VCU tells me my expected graduation date is May 2013.

I got some interesting feedback from my figure drawing professor. She told me "you know this stuff, and you're better than you think you are. It's all mental now. You just have to become more confident." That was in regards to my "scratchy" drawing tendencies specifically when drawing with a pencil. When I draw or sketch with a pen, it's much more deliberate - and I find when I'm doing "chicken scratches" - non-serious doodles in my sketchbook to pass time - I'm much more deliberate with those than I am with life drawing.

Why don't I ever get that sort of feedback from ComArts? They just look at my body of work and give me a letter grade.

I have been nostalgia tripping the past couple of days after stumbling across the intros to cartoon shows I used to watch when I was younger. Why can't they make good shows anymore?

Like this one?
Or this one?

But now we have useless shit like this.

TDWT is supposedly CN's "headline" animated show now. Never mind that CN has dedicated all of its primetime slots to their reality lineup dubbed "CN Real". Eww. And Nickelodeon apparently has stopped showing animated shows altogether, save for Spongebob Squarepants. Disney has done the same - both they and Nick have shipped all of their (now outsourced or canceled) cartoons to separate channels Toon Disney and TooNick, neither of which are available on standard basic cable. What a travesty.

Cartoons back when I was a kid were clever and endearing and inventive. They made me use my imagination. I remember myself and my best friends from down the street would pretend to be the X-Men - someone always got stuck with Jubilee (most useless superhero ever. I mean, what does she do? Make fireworks! Yeah, that's really handy when you're fighting a bunch of mutant thugs). But I digress...

There were stories to them. Stories you could follow. Stories that made you think. Stories where the viewer could connect to the characters. I think that's a big part of what made Avatar the Last Airbender so successful.

What do kids watch nowadays? Scripted junk. Child actors who get paid millions to act like "normal" kids, even though they are playing as themselves. It just doesn't work. Heck, even the "cookie cutter" cartoons from the 90s (Extreme Dinosaurs, Street Sharks, Mummies Alive, etc.) had some edge to them. The cartoons I see nowadays are bland, boring, and just not very good. The only one I can watch without having to hold back the urge to vomit or falling asleep is Adventure Time.

Again: fun, interesting story. Non-cookie-cutter characters. Whimsical and inventive. It has all the makings of a good cartoon.

The formula hasn't changed at all from the 1930s and 1940s. That's why if you show a Looney Tunes cartoon to a first-grader, he'll sit there and watch it. Moreover, he'll sit there and enjoy it.

"But Looney Tunes is dumbed down slapstick violence and nothing more!" Well then, what about Rocky and Bullwinkle? Fun, interesting story. Non-cookie-cutter characters. Whimsical and inventive. I admit, half the time I didn't know what was going on in the main storyline when I was growing up (stock market manipulation? counterfeit bond notes?) but it sure as heck kept my attention and made me want to watch more.

Yeah, I feel like an old man now. I can't even watch CN except for when they have Adventure Time marathons. And I can't even remember the last time I watched Disney or Nick. That's how long it has been since they had decent content.

It's sad. The decline of animation isn't inevitable, it's a choice propogated by the big corporations who can't understand what makes a good story. All they see is money and ratings numbers. Of course, kids don't come up with those ratings numbers - so naturally it's kind of hard for Nielsen and whoever else is in charge of that stuff to come up with any sort of accurate assessment of what kids actually like to watch. If you put crappy programming on, kids will watch it because it's more interesting than, say, Dateline NBC. But that doesn't make those programs good programs.

Yeah, that's enough of that.
Stay classy, folks.
-DC