Hacker Cinema
The Ren & Stimpy Show
1991 · TV series · 11 min episodes · 5 seasons
Created by John Kricfalusi, Bob Camp
AnimationScience FictionFantasyComedyFamily
Ren and Stimpy are a mismatch made in animation heaven with nothing in common but a life-long friendship and an incredible knack for getting into trouble. Join them in their bizarre and gross world for some outlandish situations coupled with hilarious jokes.
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3 comments on Hacker News
Great write up for a problem I'm thinking about myself a lot (https://marcus-obst.de/wiki/Notetaking)
Thanks also for using the Yak Shaving - for one, I got curious what was first, the term or the Ren & Stimpy episode illustrating the term and second, I found a description of most of my modus operandi.
> Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but Raymond Scott never wrote music _for_ cartoons.
You're not wrong. See:
https://www.raymondscott.net/features/accidental-music-for-animated-mayhem/
I find his music to be clever, entertaining and well ahead of its time in many respects. His music was sometimes dismissed by jazz purists of the time as being "novelty" or "dada" jazz.
There was a documentary I saw a little while back which included a discussion of Scott's surprise when he started receiving royalty checks again the 1990's when Ren & Stimpy started to use a lot of his music as well.
* WARNING * "Raggedy Ann & Andy", IMHO, is NOT A GOOD MOVIE. It is a fascinating trainwreck of obsession. It is a weird damn thing you see when you are five, then halfway remember when you are twenty and wonder if you dreamed it.
The idea of "pencil mileage" works both ways; really thinking about that helped me be able to finally actually enjoy some Japanese stuff.
There is also a strong tradition of Western limited animation; it actually started as the artistic cutting edge with the work of UPA (Gerald McBoing Boing, Rooty Toot Toot). Even Disney played win that domain with stuff like Pigs Is Pigs or Toot Whistle Plunk & Boom.
But then in the 60s, TV came along, and Joe Hanna and William Barbera's sweet gig doing beautifully animated Tom & Jerry shorts was gone; they started doing super-simplified cartoons that were carried largely by the voice talent. This got worse in the 70s and 80s, with tons of terrible toy-based cartoons done on the smallest budget possible (He-Man! GI Joe!). "Limited animation" is a dirty word to an entire generation of American animators.
Or at least it was until John K's "Ren & Stimpy" hit the cable networks, and inspired a new generation of animators. Who're busy making a lot of the TV stuff of today.
(But honestly I think that deep in the heart of every Western animator, there is a grey-toned Fleischer character bopping up and down in time to their heartbeat. Their hallucinatory version of Snow White - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNG8GYrh1mg - is a good example.)
Crash and Spyro are great examples of what can be done when a 2D animator's mindset is applied to 3D games! It carries on nicely from all the gorgeous 2D work on games like Aladdin or Earthworm Jim. I would love to see people come back to that mindset in video games. Guilty Gear Xrd is the first ray of light in the clunkily-puppeted darkness in a long time.