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1st Tier Director
Big House Blues Stimpy's Big Day/The Big Shot Robin Hoek Nurse Stimpy *Space Madness* Boy Who Cried Rat Firedogs Littlest Giant Marooned Untamed World *Stimpy's Invention* Powdered Toastman *Man's Best Friend* Ren's Toothache *Sven Hoek*
post-Spumco Episodes & Adult Party
Son of Stimpy Fake Dad Stimpy's Fan Club A Visit to Anthony Royal Canadian Kilted Yaksmen Onward and Upward Ren Seeks Help! Fire Dogs II
When I think about it, it never fails to amaze me the various reactions John Kricfalusi’s (and his studio Spumco’s) cartoons have stirred in people. Casual animation fans or TV watchers, the kind who just watch the cartoons, laugh at them, then forget about them the next day usually only notice the grossness of Ren and Stimpy cartoons. I understand not everyone has the time or the willpower or the base desire to be a cartoon fanatic, and I’m simply happy someone would watch the cartoon rather than not watch it. However, I do get flustered when someone likes it simply because it is “twisted” because I’m afraid John K’s cartoons will get lumped in with Southpark and all those webtoons with stiff animation, shock-horror subject matter, and no substance.
There is more to John K. than that. His cartoons single-handedly revived a dead artform. Cartoons were still dragging through their dark ages with the politically-correct made-for-TV animation cooked up to sell action figures (Transformers, He-Man) or greeting cards (Care Bears) or were somehow successful because of a one-note shtick that captured the public’s imagination even though as a craft the actual cartoons were lackluster (If you enjoy Scooby-Doo, good for you. Personally, I find that show tedious. Maybe I'm too finicky...). Even now the dark ages of animation are continuing adjacent to the renaissance (we still have the Fox Kids swill, moldy imported anime and heck, action-figure cartoons) but there’s been a noticeable improvement in TV animation (most notably Cartoon Network) as well as a better environment for cartoonists everywhere (the animation business can still be depressing, but it’s better than in the 1980’s), and this is almost entirely thanks to John K. If you think all he did was bring gross out humor to cartoons, think again.
But was it really a renaissance? Christian Gore once wrote that Ren and Stimpy stood out not because it was so good, but because every contemporary cartoon was so bad. Indeed, John K. is the first cartoon director to wear the influence of a director from a previous epoch on his sleeve (which goes to show you how young the medium is) – Bob Clampett’s influence on him is legendary. You can trace Carbunkle’s animation on the best episodes back to Bob McKimson and Rod Scribner’s animation on cartoons like Coal Black and Tortoise Wins By A Hare, and the surreal, abstract backgrounds like that grey gradient in The Great Piggybank Robbery obviously had an impact on John. However, John took Clampett’s flair for character development and pushed it one step further – I’m not saying he improved on what Clampett did, rather he created his own thing after figuring out how Clampett did his.
The character development in John’s cartoons are deeper – Clampett’s stories were always an excuse for his gags and comedy routines; John’s cartoons usually had a serious message, and for all the gross-out humor and slapstick, the main selling point of Ren and Stimpy was the interaction between the characters, the situations they got into and how their personalities developed, all wrapped in beautiful colors, expressive animation, dynamic facial contortions, and storylines that would work even without the extra trimmings. Even the second season cartoons that Games finished, like Stimpy’s Fan Club and Visit to Anthony have enjoyable storylines so that the lack of striking poses or animation is no big loss, and as for the cartoons he did finish, heck, Man’s Best Friend’s plot and characters are as captivating as Crime & Punishment. John upheld the same features that made the classic animation classic and at the same time used them to stir emotions other than laughter.
He didn’t do it alone of course – If John K. is the modern Bob Clampett, Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, and Walt Disney rolled in one, the modern versions of Rod Scribner, Ub Iwerks, Robert McKimson, Michael Maltese and such infamous animation side-men are all Spumco Ren and Stimpy artists who have also gained infamy among animation fans – Bill Wray, Bob Camp, Chris Reccardi, Jim Smith, Vincent Waller, Bob Jaques, Elinor Blake, Lynne Naylor, Jordan Reichek, Eddie Fitzgerald, Chris Savino, and many others you see working on some of the most interesting animation today owe their careers taking off to John (Doubtful? Check out some of the stuff they were doing before “Ren and Stimpy”). After wasting away on Nelvana and Filmation sewage they got together, enacted some measure of revenge on the oppressive industry, and created their own self-contained version of the Golden Age of Animation. They didn’t bring the Shit Age of Animation to a halt as much as I’d like, but they did create a fork in the road for it to follow while decent cartoons with real artistic vision got to go the other path.
