The Golden Age of 'Sesame Street' Animation
Plus: news.
Welcome! It’s time for a new Sunday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. Here’s our lineup today:
1) Indie animation on public television.
2) Newsbits.
With that, let’s go!
1 – Material conditions
What if indie animation had a massive, guaranteed audience? What if independents got paid, consistently, to animate in whatever style they wanted? And what if these things were open to any promising artist — including someone without a big name?
It comes off like the intro to a questionable sales pitch. In reality, it was the world Sesame Street created decades ago, in its golden age.
“If you want to catch up on the latest independent animation, your best bet is to tune your television to either Sesame Street or MTV,” wrote author Mo Willems in 1997. “For the past 29 years, Sesame Street has been the repository of some of the most inventive animated shorts in America.”1
He was right. Just a few years earlier, a New York event had celebrated 25 years of Sesame Street animation. It showed shorts by Willems himself (Artist Tommy LePlaid), and those by indie animation royalty like Paul Fierlinger (Teeny Little Super Guy) and Faith and John Hubley (Baseball Bully).2
The event screened pieces even by a left-field icon like Sally Cruikshank — Beginning Middle End, Above It All. The chance to animate for this series was a dream fulfilled for her. “I’d always hoped I could get Sesame Street work,” she said.3
That was only the start. Also on the bill: animation by the Jim Henson and Will Vinton studios, animation based on Keith Haring’s paintings, animation about cats and cans and remembering a loaf of bread. Sesame Street had supported all of it. Untold millions of kids (and often their parents) had watched all of it.
This year, the rising animator Austin Kimmell summed up the situation well:
If you want an easy way to educate yourself on the history of indie animation, watch old Sesame Street — my introductions to Sally Cruikshank or the NFB came from CTW platforming unique voices found on the fringes of the medium.
How did public TV for children become a lifeline for indie art? It was partly out of necessity, partly by design.
Sesame Street began in the ‘60s as an answer to the problems of television, at a time when kids were memorizing and singing along to ads for cigarettes. Its team knew that young viewers were “attracted by fast-paced, highly visual, oft-repeated commercials,” wrote Joan Cooney, a main force behind the Sesame Street plan. She and her colleagues intended to use the enemy’s weapons for good:
We thought that, perhaps, if we created an educational show that capitalized on some of commercial television’s most engaging traits (its slick production, its sophisticated writing, and quality film and animation work), we just might find a way to make this “preschool educational television program” work. The wasteland of children’s programming was too vast for a major effort not to attract at least some attention and audience.4
From the beginning, the show hired animators. Episode one included shorts by the Hubleys and artist Tee Collins — right beside the psychedelic Jazz #2. These artists found the work rewarding and open. Faith Hubley called it a step up from animated ads, and Collins agreed. “You have more latitude, much more freedom,” he said.5
They kept contributing to Sesame Street. Before long, the show’s stable of artists grew large: its reputation was real. In the early ‘70s, Harvey Kurtzman of MAD fame pitched eight Sesame Street storyboards and sold three. A magazine reported that he was “excited by the whole project,” and did careful work with an outside studio to make stuff like Nellie. The team treated it as a “prestige” job.6
Around the same time, an animator named Jim Simon went independent and submitted a few storyboards of his own. “I walked out with a contract for four films,” he recalled last year. Simon panicked — he’d never handled anything so big. But he got to work on Bread, Milk and Butter: “I just animated it, I did all the in-betweens, inked and painted it and the whole thing.” Its success jumpstarted his new studio.
