Channel Frederator

The use of the Internet as a distribution channel for animation can be traced, perhaps, to the cable television series South Park. When the show premiered in 1997, the short, unaired pilot episodes (“The Spirit of Christmas / Jesus vs. Santa” and “The Spirit of Christmas / Jesus vs. Frosty”) were ripped and uploaded to websites all over the world, and were an immediate hit amongst the fast (for then) modem crowd. And though streaming and downloadable video at the time was of an eye-strainingly poor quality, South Park‘s reductive style — the Colorform-like figures, the high-contrast palette — lent itself to this format better than Ren & Stimpy or The Simpsons might.

While people were squinting at Kyle and Cartman on their monitors, veteran TV executive Fred Seibert was in the process of setting up Frederator Studios, a cartoon production studio. Seibert was responsible for the What A Cartoon! anthology series, which fostered Cartoon Network’s transition from a dumping ground for old Hanna-Barbera shows to a breeding ground for new programs like The Powerpuff Girls and Dexter’s Laboratory; Frederator would go on to develop a similar “incubator” series for Nickelodeon, Oh Yeah! Cartoons!.

Fast-forward a few years, and Frederator Studios is still showcasing new and independent animators, but now, like those early leaked South Park episodes, it’s all accessible online. A weekly downloadable anthology of short cartoons, Channel Frederator jumps onto the video podcasting bandwagon, takes hold of the reins, and steers it towards something more than the talking heads and awkward skits that comprise most of the current podcasting landscape. And unlike those early, pixilated downloads, the higher-quality video available today affords a broader range of styles; whether or not you can actually make out any details now depends on whether you’re watching the show on a portable device or in full-screen mode on your computer.

The cartoons on Channel Frederator run the gamut from pencil-drawn sketches to graphic Flash demos, from stop-motion throwbacks to slick 3D renders. The only thing these cartoons have in common is their brevity; none of them are more than five minutes long, which means that they can pack three or four of them into each weekly installment. A lack of length, however, does not imply a lack of content; Steven Johnson writes in Everything Bad is Good For You that “popular culture has been growing increasingly complex over the past few decades,” and the cartoons here are a prime test of the audience’s ability to process a lot of information in a short amount of time.

Dave Quion’s “The Bastard” charts the rise and fall of a superhero melodrama over the course of three extremely brief episodes; as the planet-blasting villain is repeatedly caught and released by the square-jawed hero, the imagined audience capriciously embraces and spurns the show’s formula. Similarly, Wild Brain’s “Mantelope” attempts to compress the entire history of a Bugs Bunny-Elmer Fudd style struggle into as short a time as possible, resulting in what amounts to a clip show for a series that never existed. And these are among the longer pieces.

Jessica Borutski’s “I Like Pandas” is a Flash-animated music video in which painfully cute baby bears (with lollipops!) romp and frolic in time to Plone’s “Bibi Plone”. “Go Spy Go”, by Eileen Brennan, is a groovy, stylish title sequence for a movie that hasn’t been made. One piece isn’t a single piece at all, but a collection of station IDs developed by Interspectacular for Comedy Central; as with all the best bumpers, they fly by almost too quickly for the brain to process, but manage to stamp the network’s logo onto your retina. These intentionally underdeveloped, short-short ‘toons are as well suited for inclusion in a podcast as they are poorly prepared for inclusion in any other collection (a film festival or a TV series, for instance). Popping up in iTunes or an aggregator, they grab your attention firmly and let go of it rapidly, in tune with the grazing approach to media that a Web-based audience favors.

Not all the cartoons on Channel Frederator are throwaway experiences, however. Taplabs’ “Welcome to BeCountry” reimagines the debate over processed, GMO foods as a hyperkinetic battle between eco-ninjas and corporate troopers. Vera Brosgol’s “Sno-Bo” captures the magic of old Peanuts comics, making childhood cruelty and nihilism seem somehow sweet. And in the ecstatic “War Photographer”, Joel Trussel somehow manages to remix hard-rock Vikings, marching bands, and giant robots into a Fauvist mélange that’s as satisfying as it is indescribable.

No one bats a thousand, though, and Channel Frederator does have its share of misses amidst all the hits. “In the Rough”, like much of Blur Studios’ portfolio, is a technical wonder in search of a decent script. Imaginism’s “Cosbee” is a non-sequitur of a confrontation between a pudding-pop-wielding Bill Cosby and Sauron from Lord of the Rings; it’s silly, but not in a particularly compelling way. And while stop-motion animation is always a welcome sight, Max Winston’s “House of Wane” suffers from a lack of an ending.

A few less-than-perfect entries are hardly enough to derail Channel Frederator, however. Even more than the anthology series on Cartoon Network or Nickelodeon, it offers up-and-coming animators a chance to get their work — as weird as it may be — out to a wider audience. For that audience, it offers easy access to styles and ideas that they otherwise would have a hard time discovering; it even asks — begs, really — for viewer feedback, in an attempt to bring the producer and consumer closer together. Who knows? Maybe there’s some potential in this whole Internet thing after all.