There has been some controversy of late about the fact that MTV has been playing less and less music, and filling their schedule with original programming rather than the music videos that was the channel's original raison d'etre. Much of the programming is an attempt to modernize types of programming that have been staples throughout TV history: game shows, sports shows, news, dance shows, even the venerable comedy-variety show.
But there have never been animated shows quite like those which have appeared on MTV in the 1990s. Beginning with Liquid Television, an anthology show produced for MTV by Colossal Pictures in 1991, and continuing with the wildly successful Beavis and Butt-Head in 1993, MTV has encouraged the development of adult-oriented animation of a kind never before seen on American TV. And with the advent of MTV Oddities in early 1995 and the series premiere of Liquid Television staple Æon Flux in mid-1995, there is a new sophistication that is emerging, one which appeals to something a little bit higher than "huh huh huh, huh huh huh."
But the commitment to animation at MTV didn't start with Liquid Television. As longtime MTV executive and current Executive Producer of animation at MTV Abby Terkuhle pointed out, it was there from the start.
"From the first day we started as a network with the ten-second animated IDs, we have always invited animators to 'throw paint at our logo.' I believe that animation has actually played a significant role in the creation of our network's image and its popularity. " said Terkuhle.
"We've had animators like Sally Cruikshank, Henry Selick, [of A Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach fame] the Brothers Quay...a virtual 'who's who' of animation have made contributions over the years. When I came here, that was my original job...keeping the tradition of the animated IDs alive. I mean, I'm not an animator, but I've always been a fan of animation.
"We took it one step further when we commissioned some of the people who had impressed us with their IDs to do short films for us. For example, Henry Selick did a short film for us called Slow Bob. These films preceded Liquid Television, actually, and were scattered in amongst the music videos. "
Maxx-imum Rock & Roll...Of Big Purple Guys and Evil Magicians...
The first of the two animated shows to premiere in 1995 was MTV Oddities, beginning with its first miniseries, The Head. The Head was produced at MTV's own animation studio in New York City, which was originally set up to help produce Beavis and Butt-Head. The miniseries was an enjoyable but not spectacular foray into S-F, focusing on a young man of the MTV "target demographic" of 18 to 34 who suddenly finds that his cranium has become home for not only his brain, but an alien creature.
The next miniseries on MTV Oddities was another story altogether. It was The Maxx, a show based on the comic book phenomenon created by Sam Kieth (see companion article for a conversation with Kieth) and published by Image Comics. The book itself had spawned a devoted following, Maxxheads as they called themselves, in a play on the term "Deadheads" used to describe the loyal followers of the rock band The Grateful Dead. These fans reveled in the densely layered imagery; the hidden jokes and clues; discussion of very serious issues...issues like rape and family dysfunction; and musings on the nature of reality. Not your typical comic book fare.
In the animated mini-series, the comic book The Maxx was faithfully transformed into an affecting, powerful animated drama. A great deal of the credit of course goes to Kieth himself, as Rough Draft Studios CGI director Scott Vanzo eagerly points out.
"Sam Kieth worked very closely with us." said Vanzo. "He consulted on scripts,dialogue recording, music, character models, color mark-ups, and even provided us with some of his own artwork to use in the show. Sam seemed mostly intrigued with music, perhaps because he has worked with visuals for so long. Music was like fresh air for him. He was great to work with, and extremely talented, even when wielding just a marker and a white-out pen."
The Maxx was the first animated show that Rough Draft had done completely as a project of the studio. Until MTV brought them the show, they had specialized in work on other people's animated shows, from Ren & Stimpy to The Twisted Tales of Felix The Cat. Along the way, Rough Draft Studios and their overseas sister studio Rough Draft Korea has gained a reputation as a very competent, technically advanced studio which, rather than merely making characters move, actually enhances the finished product.
