What 'Sesame Street' Did for Animation
Plus: global animation news and classic Czech cartoons.
Welcome! We’re back with another issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. Glad you could join us. Here’s what we’re doing this week:
One — how the birth of Sesame Street reshaped American animation.
Two — animation news from all around the world.
Three — a trove of stop-motion Czech cartoons.
Four — the last word.
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With that said, here we go!
1. The Sesame Street cartoon
In the early 1960s, American television was in bad shape. The head of the FCC called it “a vast wasteland” in a landmark speech. Begging broadcasters to do better, he told the industry to reconsider whether “the public interest is merely what interests the public.”
Commercialism was rampant. It was a time when the Flintstones hawked cigarettes to their adult viewers. Children’s animation doubled as advertising, too — Saturday morning cartoons were, in many real ways, a marketing scheme. Creative animators had little room to move.
“TV had really kind of hit rock bottom in terms of quality,” according to Stephen Battaglio of the Los Angeles Times. “There needed to be an alternative that wasn’t driven by the marketplace.”1
One crucial step was the station WNDT in New York, a bold experiment in bringing the arts to the masses. The benefit of that idea to animation was clear from the start — literally. WNDT debuted in 1962 with a wonderful cartoon by auteurs Faith and John Hubley. From there, WNDT producer Joan Ganz Cooney would build a lasting home for animation like this. That home was Sesame Street.
The concept behind Sesame Street dates back to 1966. At a dinner party, Cooney and her boss at WNDT met a high-up from the Carnegie Foundation. The dismal state of children’s TV came up. “There was a buzz and a hum around the table,” wrote Michael Davis in Street Gang, his seminal history of Sesame Street. Cooney got an opportunity.
For months, she traveled the country on a research trip, assembling a report. It carried an unassuming title — The Potential Uses of Television in Preschool Education. In it, Cooney made the case that TV could educate kids by stealing tricks from commercials:
Anyone who has small television viewers at home can testify to the fascination that commercials hold for children. Parents report that their children learn to recite all sorts of advertising slogans, read product names on the screen (and, more remarkably, elsewhere), and to sing commercial jingles. […]
If we accept the premise that commercials are effective teachers, it is important to be aware of their characteristics, the most obvious being frequent repetition, clever visual presentation, brevity and clarity [...] commercials appear to have adopted what have always been effective teaching techniques […] many teachers may have forgotten what Madison Avenue, with consummate skill, has cribbed from them.
Her report opened doors. Over the next few years, Cooney would leave WNDT and found the Children’s Television Workshop. As Sesame Street took shape, luminaries like Jim Henson came aboard. But animation was always central to the show.
The “first piece of original material created for Sesame Street” was a cartoon, per the book All About Sesame Street. Produced at Pantomime Pictures, it was designed as an educational commercial. In a surviving snippet of its pitch meeting, we see the series’ animation coordinator, Dave Connell, explain that this cartoon is really an ad. “We’re trying to sell the alphabet to preschool children,” he says.
The short, known as The J Commercial or The Story of J, turned out as a gem. It’s funny from the first exchange. “What’s happening, man?” one character asks. The other replies, “I don’t know.” Its loose, expressive animation and design recall European cartoons of the day. It’s all very far removed from Wacky Races.
In 1968, early research on disadvantaged preschoolers showed that The J Commercial was working. “In testing the J Spot,” said Dr. Edward Palmer of CTW, “we found that as few as four or five repetitions an hour during regular children’s programming established one hundred percent recognition of the letter J.” Cartoons could teach.
But it was more than that. The J Commercial, made at a studio run by UPA upstart Fred Crippen, was the first sign that Sesame Street could be a lifeline for animators with a strong creative streak. You could be different, and be non-commercial, yet still get on TV.
By the time Sesame Street’s first full episode premiered in November 1969, the Children’s Television Workshop had confirmed that impression.
