Critic’s Pick: TV Picks: ‘Pig Goat Banana Cricket’

“Pig Goat Banana Cricket” (Nickelodeon, Saturdays). Cartoons are by nature art-historical, every shape, squiggle and way of rendering an eye or nose or arm, every method of relating background to foreground, of framing a shot having its precedents and referents in succeeding ages of symbolic invention and abstraction. Each new cartoon has its influences, its allegiances -- School of Avery, of Fleischer, of Jones, of Hubley, of Kricfasuli, and on and on -- and most combine many; the best feel original even as they are patently familiar.

But some cartoons are more obviously engaged with the past than others. One such is Nickelodeon’s new “Pig Goat Banana Cricket,” named for the species (which also serve as the names) of its four roommate protagonists, and meant very much to take you into animation’s deep past, and to bring you back again. While it seems to be Flash-animated (or some-such), the look is hand-drawn -- squiggly and textured and not at all neat, with an air of formal exaggeration, period design and all-around sentience borrowed from “Betty Boop.” The hip kids will nod approvingly -- or disapprovingly, I don’t want to make up anybody’s mind for them -- but there is enough pure visual delight to draw in the less informed. Along with the Fleischers (for shapes) and Tex Avery (for action), and Nick’s own past-informed “SpongeBob Squarepants,” I thought I recognized passing hints of Dr. Seuss, National Lampoon illustrator Rick Meyerowitz and comic artists Basil Wolverton, Mark Marek and Jim Woodring, though that could just be me. (Series creators Dave Cooper and Johnny Ryan each has a history in comics and before “PGBC” collaborated on strips for Nickelodeon’s own branded magazine.)

The stories, which come two-to-an-episode, move fast, even for cartoons; here the relevant precursor seems to be “Seinfeld,” not only for the rough concordance that can be drawn between these characters -- Pig (Jerry), Goat (Elaine), Banana (George) and Cricket (Kramer) -- but for the way it combines four storylines in a small space, at a blinding pace. (It is, in this respect, a cartoon based on a show that is like a cartoon.) The amount of plot and information concentrated in these 11-minute stories gives the show an even more dreamlike, surrealist air than it would already have, what with half-canine shopping carts, a monster derriere, a comet that forms an apocalyptic attachment to whatever Earthlike planet these characters inhabit and a hamburger-headed Frankenstein’s-type monster, whose right hand is the head of Pluto, the Disney dog.

Robert Lloyd tweets by touch-typing @LATimesTVLloyd