Excellent animation blog — Cartoon Brew

I can't believe I didn't know about Cartoon Brew until just now. It's a blog maintained by animation insiders Amid Amidi and Jerry Beck. Today's entry is a great interview with John Kricfalusi, who finished up six new episodes of Ren & Stimpy for Spike TV.

rs[John Kricfalusi]: Well I love extremes in different mediums. The extreme of a cartoon is surrealism, that cartoons can do anything. A character can explode, can fly into pieces and come back together, can have their heads blown off, squash into a pancake, turn into an erection, I love all that stuff. But that's not all I love. To me, if I make the character so real, so believable, and then do wild stuff with it, it puts you in a whole other world. It makes the weird stuff even more believable. Like in STIMPY'S PREGNANT the whole opening, after the puke stuff's over, turns into this realistic drama. Then when all the intensity is released and Ren accepts that he's going to have the kid, it's all happy and light-hearted. All the birds and squirrels show up, and then it goes right into gags. So it's about contrast.

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