THINKING ABOUT ART SCHOOL

BEFORE YOU START TO READ RUN, DON'T WALK, TO JOHN KRICFALUSI'S SITE WHERE HE TALKS ABOUT HIS IDEAL ART CURRICULUM FOR ANIMATORS. IT'S SIMPLY THE BEST THINKING ON THE SUBJECT THAT I'VE EVER SEEN IN PRINT!


What I'll try to do here is put down a few thoughts on the state of art schools in general (which includes traditional colleges offering an animation/art program) and animation courses in particular. The biggest recent change in animation curriculums is that they're almost all computer-centered. Every school wants to be known as cutting edge, preparing students for the jobs of the future and all that. As a consequence drawing courses have diminished in importance and now you can graduate from art school without being able to draw or paint. That's an historic change! Imagine that! The practice of hundreds of years reversed in my own time! How did such a big change come about?



Well, the computer obsession is the obvious first answer. That's odd because the favored animation of art students -- what they watch for recreation and inspiration when they're not being forced -- is anime, which is 2D. Students seldom watch 3D for fun unless its video game graphics. You get the feeling that they don't really like 3D all that much but they're persuaded that learning it is the only way they'll get a job. Is that true? Who gave them that impression?

The obvious answer is, "The box office told them! 3D is the only animation that makes money!," but is that true? 3D has been in TV animation for well over a decade now and what are the most popular animated programs? The answer is "The Simpsons," "South Park" and "Family Guy," all 2D. OK, south Park is computer animated, but it's deliberately made to look like it's not. No computer TV that looks like computer TV has been a prime-time hit. 3D has beaten 2D at the cinema box office but what was the competition? "Treasure Planet?" "Home on the Range?" These are executive-driven films are not at all what I would call fair competition.

My own guess is that high school teachers and art schools turned things around; high school teachers because they scared their students to death with the "college-or-scrub-toilets-for-a-living" rhetoric, and art schools because they took in so many non-artists that the foxes are beginning to rule the hen house.

The upshot of this irresponsible advice in high school was that every student who wasn't academically inclined went on a frantic search for colleges that offered easy degrees...and what college is easier to graduate from than an art college? In unprecedented numbers non-artists flooded art schools and they were backed up by big, tax-payer-backed student loans, so they were not turned away. How will these students pay back those loans? Remember when art schools had strict entrance requirements?

The influx of non-artists into art school is changing the nature of art school. A lot of students don't feel comfortable with traditional art and are much relieved when they can bail out into computers. Very often non-artists run art schools and they tend to repeat the non-artist mantra: "Everything will be computers right around the corner." That's only a half truth. 3D certainly is the future of animation but good animation programs are not by a long shot right around the corner.

Present-day 3D programs like Maya are clunky and unresponsive and there's no relief in sight. Art schools should be preparing students for a longer transition period but instead they're putting all their eggs in one futuristic basket. Maybe that's because 60s-type people run the schools and that generation was obsessed with what used to be called the "generation gap." They watched their parents lapse into irrelevance and they learned the lesson... on pain of death don't fall behind the trends. Unfortunately for them the anticipated trend in 3D was slow in coming. Today, all these years after "Tron," 3D animation is still expensive, insensitive to cartooning and expressive acting, has difficulty creating appealing characters, and is hard to use.

Even so, the fantasies of non-artists about how art should be done can't be ignored. They're training the next generation of artists and that'll have its effect. We still have to meet the challenge of anime, which is the immediate threat on the horizon, and that battle will likely be fought with 2D. My advice to young animators is to learn how to draw, cartoon and animate effectively, in addition to whatever computer skills you can pick up. If John K ever starts a school then kill to get into it. That's the real article. One day 3D will be as easy to use and creatively useful as a common pencil, and we'll all wonder how we got along without it....but we're far from being there now.

By the way, my own experience with art school management has been the opposite of what I've described here. Everybody I've worked for has been an artist, sometimes really good ones. Good art schools with competent and idealistic managers do exist and they're worth seeking out.