Month: July 2018

bogleech:

bogleech:

bogleech:

Let’s put into perspective how far we’ve come and why!

1930’s-60’s: first theatrical cartoons, an entire new medium and industry created from the ground up. They evolve from simple, plotless musical sequences to a plethora of comedy, adventure and educational shorts. Many in the business were adults who grew up with no equivalent in existence but comic strips – it’s hard to even fathom that now, isn’t it? There was almost total freedom, and cartoons were made for all ages, often controversially political.

1940’s-1970’s: television slowly kills theatrical cartoons, Hannah-Barbera and imitators develop cheap techniques for mass production, flooding the world with shows like Yogi Bear, The Flintstones, Yogi Bear as an alligator, Scooby Doo, Yogi Bear as an Octopus, Space Ghost and Yogi Bear as a Different Bear. Our nation was coming out of World War II and more xenophobic than ever; cartoons were kept wholesome and rooted in American, Christian, Nuclear Family ideals. Superheroes weren’t even allowed to throw punches. A lot of these shows are only enjoyed now as unintentionally-funny “camp,” unlike the theatrical cartoons before them.

1980’s: Filmation’s He-Man pioneered the first cartoons that were also action-figure tie ins, changing the industry forever. Cartoon/toy team-ups raced to capitalize on the new opportunity with massive successes like G.I.Joe, Transformers, Care Bears, My Little Pony, Ghostbusters and Turtles, which lasted into the early 90’s. These shows were still under heavy content restriction, and most people who worked on the admitted they were just paid to write “elaborate commercials” that didn’t need to be too intelligent.

Early 1990’s: a new generation of animators and writers rebel hard against the squeaky-clean content they grew up with; sarcasm, rudeness and “edge” becomes the real moneymaker. Spielberg studios and Nicktoons bring slapstick back to kid’s television, dramatic and “gritty” superhero cartoons multiply like rabbits, the Simpsons is the most successful prime time cartoon in decades, and MTV causes major controversy with Beavis and Butthead and other “adult” toons. There is still significant pressure from watchdog groups to avoid violent or “demonic” themes. Cartoons are still seen as almost solely for children.

Later 1990’s: Cartoon Network becomes the industry giant and begins producing new, original shows by the boatload. Dexter, Cow and Chicken, Johnny Bravo, The Powerpuff Girls, Courage…a few last even into the 2000’s. Radical ‘tude becomes a subject of pure mockery rather fast. South Park is the new big controversy in animation. The popularity of anime explodes, previously popular with only an obscure niche of geeks. I remember having never heard the word “anime” as recently as 1993 or 94.

2000’s: A mixed bag, the tail end of both Nicktoons and Cartoon Cartoons. Many ambitious efforts only last a season. Spongebob is the decade’s  Mickey Mouse. Adult Swim starts catering a new wave of (mostly short, cheap, and tasteless) cartoons directly to teens and sub-adult stoners, shattering many of the TV industry’s preconceptions and raking in money from an untapped demographic.

Anime becomes so much more economical to import that original children’s series start dropping like flies, and the Saturday Morning cartoon block at last ceases to be profitable enough to justify its existence.

A giant asshole eventually pulls the plug on still-fairly-new CN series like Flapjack and Chowder to experiment with live action, and between the internet and video games, cartoons are struggling to make a profit.

2010’s: Adventure Time debuts on Cartoon Network after its 2007 pilot became a viral internet sensation. It makes so much money, so quickly that Cartoon Network fires the guy who made them produce game shows, makes the unspeakable move to bank on more than one Nielsen demographic per show and kicks off a race between networks to pick up bold ideas from unknown, freshly graduated cartoonists who would have been thrown out of a pitch meeting not that long ago. [Figure 1: an illuminati demon presents a child with deer teeth]

We’re now four years into a sort of new animation renaissance, where independent artists have a bigger shot than ever before, networks want radically weird and different ideas to experiment with, fandoms make their voices heard, and the internet is giving people a platform even when big corporations don’t.

The people making cartoons right now are people who put up with about fifty years worth of more corporate-driven bullshit and God does it show.

Hey this post is on my dash again and is now three years old.

That’s not enough time to have progressed to a new decade or “era” of animation but a lot sure
has happened already in those three years; the success of things like
Adventure Time and Gravity Falls really did open the door for still more
ambitious, more story-driven content, with lots of more plot-focused cartoons either going strong or coming soon.

This heavy focus on story, character and worldbuilding also seems to coincide with a bigger burst of both female showrunners and female main characters than we’ve seen pretty much in the entire time I’ve been alive, and I’m not even seeing the level of whining about that from the usual crowd because I guess the shows just look that cool.

There is still an undeniable sameyness in artistic style that some people have pointed out. Is it really just Calarts fault? They’re still nicely animated, beautifully colored and interesting shows so far. I definitely wish we saw more experimentation with visuals and signature creator styles again, but I’m pretty excited to see how all this new focus on plot-driven fantasy adventure continues to pan out!

Meanwhile, the widely divisive Teen Titans Go just proved to all of Hollywood that 2-d animation is still a viable money-making theatrical medium, so, THAT’S interesting as hell.

I didn’t realize all the hype had quieted down for the last two series seen here. You couldn’t avoid it a few months ago!

Amphibia and The Owl House are both by crew from Gravity Falls and are set to premiere on Disney in 2019.

inferentialdistance:

mostlysignssomeportents:

I eagerly await our new AI masters’ world of ultraoptimized, uncannily organic, evolving foorplans. Joel Simon:

Evolving Floor Plans is an experimental research project
exploring speculative, optimized floor plan layouts. The rooms and
expected flow of people are given to a genetic algorithm which attempts
to optimize the layout to minimize walking time, the use of hallways,
etc. The creative goal is to approach floor plan design solely from the
perspective of optimization and without regard for convention,
constructability, etc. The research goal is to see how a combination of
explicit, implicit and emergent methods allow floor plans of high
complexity to evolve. The floorplan is ‘grown’ from its genetic encoding
using indirect methods such as graph contraction and emergent ones such
as growing hallways using an ant-colony inspired algorithm.

Adds Simon: “I have very mixed feelings about this project.”

https://boingboing.net/2018/07/30/what-happens-when-you-let-comp.html

Okay, now add the constraint “doesn’t make the construction company scream in horror” and run it again.

dollsahoy:

bogleech:

Many people know that vaccines were linked to autism by a fraud and con artist who just wanted to sell his own alternative vaccines.

What a lot of people DON’T know is that he had no reason to choose autism for this scam except that it had JUST started entering mainstream consciousness and was still barely understood by most people. He took advantage of ignorance and confusion already surrounding a hype train and it could have been anything but it happened to be Autism at that particular time.

That’s how fucking meaningless the connection is.

Wakefield didn’t just claim it caused autism–he also claimed it caused an inflammatory bowel disease.  That didn’t quite capture the public imagination the same way, though…