Modern design cartoon and animation treasures

May 8, 2006 2:33 PM

Always Help a Bird (1965); Sleeping Beauty (1959); Rooty Toot Toot (1952); and even more modern design cartoon and animation treasures from author Amid Amidi's blog Cartoon Modern. Look for the book to be out in August.
posted by soiled cowboy (11 comments total)

Forbidden

You don't have permission to access /blogs/cartoonmodern/images/pintoffbook_ab.jpg on this server.
posted by maxreax at 2:38 PM on May 8, 2006

links are just about all broken for me.
posted by subaruwrx at 2:43 PM on May 8, 2006

Looks like the usual referrer restriction to prevent direct image linking. if you go to the blog (second to last) link, the images are all available from there.
posted by George_Spiggott at 2:47 PM on May 8, 2006

The only link that works is the one to the blog itself. Maybe you should have linked to the posts and not just the images.

The blog itself is very cool.
posted by briank at 2:47 PM on May 8, 2006

All the links worked for me using XP + FF.
posted by Cranberry at 3:31 PM on May 8, 2006

I'm using XP and FF and having no such luck. Go figure.
posted by DesbaratsDays at 3:50 PM on May 8, 2006

Links work fine in Safari.
Thanks! Great stuff!
posted by Thorzdad at 5:08 PM on May 8, 2006

Oops. Sorry about that. I'm using XP and FF and I have no problems with any of the links.
posted by soiled cowboy at 7:18 PM on May 8, 2006

When this style of commerical art was in its ascendent, many of us found its easy stylizations terribly oppressive. It seemed like a dead end. The cartoon efflorescence of the early 20th century, from Windsor McKay, to Walt Disney studios, was stripped of its nuanced line, the illusion of depth, the attempt at depicting naturalistic light and shadow effects, and reduced to a few, doodley, swoopy shapes with obnoxious character voices. Hatred of cartoon modern gave us a thirst for the old, a passion for complexity, which many of us found in the baroque, art nouveau, the 20s and 30s comic strips that inspired Robert Crumb -- heck Busby Berkely musicals, and the whole "nostalgia" trip of the late sixties and early seventies. Meanwhile, the Hanna Barbera took cartoon modern style and drove it into the ground with the most atrocious series animated cartoons ever foisted upon children. What am I trying to say? In short: whatever is good and worthwhile in the commercial art of the late 20th century, came about as a reaction against cartoon modern. A generalization, I know. But -- gawd -- how I hated that stuff.
posted by Faze at 7:40 PM on May 8, 2006

Is "Cartoon Modern" really the name by which it's known? I've been trying to discover the name for the style -- which was hardly limited to animation -- for some time. Personally I have a tremendous affection for it; Gerald McBoing-Boing remains one of my favorites, and I delighted in the video for Donald Fagen's New Frontier which recalled the style and its era beautifully. But I will say that once Chuck Jones took it to its natural conclusion in The Dot and the Line, the form didn't have anywhere else to go, and it's significant that after that date (1965) the style began to disappear.
posted by George_Spiggott at 10:07 PM on May 8, 2006

Oh -- Faze, I will agree with you that the style had ghastly side effect, including as you say virtually all of Hanna-Barbera and the xeroxed poverty of Filmation; but mediocrity is its own excuse; it's not the fault of the form itself. At the other extreme see Isadore "Friz" Freling's contributions to the Warner Bros shorts: particularly Three Little Bops. I'd rather watch something of his than any of the syrupy rubbish of Bob Clampett.
posted by George_Spiggott at 10:16 PM on May 8, 2006