Article written by Katie Cropper.

On Wednesday April 22, ASIFA-East held a panel discussion about the current state of the New York Animation industry. Moderated by the lovely Linda Beck, the main contributors were Steven Conner, Howard Beckerman, David Levy, David Wachtenheim, and, via email, Linda Simensky. All of which are pretty heavy names in New York animation so going into this discussion I expected some deep and meaningful words of advice and perhaps some reassurance for the Big Apple. I wasn’t disappointed, though I can’t say that the main topics were surprising or new. Perhaps my own paranoia for my immediate job future has made this entire topic the forefront of too many of my own industry related conversations.

I just wanted to sum up some main points covered Wednesday that should be kept in mind here. All four main panelists made it clear that the New York animation scene has been geared towards mostly preschool/young children’s television and commercial work. Even as we dip into what could be considered a “depression”, larger productions in New York will still be working in this demographic. Beckerman made it a point to remind the audience that it is “not as bad as you think”. That in due time things will come back to New York or someone will pitch something and as the economy slowly comes back up from this ditch we will see a larger variety in the type of TV shows being produced in Gotham. Linda Simensky then adds via email that the animation industry is very cyclical and given enough time will come back to where it was say 15-20 months ago.

Going to the topic of pitching, Steven Conner and Dave Levy had a bit to touch on. Conner reminded the audience that as you are making a pitch for a new series or web project try to keep in mind the way in which the whole project will be executed. As you’re planning your strategy think to yourself “How can I keep this on budget, keep it here[new york], and how many of my friends would it take to do this?”. David Wachtenheim mentions also that there is no telling for sure what companies want or are looking for, they hear so many pitches with so many similarities that standing out in the crowd is a tiring effort. Levy then made a point that if you’re investing yourself into a project that it doesn’t hurt to do a little more to get your idea across. His example was just doing a quick walk cycle in Flash of a character he was interested in working with – the reaction he got was such overwhelming praise and positivity that it helped sell his concept or just get the job. Making yourself available to go to pitch meetings is important. Even if they say ‘thanks but not thanks’ at least you’re making a new connection and as some point someone will bite. In the very least they will keep you in mind for other projects down the line.

Howard Beckerman indulged the room with several tales of New York animated yore to make the point that animators in this city need to wear many hats. Even if you enjoy making films and want to make a living doing what you love, it occasionally doesn’t work out that way. Sometimes you have to make greeting cards (in Beckerman’s case). Beckerman also mentions that the internet is a sure thing in terms of where to look for the future of animation. I would like to add that there is a growing demand for web based work, viral advertisement, and design. The whole problem with the web is that there is no clear formula for making money creating content for the web. I can’t say the animation industry is alone on this one. The television and music industry have been searching high and low to figure this one out and when they do I’m sure we will all have some emptier pockets or perhaps better paying freelance web work.

This all can be summed up by keeping your ear to the ground and keeping an open mind in terms of where to look for the next job. Keep your skills fresh and even if  you aren’t currently at work you should still keep working. There is no telling where the next big break will come from for each individual artist. Creating personal films in your own home is the best part of the digital revolution so its best to just keep swimming till the next wave gives you a little ride. – Or you can just take the advice of Howard Beckerman and..

Photo courtesy of J.J. Sedelmaier

Photo courtesy of J.J. Sedelmaier

Today we bring you Part Two of Richard Gorey’s review of the It All Started Here exhibition, brought to you by Howard Beckerman and J. J. Sedelmaier.

It All Started Here: Part 2

Review by Richard Gorey.

It All Started Here took up two levels of gallery space. The first floor, dominated by a life-sized cutout of Gertie the Dinosaur, was dedicated to the storyboards and designs of the classic theatrical cartoons. Further back were examples of TV ads from the fifties: work that kept many New York studios in the black during that time, when theatrical shorts became largely extinct. Visitors got a chance to see art and the final spots from the famous “Bert and Harry” Piel’s Beer ads, a sampling of some of the UPA films and television spots from the same era, and the work of artists like Jules Feiffer, whose social satire Munro was represented by the complete rough storyboards, on a wall dedicated to these charming sketches. The gallery’s vault (a novel and distinctive element of the former bank’s aesthetic appeal) opened to a series of projected commercials and short films created on Madison Avenue. Co-curator Sedelmaier’s work, including the series of ribald cartoons created for Saturday Night Live, was featured on the second floor, though when these films were run the more controversial dialogue snippets were bleeped, sadly.

I sometimes wonder as a teacher of animation what people think of these days when they hear the word. “Animation” used to mean creating life (or the illusion of life) one drawing at a time with a pencil on paper. To my generation it most often meant having a personal investment in every frame. Such intimate and confessional works are showcased in the gallery, notably Michael Sporn’s Champagne, a sobering real-life account of a young girl coming to terms with her mother’s incarceration for murder. The curators managed a thorough job of including and championing works from every style and motivation: this was not merely a retrospective of television cartoons or well-known characters, though Mighty Mouse, Heckle and Jekyll, and Casper the Friendly Ghost were prominently on view.

