Going to try and resurrect some old post themes this week, to see if I can get some “appointment internet” going while I work on some long form posts in the background.
This particular Animator AMV for Toshiyuki Inoue’s work got a strong reaction from the audience when I played it during my MADstravaganza panel at Amecon this past weekend. The panel in its original form started life as an animator focussed panel 3 years ago, but gradually broadened to include everything I like that doesn’t get covered in other panels at UK conventions. Which at this point also includes anime and manga…
This year I decided to drop a couple of Animator AMVs back into the panel to gauge the response. I’ve already built a decent sized audience now, so I can see what else I can throw at them. I was pleased with the responses they got, and this one in particular got a strong response. I was left with the impression that it’s not so much that people don’t have animators whose work they like, it’s more that they don’t know they do.
One of the big inspirations for that first panel in 2007, was Tony Robinson’s Stay Tooned show for the BBC. It took what was a standard cartoon compilation programme that the BBC would run after Grandstand, and added a layer of education to it. In half an hour you could learn who made the different cartoons and what the different elements were that they brought to it. Without that, I don’t think Tex Avery and Bob Clampett would have clicked with me in the same way, and I think that little bit of information needed to join the dots is what the majority of anime viewers lack.