As a result of being surrounded by this talent we got a variety of art styles on the show – A Chuck Jones cartoon would always look more or less like Chuck Jones drew it but John K. let his more prominent artists put their personal stamp on the storyboard drawings. There is not a Ren and Stimpy cartoon from the Spumco era that looks like another, but they all look good, and I dare say while John had the last word in everything, he didn’t entirely dominate what you saw on TV.
John is an amazing artist on his own, although I haven’t always enjoyed looking at his artwork separate from the cartoons. Which is very strange, but some of the artists working for John had idiosyncratic styles of their own, and being weaned on these styles while watching Ren and Stimpy, John’s artwork didn’t grab me when I got to see some of it. I even found his original drawings of Ren and Stimpy underwhelming. It wasn’t until I read his analysis of Ed Benedict and compared their art styles that I started laughing at his artwork, especially at a throwaway gag doodle of Ranger Smith (with an erection) scrutinizing Yogi Bear and at his designs for He-Hog the Atomic Pig (Mr. Meat, anyone?). Not only do his drawings preserve the asymmetry of Ed’s designs (even though the Benedict designs I looked at were more fun to trace with my eye), the characters are so animation-ready they look like they’re gonna run off the page and grab your spine.
One last thing: It seems moot to discuss Spumco’s split from Nickelodeon now that they’re working on Ren and Stimpy again, but it’s an important piece of animation history and should be. There are a zillion other places where you can learn this fact, but if by some miracle this is the first you’ve heard of it, Spumco was fired from producing Ren and Stimpy over a year after the show premiered, meaning artists were either out of work, still with Spumco working on their new projects, or signing up with Nickelodeon to work on the Ren and Stimpy cartoons they themselves would be making at a new in-house studio called Games Animations.
There’s never been a clear, solid answer as to why Nickelodeon let everyone go. Some say it was Man’s Best Friend, others say John went behind Nickelodeon’s back too often, and still others say his cartoons were too intelligent, inciting resentment from executives who, naturally, just want their cartoons to make money. It was more than likely a combination of all this. By some accounts John did go off and do the opposite of what he was told, but that’s why the cartoons were so good, so it’s hard to fault him for it if you’re an animation fan. Still by other accounts he did compromise a lot and cut out a lot of stuff from his cartoons (including Stimpy’s Invention, proof that a piece of art can be the best even when the artist can’t put in everything he wants).
The thing is, I know every animation fan worth his salt is suppose to despise executives, but I can't blindly villify the Nick suits just becuase I'm a fan. I’ve read quite a few stories that pissed me off but good (Mary Harrington and Will McRob trying to convince Vanessa Coffey to kill Stimpy’s Invention; Nickelodeon finishing Sven Hoek without John after he offered to do it for free), but as Bob Camp once said – “We have our idea of what we want and they have their idea of what they want”. Vanessa Coffey is not completely innocent, but don’t direct all the hatred at her – She was sad about animators wasting away on crap like everyone else and wanted Spumco to do cartoons that would push the boundaries. Of course the business aspect eventually overtook her soul and she spouted this nonsense about Ren and Stimpy being “A kids show”, but she did give John and the rest an outlet for getting their feet off the ground and should be given credit for that. I may be seeing things from the enemy’s point-of-view but I don’t like blind fanaticism, no matter how justified it may be.
I was looking forward to future Spumco projects like Weekend Pussy Hunt when I learned they would be doing Ren and Stimpy again. At first I was apathetic since a Spumco cartoon was a Spumco cartoon (and it sorta reeked of trying to recreate the old days), then I realized working on Ren and Stimpy might unleash creativity meant for those characters alone that would otherwise be inhibited. Everyone has been divided by the new episodes but I like ‘em. They’re more explicit and they lack moments like Stimpy feeding Ren at the beginning of Fire Dogs, where their friendship could be keenly felt, but they still produce a cumulative effect by keeping you glued to the screen and making you think about what you’re seeing whether you know it or not, and hopefully making you laugh. Still, the classics will always be classics.