Interview by Wheeler Winston Dixon.
Film Criticism Vol. XVII, No. 1, Fall 1992
Click the image to enlarge. Text version included below.
Text Version:
Interview with John Kricfalusi
Wheeler Winston Dixon
When I asked John Kricfalusi (pronounced Krisfalusi), the director/animator/co-creator of the popular Nickelodeon cartoon series Ren and Stimpy, what his job was at Spumco, the animation company he founded to produce the show, he instantly replied: "I'm the ringleader."
While this is somewhat of an oversimplification, Kricfalusi's approach to his work is very definitely on his own terms, and he brooks very little dissent from his strongly held opinions. Throughout our conversation, Kricfalusi repeatedly praised his co-workers on the show and took pains to identify individual contributions by animators, in-betweeners, and the rest of his technical support staff. At the same time, however, he indulged in some sweeping generalities about his work and the animated cartoon in general. "Cartoon characters have no gender," he asserted, in response to my question as to Ren and Stimpy's respective sexes. I was about to mention Minnie Mouse, Olive Oyl, Betty Boop (all females), or Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig (all decidedly male), to say nothing of Ren's phantasmal heterosexual frenzy in Kricfalusi's cartoon Marooned, but thought better of it. I had the distinct feeling that if I disagreed with him, John would hang up.
Kricfalusi uses classical music in his cartoons because "it's cheap." His favorite movies are Night of the Hunter and The Maltese Falcon; his favorite comedians The Three Stooges. Yet he is not a fan of Tex Avery, the ultraviolent 40s animator who created Droopy, Screwy Squirrel, and the Blitz Wolf. All in all Kricfalusi is not a man who is afraid to voice his opinions.
But he is also a man of genius. Ren and Stimpy is the best animated cartoon to come along since the glory days of the 1940s. It is fresh, funny, utterly original, and completely anarchic. It appeals to children as well as adults. Working with Nickelodeon, Kricfalusi plans an ambitious schedule of twenty (20) 11-minute shorts for the coming season; at thirty six, he seems already one of the indisputable greats of the animated cartoon, right up there with Jones, Clampett, Avery and the other renowned masters of the medium.
Kricfalusi doesn't like to analyze what he does, like most filmmakers, but for once, I disagreed with him, and pointed out that it was his personal vision and commitment to quality that made the series so successful. Reluctantly, he agreed, but remained suspicious of any attempts to figure out precisely why Ren Hoek (an insomniac chihuahua with the voice of Peter Lorre) and Stimpson J. Cat (an overweight alley cat described by Kricfalusi as simply "retarded") had clicked so resoundingly with viewers.
Over the summer of 1992, Kricfalusi labored on twenty additional episodes of Ren and Stimpy, but ran into production problems. Kricfalusi had signed away all the rights to the Ren and Stimpy characters to Nickelodeon, and in late September of 1992, he was taken off the series and replaced by his associate Bob Camp. Whatever happens, we will certainly hear more from Kricfalusi in the future; a voice this original simply cannot be silenced.
This interview was conducted on February 2, 1992.
WD: Do you think of a story first, and then the gags, or the gags first, and then shift them into a story?
JK: It can work a million different ways. It's just whatever inspiration we get. If we get enough ideas for it--it becomes a story. Sometimes it's a complete story idea, and sometimes it starts out with bits and pieces and grows from there.
WD: Was there ever a particular gag that you wanted to do, but the studio heads thought it was too far out for your audience?
JK: Actualy there's lots of them. Plenty of them. But mostly they're subtle gags. Last year there was a gag in "Space Madness." Remember the scene in which Ren and Stimpy are having "quality time" together on the spaceship? Nothing's happening, right? We cut to closer and closer shots of their faces to show that they have memorized everything about each other, since they've been stranded in space forever.
I also wanted to do one shot--remember when you were a kid and you'd go outside on sunny days and you'd look around and get this film of paramecium or something in front of your eyes? Those little weird squiggly wiggly things that are always at the edge of your field of vision? You never can quite get a focus on them. You look at them and they zip away. Well, I wanted to have that effect, panning by in front of Stimpy as Ren's point of view of Stimpy...these weird little parameciums floating in front of his eyes. [laughs] Just to add to his madness, you know? But they didn't understand it at all, so we scrapped
it.
WD: So Nickelodeon looks at your storyboards and then gives the o.k?
JK: Yes, they have approval on the story and the storyboards.
