Toonin’ In to the Web

John Kricfalusi doesn’t seem to be the type of guy meant to work for a big entertainment conglomerate. He’s often said--bragged, even--that he’s been fired from nearly every major animation studio in town.

The enfant terrible of animation, he was even forced off “Ren & Stimpy,” the cult-hit program he created for Nickelodeon.

But now Kricfalusi has the perfect outlet: the World Wide Web.

“I’ve had the idea for years to do animation on the Web,” Kricfalusi said. “Free distribution. Freedom of speech. No middleman. Direct contact with the audience. Don’t need anyone in between to tell you what works and what doesn’t.”

These days Kricfalusi broadcasts his own show--”The Godd--n George Liquor Program!”--over the Internet. So far, a series of six animated shorts is available at www.spumco.com. The animator will screen those and perhaps other new work tonight at Anifest ’98 in Burbank. A discussion of Web animation will follow.

The Web cartoons are about George Liquor, a redneck who makes Hank Hill of “King of the Hill” look like a sensitive New Age guy. George is saddled with the responsibility of raising his nephew, Jimmy the Idiot Boy, keeping him safe from the antics of his cousins, Slab ‘N’ Ernie and his curvy girlfriend, Sody Pop.

The six shorts add up to only a few minutes of animation. Last Christmas, Kricfalusi’s company Spumco Inc. offered a pay-per-download holiday episode, and has plans for more of that variety.

The raunchy humor won’t be unfamiliar to fans of the early episodes of “Ren & Stimpy”--the unpredictable show about a neurotic, asthmatic Chihuahua and a dim-witted, obese cat. But on the Web, Kricfalusi’s imagination is unbounded. Dog droppings dance around the yard. Jimmy--who sleeps in a hen coop out back--seems to have a dysfunction that not even Viagra could cure.

All this insanity emerges from a nondescript Glendale office building where Spumco, founded in 1989, is tucked between legal and medical offices. Here, sketch pads rest on shelves above computers--and most of the staff seems to be working on the latter.

Kricfalusi and his Spumco compatriots got their start working on Web ‘toons when they were hired to create a series for the Microsoft Network. Though they completed several episodes of “Weekend Pussy Hunt,” starring Cigarettes the Cat, the network idea was scrapped and the cartoons--some of which contain hidden “hot buttons” that cause the characters to do even more hilarious things--were never put on the Web.

Kricfalusi, however, was introduced to Shockwave Flash, a program that allows--with some limitations--animation to be shown on the Internet.

“It’s kind of clunky, but it’s a new technology, and competitive technologies get better and better. It will be at least as good as broadcast television, and I think it will probably be much better,” Kricfalusi said. “In some areas, Flash is already better. The picture is much clearer than anything you can get on a television screen.”

But the problem is it’s hard to control the speed at which the cartoons are played. The timing is affected, first, by the complexity of pictures the program draws on the screen. The more complex, the slower the animation.

“When we draw something, we don’t think about how many pixels are we moving around. You just start to get a feel for it, that if you make something too complex it will go too slow,” he said.

The other problem is at the receiving end. Where film runs at a steady 24 frames per second, and video at a constant 30 frames per second, the rate of Flash animation depends on the speed of the computer processor running it.

“That puts me at a disadvantage as a director,” Kricfalusi said. “Directors work with timing a lot to make a gag funny, and you can’t control the timing very well. . . . We’ve had to learn tricks to make it approximate what we want it to do, but it’s not always accurate.”

At first, they received complaints from viewers with older computers that the cartoons ran too slowly. New generations of high-speed processors have meant that now they sometimes go too fast.

Also, on the Web, audiences have no compunction about saying exactly what they think. Spumco gets e-mail every day commenting on its George Liquor cartoons. “Generally they want you to be more risque,” Kricfalusi said. “They always complain that we don’t go far enough.”

At the heart of Kricfalusi’s creations is a love of cartoons and their limitless potential--a potential he says is being wasted by almost all of the animated shows on TV. The 1980s, he says, were a particularly abysmal time, when all cartoons were based on toys or sitcoms.

“Nothing was allowed to be magical. . . . It was mass stupidity,” he said. “They couldn’t stretch and squash--do the basic thing that animation does.”

Even now, in the midst of an animation boom, Kricfalusi said, animators’ creativity is stifled by network and studio executives who want the predictable. “All anyone does today is imitate Chuck Jones, Tex Avery and Walt Disney,” he said.

The animated shows geared for adults are primitively drawn, he added. The thinking seems to be, “If they’re going to have dirty words in them, they better have crude drawings to go with the crude dialogue.”

What will it take to change these dominant attitudes?

“A bomb.”

He hesitated a moment before regaining a touch of optimism.

“No,” he said, “the Internet will do it. It’s going to change everything, not just animation.”

Once artists of all stripes don’t have to bend to the will of networks, studios or publishers, the audiences--not the executives--will be able to choose what is popular and lasting.

“You’ll have to be good. And they’ll find you. Word spreads. We’ve never had a medium where word could spread so fast as the Internet. Like that dancing baby--how did that happen? How did ‘South Park’ happen? Those things aren’t anything. They’re simple little concepts, but they’re more interesting than the stuff these huge media conglomerates can come up with.”

BE THERE

John Kricfalusi screens his Web cartoons at Anifest ‘98, on the first level of the Media City Shopping Center, 201 E. Magnolia Blvd., Burbank. Tonight, 7-8:30. Free; (818) 566-8556.