Back to the Drawing Board : Animation: The creator of ‘Ren and Stimpy’ has other characters--two- and three-dimensional--up his sleeve. He’ll give a talk at Chapman University tonight.

Is the world ready for Jimmy the Idiot Boy? Jimmy, it seems, lives in a chicken coop behind the home of his uncle, who lets Jimmy out on occasion to learn how to “be a man.”

An unlikely sounding concept for a cartoon, perhaps, but bear in mind that Jimmy’s creator also took an irascible Chihuahua and a dim, bloated cat to cult status, ratings success and, eventually, full-blown pop phenomenon.

It’s been three years, however, since John Kricfalusi had an acrimonious parting of the ways with Nickelodeon, the cable network for which he created “Ren and Stimpy”--a cartoon that too briefly offered the promise of a new golden age in short-subject animation.

As a relatively unknown animator, Kricfalusi had to sign away the rights to get the twisted dog-and-cat team off the ground. So when he was fired--ostensibly for falling behind his production schedule--it was time to move on to new ventures.

Ergo, Jimmy--nephew of George Liquor, who was the star of some of the most notorious Kricfalusi-era “Ren and Stimpy” episodes, including one that was shelved by Nickelodeon for violence.

But don’t look for Jimmy and other new creations on TV screens yet. Kricfalusi and his staff at Hollywood-based Spumco Inc. have been concentrating on developing a line of toys, and now a comic book, with the new stable of characters.

Otherwise, Jimmy and friends (a Spumco press release mentions someone named He Hog the Atomic Pig, for one) remain confined to storyboards, as Kricfalusi shops his cartoon concepts to potential producers.

The “Ren and Stimpy” phenomenon took Kricfalusi to the top of the cartoon heap, but it doesn’t seem to have made him an automatic yes to the money types.

If anything, he allows, they may be a bit scared of him, thanks to his reputation for headstrong independence.

“The fame was a good thing for about five seconds,” said Kricfalusi, who gives a free talk tonight at Chapman University in Orange.

“Most stuff today is made by committee. Fourteen people have to say yes before an idea can go through. That’s why everything is so bland today--not just entertainment, everything. It’s a corporate, committee world. . . .

“The creative act today is to say ‘No’ to a creative person.”

Kricfalusi broke into studio animation in 1980, working on bland regurgitations of such classic cartoon characters as Mighty Mouse and Heckle & Jeckle.

“When I got into the business, it was horrible. Cartoonists had really been [dumped] on,” Kricfalusi said by phone from his Spumco office. “The trend since the ‘70s was to take classic characters and bastardize them. They made Yogi Bear responsible in the ‘70s. They put him in charge of a park and sent him around the world, taking care of the environment. He used to go around stealing picnic baskets!”

That trend continued into the ‘80s.

“I was part of that,” he said, explaining that that’s where the jobs were. “In 1985, I worked on the destruction of ‘The Jetsons.’ ”

The trend of remaking classics is not confined to cartoons, of course. “The people who take classic properties and redo them are missing the point,” Kricfalusi said. “I guess they’re making a ‘Honeymooners’ movie now? ‘The Honeymooners’ was the cast! . . . Hollywood’s biggest flaw is that they think that the idea itself is what’s valuable. It’s the people.”

Kricfalusi’s first big creative break came when he teamed with Ralph Bakshi on another new version of “Mighty Mouse”--but this one with a creative team modeled more on the old director-driven system of the Warner Bros. heyday.

“We were still bastardizing a classic character, but the difference was, at least we liked the character,” Kricfalusi said. The new cartoons were a critical success, and the show certainly stood out from the Saturday-morning crowd (“Most cartoons are written by people who should be writing seed catalogues,” Kricfalusi said), but ultimately it was a ratings flop.

In hindsight, Kricfalusi is critical of the effort.

“After the show was over, I scratched my head and tried to figure out what went wrong. The characters weren’t solidified. [They were] too abstract, too surreal, without a motivation guiding them.”

His subsequent creation, “Ren and Stimpy,” was frequently more surreal, but the action was guided by character and not just an excuse for funky effects. But finally working on his own cartoon creation for Nickelodeon was not easy, even in the beginning.

“We got nit-picked to death,” he said. “I had all sorts of trouble making Ren any kind of [a jerk]. They wanted him to be nice, and they didn’t want Stimpy to be stupid.”

But in the end, enough of his vision got through to make him proud of the project.

“Even though we had all that frustration, we still came out with something good.”

Kricfalusi will bring some things to screen for his audience tonight, including some never-aired “Ren and Stimpy” episodes as well as some of the classic Warner Bros. work of his biggest animation hero, Bob Clampett, who created Tweety Bird, helped create Bugs Bunny and directed Porky Pig and Daffy Duck.

“He’s really the guy more than anybody who created the Warner Bros. cartoon style. He created the wildest cartoons,” Kricfalusi said of Clampett, who abruptly left the studio at its creative height in 1946.

Acting and cartoons are two words not often used together, but Kricfalusi points with admiration to the “acting” of the characters in a Clampett short. Most cartoonists stick closely to a “model sheet”--drawings of a handful of stock expressions that animators are expected to follow.

Most cartoonists “religiously follow the model,” Kricfalusi said. “You never see characters with real expressions in Saturday-morning cartoons.”

Clampett, he said, was different.

“You’ll see more expressions in one scene in a Bob Clampett cartoon than you’ll see in five Disney features,” he said. “Disney cartoons have the worst acting in them.”

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Kricfalusi also looks to live action for inspiration, which is why he’s also bringing along his favorite “Three Stooges” short, “Dizzy Pilots,” to his talk tonight.

“I wanted to point out that we’re not just influenced by cartoons. Live actors, the good ones, are much more sophisticated than cartoons can ever be. . . . The more influences you have, the less inbred your work is going to be. We tend to look at things that are much better than we can do.”

Asked to whom he directs his work, Kricfalusi answered, “Humans and subhumans. I don’t care if it’s kids or adults. As long as you have emotions, there’ll be something to react to in our cartoons. The old cartoons weren’t made for kids. Bugs Bunny wasn’t made for kids. People didn’t think about who the audience would be--they were made for people.”

* John Kricfalusi will speak tonight in the Argyros Forum, Room 208, Chapman University, 333 N. Glassell St., Orange. 7 p.m. Free. (714) 997-6765.