WD: How many people work on these episodes? What's your core staff?
JK: Well, right now there's about thirty. It will go up to about fifty this year, because we're doing about twenty episodes.
WD: Ren and Stimpy seems like it's the result of a group process. How does the story evolve? Do you pass the script around amongst different departments and ask for input? Sound effects, for example?
JK: Well, we figure out the story in basically two steps. One, we do a story outline. We don't use scripts. Scripts are too primitive for animation. They're a thing of the past. So we come up with an outline, two or three pages, and that's the plot. The major gags are figured out at the outline stage. But, there's no script yet. We don't write in all the dialogue yet. Then we take the outline and go next to a storyboard. We fill out the story on the storyboard. Rather than have a script, we work out all the gags, all the details, and the camera directions in the storyboard.
Then we have a layout. The layout is where we plan the final poses of the film, and the backgrounds around them. We compose all the shots and we draw every single one--which most studios do not do, of course. Most studios take the storyboard, if you're talking about television studios, and they ship the storyboard overseas for animation.
We don't do that. There's no way the show would be the success it is if we did that. There would be no acting. Our show is heavy on acting. What makes a lot of our gags play is the reactions of the characters. How they read the lines and how they look when they read the lines. You don't get this in any other cartoon today.
WD: So when you use overseas studios, they just do the in-betweening?
JK: Well, in some cases, yes. But there's one particular studio--Carbunkle in Vancouver--which adds a lot when they do the animation. They do just beautiful animation. They animated "Space Madness," for example.
WD: Another great episode is "Nurse Stimpy." That had so many set-ups and shots edited together, especially towards the end. Who worked on that?
JK: It wasn't the animators who were responsible for that, that's the work of the layout artists. Actually also it's the storyboard artist--Chris Reccardi. On "Nurse Stimpy," the storyboards were figured out by Chris Reccardi. That montage you referred to was created by Chris. It's really great stuff.
WD: Why do you use so much classical music?
JK: (laughs) We use whatever we can get cheap.
WD: Do you fear losing control over things when you ship stuff overseas?
JK: That's why we do the layouts here--so that we have as much control as possible. Normaly, in older cartoons, for example, classic Bugs Bunny cartoons, the director would work directly with the animator--so the layouts didn't have to have a lot of poses in them. The director would sit there working with the animator, and they would work out how the acting was going to happen. The director would do sketches, and the animator would add to it...you have a lot of control this way. But because of budget considerations today, we just can't afford to do it this way anymore.
WD: What is the budget and actual running time of the Ren and Stimpy cartoons?
JK: They are eleven minutes each. I'm not going to quote an actual figure on the budgets, but it's higher than your average Saturday morning show.
WD: Do you get pressure from any civic minded groups, or do you feel obligated by Nickelodeon to be "politically correct"?
JK: No. I feel obligated to be politically incorrect! I think that's the stupidist term I've ever heard in my life! Why is one person's view politically correct when another person's isn't? Who decides that?
WD: Do you get a lot of grief from pressure groups who write in with complaints?
JK: No, we haven't had any negative press at all. We have had tons of press. I'd say ninety-nine percent is really positive. Great. Which realy surprises me--I actually thought we would get at least a few people mad. I think that we are living in a society that has such a dearth of real entertainment--stuff that doesn't claim to be anything more than entertainment--that people appreciate something good.
WD: How long have you been developing the characters? "Ren" and "Stimpy"? Did the voices come first, and then the characters? or the drawings?
JK: The drawings came first. We were struggling to figure out voices for a long time.
WD: Is Ren's voice a Peter Lorre imitation?
JK: Yes, it's a bad impersonation of Peter Lorre (laughs).
WD: I thought so. He was described by Newsweek as a sort or "Frito Bandido" voice...
JK: No. He's not suppose to be like the "Frito Bandido."
WD: Describe the genesis of "Ren and Stimpy."
JK: (sighs) This is the question I hate more than anything.
WD: Sorry.
JK: Well, they were just doodles. They were just doodles I used to do. For no reason other than to amuse people around the studios that I worked at, while doing crap. Stuff I worked on years and years ago.
WD: So how come you decided to do the voice for Ren yourself?
JK: I did the voice for Ren because I cast a whole string of professional voice actors, and none of them could get the intensity that I wanted. They might be better actors, but they just couldn't get the soul right, so I just did it myself.
