machines, not people; shoddy construction - unlike the Craftsman homes, these won’t be around 100 years from now; the arbitrary placement of windows and doors; ugly colours; ugly materials with no tactile appeal; tatty asphalt roofs with a 20 year lifespan; instead of harmony there is meaningless, unlovable noise):
When did the rot in architecture set in? You can’t blame it on “the hippies”. The rot really set in after WW2, when the Modernist school of architecture was adopted as the de facto face of Western Architecture. An early example was the Seagram Building by Miles van der Rohe:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seagram_Building
See also Walter Gropius and Bauhaus:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Gropius
Ironically, the Bauhaus was a socialist movement. Strange, isn’t it, that a socialist school of architecture should come to be equated with the pillars of free market capitalism?
A more recent (1950s-1970s) school of architecture proudly called itself “brutalism”! These are architects with no respect for the human scale:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brutalist_architecture
So much for the degeneration of architecture into the current glass box banality.
I was fortunate to enter the animation industry not through a school, but through an entry level job in a feature animation studio in 1988 (Don Bluth’s animation studio in Dublin, Ireland). My training was, effectively, the same as that of a stonemason in a Guild building a 12th century cathedral - beginning on simple tasks, and learning from experts, week by week, until finally able to animate by myself. This is a more elegant way to learn a trade/craft. The trainee is also paid, as opposed to the student - who will ‘graduate’ with thousands of dollars of student loans - a burden that can last for decades.
The guild/apprentice system has all but died. It managed to hold out in some form into the 1990s, but I see precious little left of it today. It’s a lucky soul who can learn in a Guild-like environment. It seems destined to be replaced by expensive animation schools. Little wonder that we don’t produce animators or designers like those of the 40s and 50s when we no longer have the system that produced them. Mass production wins out again.
Read “The Animator’s Survival Kit” by Richard Williams (director of “Who Framed Roger Rabbit”). In it, he describes how he hired animation luminaries such as Art Babbitt and Milt Kahl in order to be trained by them! He had missed out on the training that he might have received were he in the US, but he managed to acquire it - at great expense.
There are a few notable modern products where high quality Industrial Design is applied - and the results speak for themselves. Look at Apple and Google for elegant, simple, functional design that is also visually appealing. They are in the minority though - oases in a sea of beige boxes, SUVs and denim pants. Nevertheless, they offer a glimpse of what the world might look like, were we to apply the standards and attention to detail of the pre-industrial age to our own.
Between the standards of the 19th century and the dreary buildings, fashions and standards of our age lies the Industrial Revolution, Two World Wars, at least one Great Depression (more likely two if you count 1870) and a Cold War which threatened global nuclear annihilation for ~40 years.
It’s more than plausible that the decline in quality (not just of cereal box design, but almost everything) has more to do with the 200 year long process following the Industrial Revolution than a bunch of harmless middle class hippies in the 1960s looking for some pot and a quick shag.
4 Responses to “john k: wheat from chaff”
Yeah, i’ve been wondering about the modern style of “functionalisms” being so damn popular. I just gotta say that there must’ve been a more rational way of thinking back in the days since nowadays people seem to have a funny way of underestimate the worth of design… This can be seen from the quality of TV shows, channel by channel there’s nothing but “gray mass” that the producers seem to feed to the people that are watching the shows. But back to the business. I’ve seen this stuff happen in many forms modern art for example, there’s nothing that sucks as much as this:
http://img2.travelblog.org/Photos/1232/9041/f/35690-Modern-art-is-bullshit–j-0.jpg
And this sort of stuff keeps happening at all areas: music, architecture, etc…
For what i believe is that the “fetish to be back at 50s”
is like sort of crawing to be back at the time when (tihs) wasn’t around… since i’m young fellow, i don’t know how it was back then but as the way i see it. There wasn’t atleast as much of this “converting us into bunch of robots stuff”.
And i do agree with your oppinion about the main trigger of this nice way of developement, if there weren’t so many big scale corporations a single artist/designer/whoever would have more chance to affect the final product through their artistic point of view. Also since i’ve been dreaming of career of an animator for sometime, i find it rather sad that there’s not a single place i could learn the find craft since my skills aren’t high enough plus there’s not a single school here at Finland, the only way i could learn to animate is through a master/journeyman-education from local animators… which are none.
That’s why i have decided to work on my own and try to increase my skills by drawing as much as i can and someday to find one of such animators. (That mostly because there’s not a slightest chance that i/my family could afford “a traditional school of animation” that would teach just a fraction of the stuff a skilled animator alone could.
Not everything’s in a constant state of decline. The next Land Before Time is sure to be the best one yet.
You had me with simple, elegant design until Apple, but that’s largely an opinionated response. There’s not much technical difference between MACs and PCs, but I find one of them needlessly difficult to repair because I’m used to one and not the other.
Sex Mahoney for President
Hi Dermot,
Are those homes in Portland? What lovely Craftsmen. Truly the most beautiful houses ever built for the common man.
Now, there’s one thing you did not point out…movies, whether animated or no, are a mechanical art. They are ‘canned’ mass entertainment. Before motion pictures, people went to vaudeville houses and legit theatres for entertainment, or made their own (and most of that would have been pretty lousy. Think of pre-twentieth century Karaoke.)
Live theatre was considered better by the critics of the time, but the stars of stage are known today only through photos and reviews. The magic of the movies let me run an 80-year-old Laurel and Hardy film tonight and laugh at the antics of wonderful clowns whom I’d have never been able to see without the preservative of film.
Animation did not ‘decline’ when Walt Disney started training his artists to produce feature films. Winsor McCay’s work was notable only among animators, sadly.
I agree that there is entirely too much nostalgia among animators for the rather decadent design period of the Fifties and Sixties, but that doesn’t mean that there were no good cartoons made then. Some of the UPA films maintain their classic status, and Chuck Jones’ best work dates from the Fifties, not the Forties.
I’ve noticed that a lot of animators tend to like the animation that was around during their childhood. This says more about the animators than the animation.
anyway, thanks for the gorgeous pictures of the Craftsmen. The McMansions look like junk and will be treated as such.
By the way, Dermot, the Walt Disney Studio of the 1930s was one of the two ‘medieval guilds’ that existed in the 20th century. Disney’s training program combined traditional art study with 20th century motion study (which involved motion picture reference, by the way). I wonder if anyone will ever write a book on that training program. Probably me, eh?
Today is also the 74th anniversary of the death of Elbert Hubbard, the Fra of the Roycrofters, on the LUSITANIA. Hubbard was William Morris’ chief disciple in the USA; he had an unlikely career path from soap salesman to successful businessman to founder of an arts colony that lasted for over 40 years (well past his own death). Hubbard combined American brash hucksterism with a genuine love of handmade objects–but his crew used machines to bind the hand-illuminated books they sold, and turn the gorgeous copperware that Roycroft was famous for.
Hubbard was the man who popularized that Craftsman and Arts and Crafts style in the USA, by the way. He also coined some brilliant phrases that are often attributed to others:
“Do not take life too seriously. You will never get out of it alive.”
“You can’t choose your relatives. Thank God you can choose your friends.”
“Genius may have its limitations, but stupidity is not thus handicapped.”
http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/Elbert_Hubbard/
You can read about him, and the Roycrofters, here,
http://www.roycrofter.com/
and if you are ever in Western New York State near Buffalo, do visit the Roycroft Inn. It still radiates the spirit of enthusiasm, just as Morris’ house in Chiswick did when I visited there. Good ghosts abound.
http://www.gayot.com/restaurants/roycroft-inn-east-aurora-ny-14052_66bu070506.html
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