The New ‘Toons: Keep ‘em Short : Today’s New Animators Have Returned to the Six-Minute Short

If your goal is to create the next great cartoon character, another Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck or Mickey Mouse--a character that just might live forever and generate millions in peripheral merchandising--what do you do?

“The first thing you do is search for talent to make the characters. Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny were both created by Tex Avery,” said Fred Seibert, president of the Hanna-Barbera animation studio. “We are looking for those people, people with a burning passion, artists that are dying to make cartoons--visually driven, funny, with-a-lot-of-physical-humor kind of cartoons.”

Teamed with cable television’s Cartoon Network, Hanna-Barbera so far has hired 14 animators, both old-timers and young whippersnappers, to develop what eventually will be at least 48 cartoons using all new characters.

But to really do it right, they decided they had to scrap the primary system of today’s cartoon making--which requires the rapid production of a series of episodes, often based on a comic book or toy, by a whole team of artists, writers and executives.

Instead, based on the advice of some of the great cartoonists of the past, they decided to revive the traditional cartoon short--the six- to seven-minute films, made one at a time, that once were shown in movie theaters before the main feature.

“When people talk about cartoons, they still refer back to Bugs or Tom and Jerry, not to the more recent series,” said Betty Cohen, president of the Cartoon Network, which, like Hanna-Barbera, is owned by Turner Broadcasting. “And the thing that differentiates them, that gives them their longevity, is that the artists were working in shorts with complete creative control. They could experiment, one cartoon at a time, with a great deal of risk and creativity and revision, because there wasn’t the demand to churn out 13 half-hours for the new (television) season.”

The results can be seen beginning at 5 p.m. Monday on the Cartoon Network, when it starts its series “World Premiere Toons,” which will roll out the 48 new shorts over the next two years. The shorts will premiere individually, once a week, beginning the following Sunday at 7 p.m., and then will go into regular rotation on the network. (The first cartoon on Monday also will be seen in a simulcast on TBS and TNT at 5 p.m.)

The cartoons that click with audiences and research groups will be followed by another short featuring the same character, with a hope that eventually it will become a full-blown series and then will find a lucrative life on lunch pails, pillowcases and maybe even theme parks.

“The huge difference, though, is that we’re really going after original characters that you haven’t seen before, not something from a comic book or the toy shelf,” Cohen said. “And the premium is not on selling the merchandise or whatever, but on the storytelling. What you get is funnier cartoons with better animation, richer characters, a greater attention to the sight gags, more chances.”

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Artists participating in the unusual “shorts” laboratory include old pros such as Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera (“Tom and Jerry,” “The Flintstones”), who will be producing their first solo efforts since the 1940s, and Ralph Bakshi of “Fritz the Cat” fame, who will have one of his projects featuring a jazz-blowing cockroach.

The program also will give first-time opportunities to a group of young artists such as 1993 Loyola Marymount graduate Van Partible, whose “Johnny Bravo” is a pompadoured rocker who spends his time chasing women, and Russian-born Genndy Tartakovsky, a former CalArts animator who created “Dexter’s Laboratory,” about a genius boy scientist and his pesky older sister.

“It’s an amazing perfect job because they let you do exactly what you want, and that really seems like a novelty in this industry,” said Craig McCracken, whose cartoon trio of kindergarten superheroes called the “Powerpuff Girls” save the city from a lunatic bent on transforming everyone into slabs of meat.

Just two years out of art school, McCracken, 23, resurrected a film he animated as a student, pitched it and got the job--although his original title, “The Whoopass Girls,” had to go.

“Cartoons basically became a commercial thing, to sell toys, and not a creative outlet,” McCracken said. “They got away from being funny. I worked as an art director on (the cartoon series) ‘Two Stupid Dogs’ and I had to do two shows a week. There was no time to think, ‘What is best here?’ I just had to get something down on paper and turned in. With the shorts, you can experiment, correct your mistakes, make it look good. Make it funny.”

Eddie Fitzgerald, who previously worked on Nickelodeon’s “Ren & Stimpy” and the Disney animated series “Shnookums and Meat,” agreed that most cartoons made today don’t go for the really big, over-the-top laughs. The problem, he said, is that most cartoons start with a script and simply bring in artists as hired guns, forcing them to illustrate material that isn’t tailored to their sensibilities.

Under the Hanna-Barbera/Cartoon Network “short” approach, he noted, “the artist can draw to his strength, do what he wants and knows is funny. Just right there, you are going to avoid the generic and come up with something personal, wilder and laugh-out-loud funnier.”

Fitzgerald, whose short stars a paranoid worm that is furious at the abuse he takes from humans stepping on him all the time, said that when he works he thinks about whether kids on a playground will be excited enough to act out the story for their friends. If not, then he reworks and redraws.

“We’re not looking for an animated sitcom that is dialogue-driven or artsy movie-festival animation, we’re looking for cartoons that are commercial and make people of all ages laugh,” Hanna-Barbera’s Seibert said.

“Pure filmmaking, visually driven. That’s what gives the great cartoons such international value,” he continued. “For you and me, we might love ‘I Love Lucy’ or ‘Mary Tyler Moore,’ but there isn’t the same affection for them in other parts of the world. Whereas Fred Flintstone is an international star. That visual basis for humor translates from culture to culture, and that’s why I think that cartoons are the most underrated form of comedy filmmaking.”