The first episode featured a psychedelic, morphing piece (E-Imagination) by Faith and John Hubley. There was a disorienting, Yellow Submarine-style cartoon (Jazz #2) with vocals from Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane. The runaway hit Wanda the Witch came from Tee Collins — the first Black animator to run his own studio in New York.
The Hubleys, Pantomime Pictures, Imagination Inc. (Jazz #2) and Collins were all veterans of TV advertising. Asked about the switch to Sesame Street, Collins approved. “You have more latitude, much more freedom,” he said. The Hubleys preferred it, too. Although they still did ads to survive, Faith remarked, “We’d rather do Sesame Street than commercials.”
“We feel that the airwaves should be used to help us understand the world we live in,” John once said. “I don’t think we can afford to waste human time just turning out low-level entertainment.”2
The creativity of Sesame Street cartoons grew in the episodes to come. Fred Crippen’s hilarious I for Impolite, which aired that December, is so sarcastic that it almost feels like a piece for adults. The Hubleys became more and more prolific contributors to the show, pushing boundaries with great films like O Song (1969) and Exit (1970).
The 1970s were a tough decade for animators in America — but the cartoons on Sesame Street only got better, freer. That included the pioneering work of Jim Simon, whose so-called “Afro-Cubistic realism” powered pieces like Bread, Milk and Butter. The popularity of Sesame Street led to other shows in the same style, like The Electric Company and Vegetable Soup, that likewise empowered animators.
A parade of underground names would march through Sesame Street. Will Vinton. Michael Sporn. By the ‘90s, you had animated Keith Haring paintings. Fierce independents like Sally Cruikshank got picked up. (“I’d always hoped I could get Sesame Street work,” she later said.)
Many of these artists were reaching the largest audience of their careers — and forming memories that would last lifetimes for their young viewers. All without selling a single box of cereal. In the end, Cooney’s big idea paid off for everyone.
Sesame Street is rarely seen as an important piece of animation history. Maybe that’s because the cartoons were released anonymously, or because they were aimed at young children. But, for decades, America had no more reliable factory of creative and intriguing animation than this show. It’s impossible to imagine how animation would look today without the Sesame Street cartoon.
2. News around the world
What happened at Cartoon Forum
In Toulouse, France, the Cartoon Forum event ran from Monday through Thursday this week. It’s a big deal. Studios from all across Europe showed up to pitch TV animation to investors. As a French event, though, the French came out ahead.
Animation Magazine reports that all ten of the most-attended sessions were for French or Franco-Belgian projects. The top performer was Mister Crocodile, based on a comic series by Joann Sfar (The Rabbi’s Cat). Adaptation was a major trend — quite a few projects drew from local comics. That included Living with Dad, the year’s “best attended pitch with at least two co-production partners,” per C21 Media.
C21 Media notes that the numbers look a little different when weighted for “potential investors in the audience,” percentage-wise. Here, Little Charlie comes out ahead. A German-Dutch co-production, it adapts a children’s book series by Rotraut Susanne Berner. Rhina Rhino, another German production, was second in this category.
The impact of Cartoon Forum 2021 will grow clearer in the coming weeks and months, as deals become public. Already, though, the French musical Samuel by Émilie Tronche has a greenlight. The channel Arte France is picking it up for release through its website, YouTube, Instagram and potentially TikTok, Variety reports.
Best of the rest
News broke over the weekend that animation legend Eiichi Yamamoto of Japan passed away, at the age of 80, earlier this month. He’s best known for directing Osamu Tezuka films, including Tales of a Street Corner.
The Amazing World of Gumball, one of the biggest cartoons produced in Britain, is coming back with a movie and a sequel series.
The Japanese studio dwarf (Rilakkuma and Kaoru) has released a beautiful stop-motion short in support of cancer patients, their families and the medical staff treating them amid hospital overload from the COVID-19 pandemic. Highly recommended.
Vaibhav Studios of India just picked up even more awards for its endlessly entertaining Nickelodeon ident series.