Paul Fierlinger had a similar experience. He was a defector from Czechoslovakia who landed on Sesame Street in the ‘70s. “I needed a series, I needed a steady flow of work,” he said. During the ‘80s, he got it with Teeny Little Super Guy — shorts animated on plastic cups, as a workaround for his lack of resources. They made his name.7
Sesame Street couldn’t cut Hollywood-size checks back then. Its animation budget was “$3,000 to $5,000 a minute” in the early ‘70s — something like $22,000 to $38,000 now. But it paid enough to keep the lights on. That stayed true for decades.8
The producer who defined Sesame Street’s animation was Edith Zornow, who joined in the early ‘70s. She was a beloved figure. Indie legend Michael Sporn (Abel’s Island) remembered her as a “genius … who did magnificent work with all the different animators.” She accepted shorts like Crocodile Smiles from him in the ‘70s and ‘80s.
“For the longest time, I considered her my guardian angel,” he wrote. “Just when business had gotten at its worst, she would call out of the blue with a half-dozen spots to do. I had lots of freedom in all of them.”9
Her successor, Arlene Sherman, turned into another great benefactor of the animation world during the ‘80s and ‘90s. Sporn found her “just as supportive” as Zornow. She was known for the creative room she gave people — and the risks she took. For Sally Cruikshank, Sherman was “a wonderful person” who offered “complete freedom.”10
The admiration was mutual. In the ‘90s, Sherman said she’d grown “so fond of that independent animator community.” Sesame Street relied on it because the budgets for commissioning work still weren’t massive. Cruikshank charged $20,000 (around $43,000 now) to make two minutes of animation in 1995, for example. “Certainly nobody is going to get rich by doing this,” Sherman admitted.
But indie artists and studios could operate inside those margins. So, Sherman hunted for unique voices — poaching “many” from MTV’s Liquid Television, among other places — and let them create. “They’re going to have a lot of freedom, and they’re going to have a lot of fun,” she said. Wild, enriching, mind-expanding artistry was what she wanted.
Look at the contributors to Sesame Street episodes in the ‘90s, and you find Peter Chung, Karen Aqua, Joanna Priestley, Sporn, Cruikshank. There were films in all different styles, and they ran again and again. Sesame Street animation could reach generations. Tissa David animated Penguin Rhythms for the Hubleys in the early ‘70s; it was still airing by 1999.
Sesame Street’s educational benefits are no secret: the gamble was that TV could help kids, and it paid off. But animation was the vehicle of much of that help. As a result, animators got paid to do good work.
Which sparked an independent boom. The ideas of Children’s Television Workshop even powered early MTV — whose creative director, Fred Seibert, called Sesame Street one of the “biggest influences on what we did.” The channel drew from the talent pool that CTW had cultivated in the first place. In the mid-1990s, producer Linda Simensky wrote:
Back in the days before cable television, one could satisfy a need to see animated films by independent animators simply by flipping to Sesame Street. … Jobs for Sesame Street helped to pay the rent for many independent animators long before MTV, Nickelodeon and the Cartoon Network …
Animators who have worked for Sesame Street have appreciated CTW’s trust in their ability, along with the leeway they are given to work with their own style and vision in the context of the show’s vision. CTW has also been willing to work with younger, less experienced animators, who have exhibited original styles.
It reveals the power of public funding. Sesame Street came together in the ‘60s partly through cash from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which kept backing it for over a decade. Between 1968 and 1971, the CPB put $1.65 million ($13.3 million) into CTW, while the federal Office of Education gave $6.2 million ($50.5 million).
Half of Sesame Street’s starting budget was public money. From there, it got direct government support until the early ‘80s, totaling more than $100 million just from “the Department of Education or its predecessors,” in today’s dollars.11
That funding created an ecosystem of artistic freedom, which went beyond Sesame Street and even CTW. Quite a bit of television that actually helped people, in front of the screen and behind it, emerged from stuff like the CPB and the Ready to Learn Act. It should be said that, in recent months, the American government killed both.
Sesame Street will survive, although it isn’t the creative haven for animators that it once was, for a lot of reasons. Less certain: the future of noncommercial art in American broadcasting, of the artists who make it and of the viewers who benefit from it. Things are scary now, in ways the general public doesn’t hear about.