WD: What would you say is the basis of Ren and Stimpy's relationship with each other? What's the basic chemistry between them? They seem like Abbott and Costello in a way.
JK: They're just a classic comedy team. Ren is an asshole. Stimpy is retarded. (laughs)
WD: Do they have gender? It seems nonspecific.
JK: Cartoon characters don't have genders.
WD: Are you interested in a live-action/animation mix at all?
JK: Not really, not unless it's for a joke. It doesn't mix naturally. It always looks terrible.
WD: What were some of your first gigs?
JK: I worked on some of the worst cartons ever made. There was this studio--Filmation--a few years back, the worst studio ever...(laughs) They made Archie and Gilligan's Planet and some of the most horrible cartoons you ever saw. They just turned your stomach to watch them. I started there. We took some of the most classic cartoons and ruined them! We ruined Tom and Jerry and Droopy. We ruined Mighty Mouse and Heckle and Jeckle. We did updated versions with limited animation. They were so bad they're almost funny. Almost funny. Except that they're kind of sickening. I also did a lot of subcontracting, and I freelanced for all the studios: Hanna- Barbera, Filmation, DIC. I worked on so much terrible stuff. I sort of enjoyed working on The Jetsons, really The New Adventures of the Jetsons. I just liked the styling of The Jetsons. I liked the way the characters looked and the backgrounds. I enjoy the early Hanna-Barbera stuff, particularly Huckleberry Hound and Quick Draw McGraw.
WD: Huckleberry Hound was kind of a rip-off of an old Tex Avery cartoon, Billy Boy. The voice was taken from Tex's Billy Boy.
JK: Yes, the voice was, definitely.
WD: When did you hook-up with Ralph Bakshi?
JK: I worked with him a couple of times in the early eighties. None of it was ever produced. He wanted to get into the shorts market. He wanted to recreate the short cartoon market, which is tough to do. I worked doing some storyboards for him for a while, writing cartoons and stuff. It never really got off the ground. I also wrote a live action movie for him. That didn't get off the ground. That was my history with him then. I was doing things for him that he couldn't sell. (laughs)
He retired for four years. Then he came back and decided that he wanted to get into T.V. He looked me up and we developed a bunch of ideas and tried to sell them to television. They were much too weird for television. Then he sold Mighty Mouse. So we took all our weird ideas and stuffed them into the Mighty Mouse series. They didn't fit at all. They had nothing to do with Mighty Mouse. But we used them anyway.
WD: Yes, your cartoon are full of lots of weird gags, as in the Ren and Stimpy cartoon "Fire Dogs." The fireman who appears in "Fire Dogs" seems kind of Bakshiesque. Very over the top. Or the narrator who forces Stimpy to push the "History Erase" button in "Space Madness."
JK: Well, the fireman in "Fire Dogs" is Ralph Bakshi. That's really him! (laughs)
WD: Do you always push your writers to always go one step further out?
JK: I don't need to push them. They're all insane.
WD: What do you make of the Ren and Stimpy cult following on college campuses?
JK: I don't feel connected to that. It's an abstract thing that people tell me. I haven't really witnessed it.
WD: When you create a cartoon, are you writing for yourself or your audience?
JK: I always write for the audience. I'm not out to be any "auteur" or anything like that.
WD: Yes, but you are. The series is completely individual and original. You inject your personal energy in every frame.
JK: Yes, myself and the other creators--Jim Smith, Bob Camp, and Lynne Naylor all have had major input, though Lynne Naylor and I originally founded the company, developed the characters and did the original cartoon that sold the series. We did the styling and everything.
WD: Which networks turned down Ren and Stimpy?
JK: ABC, CBS, NBC, all three of them.
WD: What were their reactions?
JK: Well, I would go into the studios and pitch the stuff at them. I bring in a lot of drawings, storyboards, and act it out and scream and jump around and sweat a lot. I'd throw myself on the tables and stuff. Their reaction was just--"how do we get this guy out of the room without getting hurt?"
WD: So how did you get hooked up with Nickelodeon?
JK: Well, they were looking for small studios who were producing cartoons. They didn't want to go to Hanna-Barbera, Disney, the big studios, the same old stuff. They wanted something inspired by the animators themselves. They wanted to get the animators' vision onto the screen.
We heard about this. I didn't believe it for a second. So I went down to meet Vanessa Coffey of Nickelodeon in her hotel room. She was here from New York. So I did the same thing I'd done for the majors. I jumped all over, screamed, sweated all over, flailed myself against the wall, and instead of phoning the police, she rushed me to New York and I had to do it again for all the executives at Nickelodeon. They went for it.