Entries are open for Poland’s ANIMARKT Stop Motion Forum and Germany’s Stuttgart International Festival of Animated Film. The deadlines are mid-October and early December, respectively. Both accept global entries.
We’re a little late on this, but the French school Gobelins is rolling out its 2021 graduation films. Check out the nicely crafted Golden Hour.
On Thursday, Soyuzmultfilm head Yuliana Slashcheva delivered a bold speech in Russia. The studio’s goal is to “become the largest player in the national and international animation markets in the coming years.”
The Malaysian studio Monsta will debut its series Mechamoto on Cartoon Network Asia Pacific in December. It looks expensive, with Spider-Verse-inspired VFX design.
A feature film based on the Indonesian animated series Nussa is set for wide release in its home country during October.
The animation gold rush continues. In Sweden, audiobook and ebook service Storytel is getting into the game with the help of local indie team The Nuttery.
Lastly, as you’ve heard, there’s going to be a Mario movie now.
3. Treasure trove — Czech Bears
In the rich history of Czech animation, it’s hard to pick favorites. But the Bears cartoons are up there. Across two series between 1965 and 1973 (under the odd names Hey Mister, Let’s Play! and Who Threw That, Gentlemen?), these bears became stars in Czechoslovakia. Some of that love survives even today in the modern Czech Republic.
The Bears cartoons really are irresistible. They rethink stop-motion puppetry — using tricks that allow “puppets to be animated just as freely as characters in hand-drawn cartoons, complete with smears, limb stretches, and even grotesque distortions,” in the words of blogger and translator Toadette. The results are wildly imaginative.
We can thank Toadette, in fact, for making these films available in English for the first time. The project to translate the series started last year and reached the finish line on the 19th of this month. A “mutually beneficial” arrangement has let Toadette upload the entire series to YouTube, fully subtitled.
The translated Bears cartoons are in two playlists, one for each series. You’ll find them here and here. There are 11 episodes in all — each one short, breezy and funny. A great watch that we think you’ll love.
4. Last word
That’s all for this week! Thanks for reading. Catch us next Sunday for more animation highlights from around the world.
If that’s not enough for you, we’ve also got Thursday bonus issues — deep-dives into specific topics that excite us. These are for members only.
Membership costs $10 per month or $100 per year. Students can contact us to receive an additional 40% discount code.
This week, our Thursday deep-dive covered Katsuhiro Otomo’s storyboarding technique, from Akira on through gems like Combustible. His storyboards are one of a kind. As we wrote, “He came at them like a manga artist who’d come at manga like a filmmaker.” A quick excerpt from the Akira section:
Alongside his other duties on Akira, he drew the film’s 738 pages of storyboards by himself. “I think I did too much on my own for Akira,” he later said.
It was a time-consuming process. Otomo boarded keeping in mind that Akira would be shot on 70mm film, a rarity for anime. That thinking was behind some of the intense detail he put into his boards — beyond even many manga of the day. The almost-surreal intricacy of Otomo’s own manga art is another clear influence.
But Otomo struggled, and he approached boarding in a trial-and-error way. Long, fully realized sections of the 738-page storyboard are crossed out in surviving prints, never making it to camera.
There’s much more from there — including a ton of Otomo’s storyboard art from across his career. Find the piece right here.
Hope to see you again soon!
From the PBS documentary Pioneers of Thirteen, a source we use several times in the article. We also draw a lot from All About Sesame Street, an invaluable book from 1971.
From a newspaper article in The Journal Times, published April 2, 1972. Faith Hubley’s quote comes from The Indianapolis News (April 3, 1972) and Tee Collins’ from The Pittsburgh Courier (January 3, 1970).
I pored over the animations you included in the Sesame Street section of this issue. The alphabet “ads” were so smart, effective. I found myself tapping my feet as I watched the one for “J.” The one for “E” was wonderful too. Amazing that they unabashedly supported unconventionality in their era. They made it cool. Knowing this history makes me love Sesame Street even more.