The teeny-boppers who saw Miley Cyrus at Barclays Center on Saturday might not fully appreciate the weird animation playing on-screen behind her. The art comes from John Kricfalusi, the animation genius behind Nickelodeon’s “Ren & Stimpy,” which debuted in 1991 — before Miley was even born.
But for older fans, “Ren & Stimpy” represented the moment where TV animation split from toy-hawking Saturday morning cartoons (a k a “Transformers”) and lame adaptations (remember MC Hammer’s “Hammerman” cartoon?) into an imaginative world of surrealistic pop art. Kricfalusi is being honored with the Tex Avery Animation Award next week at the Dallas International Film Festival.
Here are six things you might not know about the man who brought intricately drawn boogers and the word “eediot!” to kids TV.
He doesn’t watch modern cartoons
While many people credit Kricfalusi’s groundbreaking “Ren & Stimpy” for ushering in a wave of weird and creative animation along the lines of “SpongeBob SquarePants,” “Adventure Time” and a bevy of those weird Adult Swim shows on Cartoon Network, he doesn’t keep up with contemporary animation. “I don’t watch it,” he says. “It seemed like in the early ’90s, there might be a real revolution. There’s a lot of imitation wacky shows out there. Even if they were funny, I can’t get through it.” The TV lineup today is full of too many imitators, Kricfalusi says, like “fake ‘Simpsons,’ fake ‘South Park’s, fake ‘Beavis and Butt-Head’s.”
He likes Ultimate Fighting
Kricfalusi is a fan of Ultimate Fighting Championship. It’s “the last pure form of entertainment,” he says. “It evolves, like animation used to evolve.”
UFC, he says, has been progressing in style and performance since it began its mixed martial arts competitions in 1993, much like how animation went from the simple drawings of Disney’s “Steamboat Willie” to the elaborate art of “Snow White” just nine years later. For him, the form has yet to become repetitive, like much of the rest of TV.
He prefers classic country to current pop
Sure, Kricfalusi has a favorite Miley song now — “Wrecking Ball,” because, he says, “music sounds better naked” — but he’s more into her dad Billy Ray Cyrus’ genre: country. “I love everything old, everything from the first half of the 20th century,” he says, citing classic crooners such as Marty Robbins, Hank Williams and Johnny Cash. “Miley really likes her dad’s heritage. She wanted to open her fans’ minds to new (and old) styles of art and music that they might not have been aware of. She talked a lot about Nashville and country music.”
He hated (like, really hated) working on Saturday morning cartoons
When he was starting out as an animator, Kricfalusi spent about nine years working on what he calls “mindless unimaginative Saturday morning cartoons that had no intention whatsoever of using the ‘magic’ of animation.”
Those included lame cartoon adaptations such as “Mork & Mindy” and the stiff art of “Super Friends.” “Everyone hated it. You couldn’t do anything,” he says. “The characters that you drew in the ’80s had no personality. It was a lot of fake live action, trying to make things look real, which always looks terrible in animation.” So, in the ’90s, “Ren & Stimpy” was born.
‘Ren and Stimpy’ started as mindless doodles
Kricfalusi does a lot of what he calls “phone doodles,” which he describes as “mindless doodles I do all the time — in boring executive meetings, at pizza parlors and delis and while on the phone — “hence the name ‘phone doodles.’ ”
Ren and Stimpy started this way, too.
“I come up with some of my weirder characters this way — when I’m not consciously trying to design something,” he says.
Since his deadline on the Miley project was so tight, he sent his animators a lot of his existing phone doodles of animals to use for the show.
His next project predates ‘Ren & Stimpy’
Though the cat-and-dog duo were often seen living on their own, the human George Liquor was their master in some episodes. The big, loud, proud-American character was based on Kricfalusi’s own Depression-era father and was originally intended to be a main character of the show. Two decades later, in 2012, Kricfalusi raised $136,000 on Kickstarter to make a pilot based on George Liquor and his little nephews, called “Cans Without Labels.” In the pilot, Liquor, like the animator’s own father, buys unlabeled cans at the store to save money, and forces his family to eat whatever’s inside (a face, in this instance). The animation is mostly done, and he’s working on finding a partner to help finish it.
The project, he says, wouldn’t be possible without his “wonderful fans” who stuck by him for all these years.