In LA

I’m a little disappointed with the New Yorker animated cartoons.

It’s a good idea from a business perspective, twitchily animating short print cartoons and then sticking an ad on the end can’t be a terribly expensive process but could bring in decent revenue.

But after watching a couple of cartoons and not laughing or even smiling, I realized that for me, much of the fun of the New Yorker cartoons (and all other one-panel comics) is that I can scan my attention across them in whatever way and at whatever speed I want and the dialogues and images work together in an organic fashion. These animated versions are very directed, the camera pans across and zooms in on important details to bludgeon the viewer with bits of the drawing that only seem funny to me when I read the cartoon at my own speed in a random-access fashion.

You can see one of the New Yorker Animated Cartoons here.

I’m easily annoyed by musical choices, so I also take issue with the annoying “jazzy” upright bass plucking that opens each cartoon. It’s so smooth and “sophisticated” and makes me imagine an old psychoanalyst dude (albedo 0.60) sitting back in a chaise lounge with a meerschaum pipe watching “expletive-free comedy at the improv in front of a bare brick wall” on A&E. It’s not that it says all the wrong things –it’s probably perfect for their intended audience, it just happens to irritate me, and will continue to do so at least until I slip well out of the 18-34 age bracket. Take some risks with the animation and music, people!

They should get Mr. Odd Todd to try his hand at animating a few of these. Actually, they should have a different internet animator score and animate a different New Yorker cartoon each week, that would be interesting. Cutting the opening credits and opening music down to a glitchy single second would also be a worthwhile move. Credits should not be 20% the length of the total animation.

Speaking of The New Yorker. They have a cartoon caption contest that is pretty amusing (and I’ve entered a couple of times). Radosh.net in response created “The New Yorker Cartoon Anti-Caption Contest“, which asks visitors to come up with the worst possible caption (just not funny, or missing the point) for a given New Yorker cartoon. Pretty brilliant idea. Here’s the winner from the first, Oct 31, 2005 contest:

“There is a man pinned under this truck who requires immediate medical assistance. Someone please call for an ambulance. Please, before it’s too late.” —Pareene

Kudos to the New Yorker for not crushing the anti-caption contest like a little bug. Looks like there’ve been 91 contests so far without one cease-and-desist letter.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 25th, 2007 at 6:45 pm and is filed under Books, Video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.