Photo courtesy of J.J. Sedelmaier

Is there a “New York” personality in East-coast animation–one distinct and unique from the West Coast films? Writers like Leslie Cabarga (“The Fleischer Story”) and other film historians agree there is: something brash, irreverent, sometimes obnoxious, and decidedly confrontational that surfaces in many films animated by New Yorkers. Popeye certainly had rough edges in his personality and his animation, and the recent films created by Sedelmaier have a crude, puckish nature that is a delight to many audiences and occasionally off-putting to others.

It All Started Here serves as a reminder that for the first two decades of animation’s existence it was an industry which grew and evolved in the midst of this New York/East-coast sensibility. Early films were ribald, rude, funny, and even shocking. They still are: go to any New York festival and you’ll see stories about as far a field from the childlike wonders of California animation as you’re likely to get. There is something angry, raw, and challenging in this work, but the Westchester Arts show also boasted examples of the physical art taken to stunning extremes. The feature films and shorts produced at Blue Sky (Which until recently was located on Main Street, in White Plains) are sterling examples of “state of the art” in design, execution, writing and direction.

“The thing is, it seems people have forgotten everything,” Beckerman offers. “Not just where the studios were located and who worked there, but the films themselves, many of which have been lost to history. The computer is a great tool, and it’s taken over, but we should remember that the computer merely copied everything we used to do by hand.” In many ways, the computer has streamlined the process: in others it has pushed the limits of what is possible regarding rendering, detail, and surface modeling. But the inspiration that designs and moves the characters is still an internal, human province.

The show features a century’s worth of material but even the most historic pieces felt fresh–if not in physical style than in their humor and accessibility. I saw several patrons laughing out loud at a silent cartoon whose artwork was crude, but whose cavorting puppies retained their power to delight and amuse.

Photo courtesy of J.J. Sedelmaier

Design and flow of the show seems to have been carefully considered. Montages of art and written material featured numbered “key maps” which told in detail what each piece was and when it was created. The gallery space was filled with things to see, but didn’t feel crowded, claustrophobic, or haphazard. Three-dimensional models of characters from Blue Sky’s Robots and the Ice Age films were welcome additions, offering a more tactile sense of the process by which animals and vehicles are realized and rendered in modern feature films. A computer used to create very early 3-D animation looks frighteningly primitive until one realizes it was built (and one suspects abandoned) in the early nineties.

One interesting aspect of the gallery show was a letter written to Nickelodeon by an anonymous Mom, in which the woman berated the network for a logo she swears shows the main character wearing “two condoms” on his feet. “My son pointed it out to me,” the woman wrote, incensed, and a reader wonders how old the boy was, what he saw, what he thought he saw, and how he knew what a condom was…but never mind.

The letter was funny in itself, of course, but it did shine a spotlight on the often-mature nature of the work created by the New York artists and writers. Films like The Ambiguously Gay Duo were designed for adults, and their inclusion in the gallery show may have seemed intimidating to those bringing small children, but the show’s function was to celebrate the diversity, risk-taking, controversy, and personal investment in the New York work, where animators create angry, chancy, rude, and challenging films. Sedelmaier’s irreverent and taboo-shattering style may have dictated his affinity for the more brash and outrageous pieces represented, but the show, which he conceptualized and organized, pays homage to several different methods and demographics.

For those who care about animation as an art form and mode of personal expression, it’s important to recognize that what most people think of as “cartoons” are often a tiny fraction of the work currently being produced-on both coasts. New York has a large independent community, and with the advent of computer technology and affordable software, many artists who might not have had the resources or finances to make films are now able to make intimate statements, some of which are troubling and even confrontational. Celebrating this freedom, that commitment, and the often-unsung contributions of the New York artists is a wonderful idea, and Sedelmaier’s show was a welcome addition to the historic record of the industry on the East Coast.

“I’d like people to come away from this exhibit knowing that that what ‘animation’ is can be much bigger than the popular features audiences see and remember,” Howard Beckerman says. “This was a chance to showcase some outstanding work that hasn’t really been given its’ due.”

In this, he and Sedelmaier have succeeded: the Westchester Arts Gallery reported its biggest audience ever, one Saturday during the show’s run. Looks as if New York animation is once again a big draw.

Photo courtesy of J.J. Sedelmaier

It All Started Here: Part 1

Review by Richard Gorey.