"The studio started pretty much in Gregg Vanzo's garage." said RDS producer Claudia Katz. "I first worked with Gregg when we were doing the Butterfinger commercials. After he did those, he and his wife Nikki opened up a studio in Korea, and after that became successful they started building up the company here. One of the reasons Gregg wanted to start a studio overseas was that he wanted to control the quality, and cultivate a talented group of people, which he's done. A lot of the beauty of The Maxx came directly from the work of our unit in Korea. They keep getting better and better and surprising us almost daily.
"We've done commercials in their entirety here, but this is the first big TV production we've done," continued Katz. "MTV came to Gregg with the idea... The Maxx was a property they were developing. Gregg got very interested because he had gotten turned onto The Maxx independently...he liked the comic, and its level of artistic expression. So he was really inspired to do the show."
One of the breakthrough elements in The Maxx was the marriage of 3D computer rendered background elements and objects with 2D drawn animation that had been drawn traditionally then scanned into computer workstations for ink, paint and special effects. This kind of mixed-media work had been done for years, from the Disney movies Tron in 1982 and The Great Mouse Detective in 1986, through to the current SatAM cartoon show Spiderman. And the use of dimensional backgrounds for drawn animation had been done as early as the 1930s by Fleischer Studios in their two-reel short subjects Poor Cinderella, Popeye vs. Sindbad, and Popeye vs. Ali Baba. But never had it been used so strikingly, in this reporter's opinion, than here.
Scott Vanzo explains: "We had done a project for Film Roman(The Critic, premiere episode) where we designed a 3D environment for a Beauty and the Beast parody. For that 30 second sequence, we designed the 3D environment first, choreographed the scenes, made hidden-line printouts of each frame of the 3D scenes and made the traditional animation match the environment. It was a bit painstaking and it involved a bit of faith that all the elements would match up correctly.
"For The Maxx, we worked much differently. With the advent of digital Ink and Paint at our studio, everything ended up in the computer, so we had a tremendous amount of flexibility in registration, reworking the scenes, etc. We created the character animation while simultaneously using the layout to produce the 3D environments. We used our digital Ink and Paint system to bring all those elements together. Within the system we were able to adjust each part of a scene... so if registration was a problem, we had many ways of working around it. Most of the scenes that involved 3D were composited in Toonz, (a piece of software from Digital Video in Italy which is distributed by SoftImage, a Canadian company recently bought out by Microsoft) but sometimes we brought 2D elements into the 3D software. It was a matter of figuring out which method would provide us with the best impact."
The show's animation style is often very minimalist, with much use of camera movements in place of animated movement. But this was not meant merely as a device to save money in production, but as a conscious stylistic choice.
"Gregg had envisioned that "The Maxx" series would not be too action oriented. I kidded with him, since it was obvious that this approach involves less animation. Gregg had it in his mind that the careful timing and composition of the scenes directly related to the dialog of unfolding truths present in "The Maxx". Making the series decidedly action-based would clearly distract from the underlying metaphors that Sam concatenates in his books." concluded Vanzo.
The Dawning of a new Æon
Æon Flux had its origins in Liquid Television, and quickly became one of the most popular elements of the show. It is understandable on a strictly superficial level why Æon Flux is so appealing: the title character is beautiful, dressed very skimpily, and is a strong woman of action. For post-pubescent guys, she's a fantasy woman come to animated life. For young women, she's a strong figure along the lines of Sigourney Weaver in Aliens or Anne Parillaud in the French action movie La Femme Nikita who can wield a needle gun or plant a bomb just as well as the muscle-flexing manly action heroes of movies and TV.
But there is far more substance to Æon Flux than surface impressions would imply. The original shorts were an ironic parody of action movies, and asked a rather important question...is the hero who shoots first and asks questions later really a hero, or a species of villain?
And like MTV Oddities: The Maxx which premiered before it, this first season of half-hour length Æon Flux episodes examines even bigger issues. The balance between truth and lies kept by those in political power, the ramifications of science tampering with nature, religious faith in conflict with doubt, and the consequences of violent deeds are all examined within these 22-minute long episodes.
When I spoke to Abby Terkuhle, he described Æon Flux as "American anime." Peter Chung, however, respectfully differs.
