Animation maverick John Kricfalusi, creator of The Ren & Stimpy Show and The Ripping Friends, has worked in the business since 1980. He launched his independent studio, Spumco, in Los Angeles in 1989, and this fall opened Spumco Canada in his hometown of Ottawa.

Kricfalusi was honored with a tribute/retrospective at this month’s Ottawa International Animation Festival.

He says the new Ottawa studio may not change his creative perception of the world, ‘but it will change the way we do things. It makes us actually able to do a lot more than we could do before.’

Spumco, in association with Toronto’s CCI Entertainment, is developing a new round of The Ripping Friends, 13 half-hours commissioned by Cartoon Network (WB) in the U.S. and Teletoon in Canada. Kricfalusi says the show, which chronicles the extreme whacko adventures of Crag, Rip, Slab and Chunk, four ‘manly superheroes’ whose mission is to ‘rip’ anything standing in the way of freedom and goodness, has just applied for funding from the Canadian Television Fund. Thirteen episodes were produced last year.

Ren & Stimpy in primetime

The house is in production on six new episodes of Ren & Stimpy for the property’s owner, TNN (Nickelodeon/ Viacom) in the U.S., with 13 additional half-hours slated for production next season.

Ren & Stimpy has moved over to primetime from its original kids block position.

‘I guess they ran it for 10 years and it is still popular with adults and that is probably why they decided to make some new ones,’ says Kricfalusi. Last Christmas, the series was broadcast on VH1 to excellent ratings results.

Asked what changes are planned for the new primetime demographic, Kricfalusi unhesitatingly replies, ‘Really nothing. Adults watched it the first time around so I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing.’

A fair portion of the animation is being done in Vancouver by Carbunkle, which also did a lot of animation on the original Ren & Stimpy.

‘Don’t follow trends’

‘I don’t follow trends at all,’ Kricfalusi says. ‘I don’t know what other people are doing. We start the trends. That’s my job. Every cartoon seems to start its own trends because we do things differently all the time. I get bored real fast. If I repeat myself too many times I get mad at myself. [But] in production you do have to repeat yourself sometimes, you can’t make everything completely new.

‘One of my rules is: ‘Don’t do what you already know how to do.’ I tell the guys every day, ‘You’re not allowed to draw a [character] expression you’ve drawn before.”

He says animation character expressions are typically built on model sheets before production. ‘They become rubber stamps. That’s what everyone is used to doing. In fact, if you try to draw an expression that is not on the model sheets you get yelled at at other studios.’

Kricfalusi says he practically never watches TV.

‘All my influences are very old. I have a huge library of old movies, especially film noir movies, and TV shows and toons. Pretty much culture ended around 1970 for me.’

The new Ottawa studio has about 30 people on staff and is planning to build up to about 40, ‘mostly a very young crew,’ says Kricfalusi. ‘Some people are right out of Algonquin College [in Ottawa]. Most of them have had a couple to a few years experience. They are all super eager, a really talented crew.

‘Many of the new staffers, not all, are rejects who didn’t get along at the regular studios,’ he adds. ‘People get dissatisfied working on boring stuff. Most television stuff is really boring to work on.’

Spumco will do all the posing (the drawings of key characters) in-house.

Kricfalusi says Spumco does a lot of things differently from other animation studios.

‘We do our post-production up front. Rather than wait for the cartoon to come back from Korea, we do the music and sound FX [before using] Final Cut Pro. And we cut our storyboards right from the beginning.’

-www.nick.com

-www.spumco.net