Cartoon Central

It was a really good christmas, I got to see Tom’s nephews and it’s cool being around them. I’m planning on converting the older ones to watching Aqua Teen Hunger Force if I can. :D Otherwise, I’ve just gotten over being sick before my birthday–through my birthday and got over it right at Christmas. So it was very uneventful December.

Have you seen the Indian edition of The Simpsons? It’s called the Singhsons. Now, that’s how the Simpsons family would look like if they were from India!

Remember that scene in “A Charlie Brown Christmas” where he’s talking to Lucy (the psychiatrist) and she finally nails his phobia? He screams, “THAT’S IT!” knowing that she just nailed exactly what he’s feeling? This Dilbert does it for me when it comes to politics.

I just wanted to wish everyone a Merry X-Mas. Enjoy some time with your family, or just run a search at YouTube for “Beavis and Butthead Christmas” like I did.

The first problem is Fox seems too conscious of the competition. Pixar started a tradition of showing a short before its feature films. This hearkens back to the olden days when Disney would show Loony Toons before its feature films. Pixar’s shorts have won awards. I can just imagine the conversation in a Fox board room somewhere: “They’re doing it, so we have to do it too.” Their short focuses on that little animal that was chasing his acorn throughout the first movie. He’s still chasing it. Problem #1 with the short (does that make this Problem 1(a)? Too much law school!) is that the animation isn’t impressive. Pixar always makes a point of making its shorts look cool. Fox’s short looks like they just used the storyboard sketches.

ISFAT was given the opportunity of talking to Dony Permedi, the animator and mind behind “Kiwi!”. Dony was interviewed by evil from ISFAT.com (real name Jordan), who also wrote this shiny article. In the interview, Dony answers some questions you might be left with after watching “Kiwi!”, discussing many of the creative decisions involved - namely the ‘thud’ at the end of the short film.

It seems like my liberal teachers just can’t avoid those political cartoons. Last year I blogged about one of my teachers crossing the line with a cartoon about abortion, and no answer to the other side of the issue. Interestingly enough, some cartoon wars have been raging lately. Let me set the scene…

That’s right, it’s Saturday night, the lovely and talented Aubree Lynn is out and about on official River Theater business, and a man’s fancy turns to YouTube. My current time-wasting video obsession is with funny commercials. Two favorites from the evening…

The new Pixar movie is about a RAT!! Check out the trailer - he's adorable! HOORAY FOR NOT DEMONIZING RATTIES!!

Check out some of the Asia award winning commercial. We really have to appreciate these creavtive and hardworking people for producing such nice and funny commercials. Engglish subtitle for all the commercials in case you do not understand the language.

So I figured what better way to voice my concerns over what I saw happening in the United States, than to dig up some zombies of my own to express it. As a writer, I’ve always preferred to rely on humor to make a point, which is why “American Soil” is almost as much a satire about zombies as it is about politics. So, in that regard, I would say that horror-comedies like “Shaun of the Dead”, “Army of Darkness” and “Return of the Living Dead” along with propaganda cartoons and comic books from the Second World War, were the inspiration for the kind of narrative that I wanted to write.

Angie left some stuff out about the weekend that I thought I would go over. We went over to her parent's house for Thanksgiving and had some real good food. We also took Cars over and watched it together. Any fan of Pixar and/or cars in general needs to pick this movie up. While we were at the house, her dad put on the new rims we got and painted her calipers black.

Scott Adams is a professed atheist, but you may know him as the daily writer for the hilarious Dilbert comic strip. He also writes a daily blog, which I frequently read. One day he listed and ranked several reasons that Christians give for belief in God. Since they are coming from an atheist, this is interesting reading. My comments are bracketing and in bold.

If you’re a fan of The Simpsons (as I am), you have to check this out. It’s a map of Springfield complete with Evergreen Terrace. It’s best viewed on flickr, so you can see all the notes. You can view a much larger version on flickr as well.

Having said that, I find it amusing that the negative words that refer to selfishness are always a form of ethnic slur - being “niggardly” is being cheap or unwilling to share, if someone tries to financially screw you over, the words “jew” and “gyp” come into play. The recent controversy of the “n word” reminds me of that South Park episode where they say “shit” over 100 times, and it is revealed that the word itself is cursed, and that saying it too often will mean the destruction of society. For a while, I think comedians like Dave Chappelle had lampooned it so effectively that the word had been robbed of its power. Apparently not.

After a hiatus of nearly 50 years, Walt Disney Studios is getting back into the business of producing short cartoons, starting with a Goofy vehicle next year. The studio has released a few shorts in recent years — “Destino,” “Lorenzo” and “The Little Match Girl” — but those were more artistic exercise than commercial endeavor. The new cartoons, by contrast, are an effort by a new leadership team from Pixar Animation Studios, now a Disney unit, to put the Burbank company back at the forefront of animation with a form it once pioneered.

OK … a little something different today. Welcome to the first in my series of occasional interviews with TCP — Totally Cool People. First up … the man behind the popular comic strip Luann.