Howard Beckerman, co-curator of the Westchester Arts Center’s animation exhibit, recently told me, “I’ve always said the two best-kept secrets of world War II were the development of the Atom Bomb and that Animation began–and was still being produced–in New York, not just California.” Last month, Beckerman and animation producer J.J. Sedelmaier helped to spread the word about one of these “best kept secrets” in their White Plains gallery show It All Started Here, a retrospective of New York animation over the last century. The show championed the creativity, individuality, and uniquely “East Coast” personality of the work featured, but It All Started Here also served as an instructional tour through the specifics of traditional, hand-drawn animation production. A diverse sampling of commercial and independent New York films were represented, but the Westchester Arts gallery featured everything from tools, cameras, light boxes, projectors, desks, paints and even the computers instrumental in designing, storyboarding and executing these classic works of art. Much of this material came from J.J Sedelmaier, who has been collecting and restoring animation related items for many years, and the gallery offered tangible proof of the incredible amount of labor and skill required to produce animated cartoons. That glorious finished product doesn’t just appear onscreen: the process is compartmentalized, laborious and often physically difficult. It’s an odd contradiction when one considers the easy fun and humor many cartoons are famous for. Visitors to the Arts Center were offered rare glimpses of East-coast films (some not seen in five decades) and found themselves standing next to the tools and equipment that made the shorts possible.

Some years ago, I was asked to introduce a screening of the Fleischer studios’ Mr. Bug Goes to Town. As a part of the evening’s agenda I showed a short made in 1940; a “backstage look” into the workings of the animation process which was a revelation to the audience-many of whom never had been exposed to the specifics of pre-computer-era cartoon production. The images of men and women hand-painting clear plastic cels, shooting the artwork against watercolor backgrounds on an bulky camera stand, even the creation of miniature 3-D models for the Popeye shorts were all surprises to the current generation of cartoon fans. I had a similar feeling of history and education when I toured the Arts Center’s exhibit, and was reminded that these films were created one frame at a time by artists and craftspeople that had a personal relationship with every inch of what eventually wound up onscreen.

The show, which ran until February 28th, featured art and concept work from the Betty Boop and Popeye shorts of the twenties and thirties as well as clips and production materials from more recent creations, such as Blue Sky’s Ice Age. In these days of slick computer-generated imagery, audiences sometimes forget most ideas start on paper–even though they may end up as pixels in a hard drive.

“The Westchester Arts exhibit was inspired by J.J.’s collection, and I got involved because of my research of New York Animation studios. There was a slide presentation I had done over twenty years ago,” Beckerman says. “I realized all this New York history was being lost, that the studios had disappeared, the buildings that housed them were being torn down. I spent a great deal of time walking around Manhattan taking pictures of all these places. Sedelmaier has over the years collected so many incredible artifacts from the early days. He has the original Bray paper punch, for instance, and a desk from the Fleischer studios, when they were at 1600 Broadway. He’s got the moviolas, peg bars, and all kinds of promotional materials, so pulling together the things we wanted to display was relatively easy.”

Beckerman says one of the differences between the New York work and the California animation is that East Coast work was focused more on short subjects, commercial and independent films, whereas the California animators usually dedicated themselves to episodic television and feature films. “Once Disney’s Mickey Mouse became successful, Hollywood beckoned,” Beckerman says, “and well, many guys left New York for LA. But people forget there were a lot of others who stayed behind…and they forget that for years labs and processing plants were still in New York, in Rochester and upstate. In so many ways, the business never left New York, but the features, which did get a lot of attention, were mostly from California.”

Notable exceptions include Ralph Bakshi’s startup production of the successful Fritz the Cat in New York, in 1972, and the 1977 feature Raggedy Ann and Andy, produced in Manhattan Studio space. Raggedy Ann was an elaborate and sumptuously animated widescreen example of Disney-quality draftsmanship, and remains a source of pride for the young New York animators (among them Michael Sporn, Dan Haskett, Tom Sito, and Eric Goldberg) who got their start working on it. That film and others were featured in the gallery, represented by animation drawings and posters.

Stay tuned tomorrow for Part 2.

From January 20 – February 28, The Westchester Arts Council will be featuring an exciting exhibition on New York’s 103 year relationship with the Animation Industry.  The NY Times wrote an excellent article on the exhibition and the accompanying programs throughout Westchester County, which include not only original artwork and animation clips from various projects produced in New York, but screenings, panel discussions, and workshops for both children and adults.  “It All Started Here” was curated by veteran animators J. J. Sedelmaier and Howard Beckerman.  The opening reception will be held on Saturday, January 17th.   Unfortunately, I cannot make the opening night (so very disappointed) but invite all of you to share your experiences with us in the comments section.  For more information regarding the upcoming show, please visit The Westchester Arts Council web site.

Welcome back and Happy New Year!!   This looks like a fun event coming up in White Plains, NY.

IT ALL STARTED HERE!
New York’s 103 year relationship with the Animation Industry.

Opening Reception: Saturday, Jan 17, 5-8pm
On View: January 20 – February 28

Curated by Howard Beckerman and J. J. Sedelmaier
Presented by ArtsWestchester in partnership with J. J. Sedelmaier Productions, Inc. and Blue Sky Studios