WD: You must have felt totally vindicated after working so many years on other people's junk?
JK: I didn't really believe it at first. Even when they gave us the money to produce the pilot, I still didn't quite believe it.
WD: Did you always want to be an animator when you were growing up?
JK: Except for a brief stint when I wanted to be a rock star. I guess everyone goes through that.
WD: Did you have particular directors you admired? Tex Avery?
JK: Not so much Avery. My favorite is Bob Clampett... To this day, I will swear that Bob Clampett was the greatest cartoonist who ever lived, and everyone else was just a cheap imitation of him. Avery was good, but he doesn't compare to Clampett. He just didn't have the subtlety of Clampett. He didn't have the many shades of expression that Clampett put in his work.
WD: What about Rod Scribner?
JK: He's the best animator that ever lived.
WD: Scribner and Clampett were...
JK: an unbeatable team. Absolutely.
WD: Yes, I love Daffy Duck, for example, as drawn by Scribner in Draftee Daffy. So the takes are more from Clampett than Avery?
JK: No, no, no. Forget the takes. Takes are cheap shots. Anybody can do a goddamned take. Look at Roger Rabbit. 90 minutes of takes. Makes me want to throw up! You don't have to be a genius to draw a take. It's emotion--the full range of emotions that works in Clampett's cartoons. The acting is some of the most convincing acting of any cartoons ever made. His ideas were amazing. He had new idea after new idea. For a string of about four years, he made nothing but great cartoons. You take the other guys and the best of them, Chuck Jones and Tex Avery, look at their whole history, twenty, twenty-five years worth of stuff, and they don't have as many great cartoons as Clampett did in four years.
WD: I've never been a big fan of Chuck Jones.
JK: Chuck is definitely a great director.
WD: But he's so long on story...
JK: Well they lean towards pomposity. That's for sure.
WD: Do you admire Rocky and Bullwinkle?
JK: Not in the least.
WD: Why?
JK: They're just illustrated radio--moving radio.
WD: What's the long range game-plan with Ren and Stimpy?
JK: Well, I don't have a long range game plan with Ren and Stimpy. Nickelodeon does. They want to make them as long as they are popular. They want to make millions of them and sell them
around the world. Put them in syndication. Make them American icons.
WD: It seems that they haven't been over-merchandised as of yet. Is that a conscious decision?
JK: Yeah, I think so. Nickelodeon wanted to be sure that the characters were popular first and lived on their own. Now they are. It's a big hit. Now I'm hoping that they do blitz the market with merchandising, because when I was a kid I loved having toys and comic books and all that stuff with cartoon characters that I really liked. I didn't want them forced upon me. But if you like cartoon characters, of course you want to play with false idols of them.
WD: What about the possibility of a feature film with Ren and Stimpy?
JK: They're talking with us about it. I'd love to do one. We're really cramped up by this eleven-minute format. We have so much raw emotion happening that there's never enough time to play
it out.
WD: Some would argue that the narrataive drive couldn't be sustained in a cartoon for ninety minutes, but you don't think that would be a problem?
JK: Well, that's because they think that all cartoons are like Tex Avery cartoons, where you have ninety minutes of takes. We would have to cover a whole broad range of emotions. There's many types of humor. Not all cartoon humor is just about having bugged-out eyes and tongues flying out of people's heads.
WD: Did your mother and father support your work while growing up?
JK: Not really, no. That's normal, though. All cartoonists are taught "you'll never make money drawing funny little men...get a real job."
WD: What do your parents do?
JK: They both work for the Canadian government. I was born in Canada.
WD: How old are you?
JK: Thirty-six.
WD: So you didn't make super-eight cartoons as a kid?
JK: No. I did flip-books. I'd take courses with the biggest books. Like history books. I'd fill them with drawing and make flip- books constantly.
WD: Do you have any favorite films that influence your work--live action films?
JK: I've always loved The Maltese Falcon. I like The Night of the Hunter. That's my favorite film. Kirk Douglas, I love Kirk Douglas. Kirk Douglas was one of my biggest influences. Young Man with a Horn, Champion, and especially Detective Story. He's a rat with a heart. With remorse. The great thing
about Kirk Douglas is not just his intense acting. It's the remorse after the intensity. The burst, and then the let-down. It's just incredible.