"First of all, I don't like the word anime. It's meaningless. It's an American bastardization of a Japanese bastardization of an English word. To call something anime or not anime is to play a game of semantics. I would rather not be bound by arbitrary categories. In America, the term refers to Japanese animation. It doesn't mean Japanese animation in Japan...it's just their way of abbreviating the word animation in their language. (In Katakana...Japanese characters that are used to transliterate foreign words... -- Webkeeper) If you mean by anime Japanese animation...there is a very wide scope of Japanese animation, and the problem with the term is that what gets associated with that term is really not the entire spectrum of what Japanese animation is. There's scores of titles which have never made it over here, that are equally if not more Japanese in approach. The stuff that we see here tends to be fantasy and science-fiction oriented, or action-adventure or sword and sorcery. It tends to be the stuff that's most palatable to Western audiences.
"The things I'm really a fan of are stuff like what I saw recently over there, a series on NHK (The Japanese equivalent of the BBC) called Dear Brother. It's an animated soap opera about a sorority in a girl's school. It's done in a very pretty, romanticized style...it was great. But I doubt that will ever be seen over here. I mean, to the extent that a lot of the animation was produced in Japan, Æon Flux can rightly be called Japanese animation. A lot of Japanese animation has been influential to my work, true. But I don't think that you can point to anything in particular and say directly 'yes, that's Japanese animation influence.' I'm more influenced by the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Antonioni and Stanley Kubrick....most of my cinematic influences actually come from live-action, really."
The show was done in several different countries: the US, Japan, Korea, China and Canada. Eight of the ten episodes were animated at Mook Ltd. in Japan, and two were animated at Gana Productions in Korea, a "boutique" animation house where Peter Chung personally supervised and even did some animation on the two episodes.
"All the post production on the show is being done right here in Los Angeles...we've set up an office here." said Catherine Winder, Producer of Æon Flux for Colossal Pictures.
"We get the film back from overseas, we edit, add the sound effects and music. All the while we work very closely with MTV Animation in New York, with Abby Terkuhle and John Andrews...It can be a real challenge at times, but we've got a great crew and we've managed to keep the shows together, up to our standards, and on schedule. MTV seems happy so far, at least..."
Mapping out the future
So where will MTV animation go as we head into 1996 and beyond? The strength of Æon Flux and The Maxx augurs well for the future. When Beavis and Butt-Head became a cultural phenomenon in 1993, an entire animation studio was opened at MTV's headquarters in the Viacom Tower in Manhattan, complete with Silicon Graphics computer animation workstations for digital ink and paint, and a small army of background, layout and storyboard artists. Terkuhle points with pride at the achievements of the studio, and mentioned projects which are in the works.
"We're doing great. We hope to be in production for a Beavis and Butt-Head animated movie in the not-too distant future....We're in pre-production for it right now and we hope to have it ready in time for Summer of 1996. We're very excited about that. Also being made under our roof is a new season of The Head, and we're looking at different creative ways to continue The Maxx, possibly partially here in New York as well as continuing to work with Rough Draft Studios. We have quite a few pilots being developed here too -- it's a little too soon for me to talk about them -- some of which are a new direction for us in that they are created and directed by women and look at their subject matter from a woman's perspective.... (Doing something along the lines of Liquid Television is) something we're talking about. We did an experiment called "Cartoon Sushi" during a recent MTV animation weekend, and we might continue to explore using that as a vehicle for animated shorts."
Pretty ambitious for a network which is often discounted as being a vapid realm of sex, violence and Rock n' Roll. It is well worth noting that MTV is one of the few places where independent animation has a home in the hundreds of cable and broadcast TV stations in America...not even PBS has been as supportive.
"Like everything we do, our animated programs are geared towards young adults. And I have always believed that animation is not just for Saturday Morning children's viewing. We've all grown up with that. But animation can do more than entertain children. It can address big issues...social, political, humor... anything you can conceive in your mind."
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Page last updated 1/15/1998
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