BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Scooby-Doo breaks cartoon record
Would you credit it? Scooby Doo is now officially the most prolific tv animation ever…
I have to admit to being rather fond of the Scooby Doo toons I grew up with, although I’m not a big Hanna-Barbera fan on the whole. I loathe most of their output; Top Cat, Yogi Bear, The Flintstones, and wonder at times if I was perhaps an animation snob even as a child. The walk cycles in HB toons annoy me in the extreme, see for yourselves.. watch either Yogi, Officer Dibble, Fred Flinstone, Barney Rubble et al and notice that they all to a man/cat/bear, whatever, have the same gait.. blerrrggg.
Actually, if truth be told, the same can be said for Shaggy and Scooby but at least they were more entertaining than the above monstrosities. Don’t even get me started on the twenty minute toy adverts that Transformers were. Maybe I was just too old and jaded by the time that stuff like that came out, or just too cynical, but I could never get past the damned marketing element of Optimus Prime and co.
I was recently pointed at the excellent Anisaki.com after buying the appalling so-called ‘remastered’ Tom and Jerry dvds. I’ve been here before though and won’t bore anyone with the details, see this post for the full whinge and related linkage.
Tom and Jerry should be, I guess, an exception to the rule as far as tv animation of my youth goes, as they were originally destined for the cinema and so tended to have higher production values anyway. I just can’t help bemoaning the fate of tv animation when I see beautiful examples of ‘rubber hose’ animation like the Silly Symphonies or Merrie Melodies forgotten in favour of tripe like Pokémon or Yu!-Gi!-Oh! (how many exclamation marks do you need?).
What’s my problem with the two examples of Japanese tv animation I’ve picked up there? Watch them, watch the complete lack of anything that comes close to ‘animation’. Characters leap into the air and travel in one static movement across the screen with speed lines just in case you hadn’t realised you weren’t looking at a comic. In actual fact I’ve read comics that are more animated than these things. To be fair, I know they churn these things out at a ridiculous rate of knots, and it shows. Boy does it show. Want someone to cry? Just have a constant stream of something approximating tears going diagonally over a static face with a big open mouth. Oh, and never let your audience see them from the waist down, it saves on the walk cycle.
Arf. Not that I’m bitter, natch. I’ll just point out that, what I consider to be, the greatest animation studio on the planet right now,Studio Ghibli is also Japanese. We treated ourselves to Pom Poko the other week, a fabulously rich and wonderfully scripted film, charming in both it’s execution and humour while concentrating on the favourite Ghibli/Miyazaki theme of eco-awareness.
Here endeth the …err… rant.
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