The influence on the acting in our cartoons is obviously not from other cartoons. It's more from movies and real-life. Our characters have real-life experiences, thrown into a surreal world. Ren and Stimpy act like people. They don't act like funny animals. They look like funny animals. But they act like human beings.
WD: Do you ever plan to remake any old classic cartoons with the Ren and Stimpy characters?
JK: No, no. All these homages always pale in comparison to the originals.
WD: What other influences do you have?
JK: I love The Three Stooges. I think they, along with Monty Python, did some of the greatest comedy ever.
WD: What did you think of Disney's new version of Beauty and the Beast?
JK: I didn't even go and see it. It just looked so horrifying. I can't believe it's a hit. Why? I just think it's the greatest hype machine in the world.
WD: Well, it's a return to the past. They're trying to get back to their old style, like Snow White or Cinderella.
JK: Forget it. They can't touch the classic cartoons they once did, even stuff only ten years ago.
WD: College kids love your show because it goes for the edge. It's not just safe old rehashing of the past.
JK: But it's not just the college kids. Let me made this clear: Ren and Stimpy really is a children's show. It was made for kids. I'm not putting anything in there that I don't think a kid can watch, or should watch. It's completely a kid's show. It really surprises me that adults watch it. It has a huge adult following.
I think it's just because we don't hold back on entertainment value; with almost everything today, whether it's a movie, a series on t.v., a novel, whatever, they hold back on the entertainment. I don't want to give them any messages or anything. I don't want to bullshit them. I don't want to show them that I'm a genius or an artist. Give them entertainment! Give them a solid half-hour of entertainment. As many ideas as you can cram into it. Old cartoons did that. Old movies did that. That's what we do.
And the show is a combined vision. The four key people are Jim Smith, the key designer, director, and an unbelievable artist; Bob Camp, who is also a great artist and the head writer. He and I have come up with most of the stories. Lynne Naylor is no longer with us, but she developed the characters and drawing style with me. And then there's me. I'm the ringleader. (laughs)
WD: Where does the name Spumco come from, incidentally? Why do "the Danes call it quality," as you say at the end of each show?
JK: Well, it's a weird coincidence. The word "spum" is the word for quality in Danish. but it's actually named after Raymond Spum, the guy who invented animation in 1856.
WD: How many cartoons are you working on at once?
JK: You have to jump back and forth. You're working on the story for one, the storyboard for another, the layouts for one, the design for another one. Then you're directing voices for another one. They all overlap. We work on maybe six at a time.
WD: Are Ren and Stimpy coming out on video?
JK: Eventually, yes.
WD: Why are Ren and Stimpy like outsiders? They're always out of a job, for example.
JK: I don't really think about it. If I did, maybe I'd say they represent average folks. They're real people, with real problems. That's probably why people identify with them. We are not making an idealization of their characters. Ren and Stimpy are not the Care Bears. They're not these unreal characters that are nonmotivated. They have the same motivations that we have, that real people have, only they're exaggerated.
WD: If I had to sum up the appeal of Ren and Stimpy, it seems to me that you always do what the audience doesn't expect.
JK: That's my biggest rule at the studio! Try not to repeat yourself. try not to go for the obvious.
WD: I remember in "Robin Hoek," for example. Robin climbs up the maiden's hair, and it turns out to be her nasal hair...
JK: Well, that's a joke upon a joke. The first joke was, well, "let down your golden hair," and one hair comes down, so you would think that's enough of a payoff. No, that's not enough. Let's give them something more. "We've surprised them once," I said, "let's give them another one."
WD: How many hours a day are you working? Do you drive yourself in to the ground?
JK: During the peak of our season, yes. When we're doing layouts, for example. The drawing is the most important part, the hardest part. Most cartoons today are run by writers. Everything you see on television is controlled by writers!
If I you want to print something that's really true, print this. The drawing in animation should always take precedence. When writers control it, writers who can't make it in the field of writing that they'd really like to be in, failed novelists, failed sit-com writers, failed movie writers, whatever, they all gravitate towards the animation business and then write the most terrible stuff in the world that can't be produced, and that's why it's all so bad.
But at Spumco, all our writers are artists. We know what you can and can't do. The writing is actually the easiest part. We can write a story in an afternoon, and I think our stories fare with some of the best in animation. But the hard part is to make the stories work. That takes drawing skill. Real hard sweating drawing skills that very few people have. That's what makes our cartoons work.