It didn’t cost much, all things considered, to give kids something to memorize besides cigarette commercials. Offering indie animators an audience, and reliable paying work they believed in, was also pretty cheap. Sesame Street’s artistic explosion happened thanks to just a little support. “They’re not fat, but one can work within those budgets,” noted an early animator for the show.12
Consider the case of Bill and Colleen Davis, who did the Keith Haring shorts. The Ithaca Journal visited their studio-home in 1993, where they worked and raised four children. Per the report:
... while shows like Sesame Street pay upwards of $6,000 for a minute of animation, about three-quarters of that is paid out to other artists who do the voice overs and sound effects, and the New York City outfit that turns their cels into film.
But while the Davises could be making more money as commercial animators — and have done work for companies like AT&T and Stroehmann’s Bread — they prefer doing educational cartoons.
“Jesus, it’s not selling cornflakes,” Bill says.
“It’s producing something that has some value,” [Colleen] says.13
2 – Newsbits
We lost Robert Labidas (59), a respected Yakutian animator.
Nobody has earned over $175 million in China. That makes it one of the country’s top 10 animated movies at the box office — a serious victory for Shanghai Animation Film Studio and Chinese 2D animation in general.
In America, Deaf Crocodile shared a trailer for volume two of its Treasures of Soviet Animation Blu-ray series. It features The Snow Queen and is due next month. (As a note: we’re collaborating with Deaf Crocodile on multiple projects this year.)
In the world of British television, almost “half of all workers … are unemployed,” reports Kidscreen. Among the problems: low YouTube payouts and “a wide-scale and deep commissioning drop,” in many cases from public broadcasters.
Meanwhile, in Canada, the Shaw Rocket Fund for children’s programming is at risk.
Cartoon Brew went behind the scenes of the YouTube pilot Plinko & Mark by Thrash and Bash, an indie team co-founded by artists in America and Canada.
Use of Russian platforms like Rutube and VK Video dramatically spiked this year. A report claims that the latter beat YouTube’s traffic in the country during July. It comes as the government continues to disrupt YouTube access.
In America, the de minimis duty exception for imports under $800 closes at the end of August. That’s causing chaos and will add lots of extra expense to consumer imports of animation-related goods.
The Wild Inside picked up €30,000 in development support from Film Fund Luxembourg. It’s the next feature by Patrick Imbert (The Summit of the Gods).
Last of all, we looked into the debut films of three great director-animators: Lotte Reiniger, Caroline Leaf and Takashi Nakamura.
Until next time!
From a conversation between Mo Willems, Arlene Sherman and Abby Terkuhle, published by AWN. One of our key sources.
For details about this tribute to Sesame Street animation and the films that it screened, see Animation Magazine (January 1995), also our source for Simensky’s quote lower down.
Cruikshank said this in her interview with Art of the Title, used several times today.
See Cooney’s foreword to Sesame Street Unpaved.
These comments from Faith Hubley and Tee Collins come from the Evansville Courier and Press (April 9, 1972) and the book All About Sesame Street.
This story is related in Chris Robinson’s Unsung Heroes of Animation.
Figure from the report “Children’s Television Workshop; How and Why It Works.”
For Sporn’s recollections, see this post. For more details on Zornow, see The Naples Daily News (November 16, 1991).
Sporn praised Sherman in this post. Other details come from AWN’s obituary and its article “CTW and MTV: Shorts of Influence,” a key source.
For the funding data on Sesame Street and CTW, see the book Sesame Street Revisited, Cooney’s comments during the 1982 National Science Foundation Authorization and a statement given to the government by CTW’s Gary E. Knell in 1990.
Quote from Cinema Canada (August 1976).
See The Ithaca Journal (April 10, 1993).
I still remember so many of those animated shorts from when I was a kid. I'm grown, and now my kids are, too, but I have the sudden urge to go back and watch old episodes of Sesame Street.
Wow, I never knew how important Sesame Street was to indie animation back in the day!
Thanks for the very captivating, engrossing read!