cartoon
Veronica Lee
A show that began as that hippest of 21st-century technology, a podcast, gains new life in a transfer to the dinosaur of television having been given a makeover with old-school Hanna-Barbera-style cartooning. The Ricky Gervais Show started life on the Guardian website in 2005, where Gervais and his long-time collaborator Stephen Merchant sat in a studio and talked to - well goaded, really - their former radio producer Karl Pilkington, the “little round-headed buffoon" from Manchester. After it became the most downloaded podcast in the world, America’s HBO channel picked it up and fashioned Read more ...
Matt Wolf
Far be it from me to complain when the eternal geek is reborn as a man of action. But perhaps I'm not sufficiently a video game kinda guy - Okay, let's come clean, I've never played one - to get into Scott Pilgrim vs The World, the inoffensively if incessantly violent romcom in which an eerily youthful Michael Cera gets to go "Ka-pow!" an awful lot before he finally gets a girl that doesn't in any actual way seem a sensible match. There are chortles to be had, and Lord knows the (English) director Edgar Wright keeps enough visual balls going simultaneously to ensnare even the most ADD- Read more ...
Jasper Rees
NB Since it was co-opted by the New Labour project to make them sound like humans, I’ve gone off the word “kids”, but let’s make an exception for a film called Diary of a Wimpy Kid. The film is based on Jeff Kinney’s book series, first published in the US in 2007, which I suspect has not been as big over here as in the States (illustrated below).Greg Heffley is an adroit draughtsman, and fills his journal with doodled caricatures of the figures he comes across in his first year at middle school. There’s his porky pal Rowley, the unspeakable geek/ freak Fregley and a cool girl who loiters in Read more ...
neil.smith
The 15 years since Disney released the original Toy Story have seen a seismic boom in the computer animation field that has prompted every major movie studio to get in on the act. Relatively cheap to make, accessible to both adults and children and easily converted to 3D, these digital cash cows have become as much a part of a Hollywood balance sheet as the action-packed thriller, low-brow comedy or all-star contemporary reboot.Yet while its chief rival DreamWorks has shown few qualms in turning their animated hits (Shrek, Madagascar, Kung Fu Panda) into serial franchises, pack leader Pixar Read more ...
fisun.guner
There’s a rich vein of comic and satirical humour that runs through British art. Hogarth set the trend in the mid-1700s and heralded a golden age of graphic satirists. These included the three masters of the form: Gillray, Rowlandson and Cruickshank. There’s a direct line that links their work to the political cartoonists of our own day, and Tate Britain’s sweeping survey Rude Britannia: British Comic Art features both the historical and the contemporary: Gerald Scarfe, with his excoriating visions of Thatcher; Steve Bell, who most notably put John Major in a pair of Superman underpants; and Read more ...
fisun.guner
Satire, like roast beef, is what Brits are famous for and this exhibition takes us right back to its earliest days in graphic print. In the 1600s, Dutch allegorical prints were adapted by British printmakers to comment on contemporary issues and one of the first examples in this exhibition is a print that illustrates the purportedly cruel and barbarous treatment meted out by the Dutch to the English at the outset of the Anglo-Dutch war - so it’s hardly rib-tickling stuff.This is before we get to Hogarth’s moral outrage and thence to the birth of political satire’s golden age with the big Read more ...
Jasper Rees
This week a new exhibition with no pretence to seriousness opens at Tate Britain. Rude Britannia: British Comic Art is a comprehensive tour of a great national tradition: having a laugh in a line drawing. The show covers the boardwalk from Gilray and Cruikshank to Gerald Scarfe and Steve Bell. It also includes the work of a cartoonist and illustrator whose world view, more than any other, now seems deliciously quaint and old-fashioned: Donald McGill. All four examples from the exhibition are included here.It's not widely known that the greatest collector of McGill's in this country is the Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Has modern cinema ever arranged quite so fetishistic an entrance? She’s blonde, she’s beautiful, and needless to say busty - a benign pneumatic deity who, gliding in slo-mo across a crowded screen, induces males of every age and hue to turn and gawp in frank, unreconstructed appreciation of her sheer unblemished wondrousness. Hollywood is zip-all without dream retail and the shameless objectification of women. But surely – surely – this is too much.The joke of She's Out of My League – let’s call it a joke, because it’s sometimes almost funny – is that romantic compatibility can be organised Read more ...
bruce.dessau
For a band that was initially created as a conceptual cartoon, Gorillaz is a pretty formidable live band. At a heaving Roundhouse last night, Damon Albarn and a galaxy of guests put on a show that is an easy contender for gig of the year, complete with visuals from co-founder and cartoonist Jamie Hewlett and sailors' hats all round. From Admiral Snoop Dogg opening proceedings on a giant video screen to Albarn fronting an all-hands-on-deck climax of early hit “Clint Eastwood”, the virtual band was virtually perfect.When you've got two former members of The Clash on guitar and bass, of course, Read more ...
ash.smyth
When the subversive graphic artist Sarnath Banerjee won a MacArthur grant he opted "to research the sexual landscape of contemporary Indian cities", embroiling himself in the aphrodisiac market of old Delhi and introducing the English reading public to the great Hindi word swarnadosh (erm, "nocturnal emissions"). Banerjee (b. 1972) is generally credited with having introduced the graphic novel to India. Incorrectly, as it happens; but with Corridor (2004) and The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers (2007) – over and above his work as illustrator, publisher and film-maker – the Goldsmiths-trained Read more ...
ash.smyth
The subversive artist and film-maker Sarnath Banerjee, credited with introducing the graphic novel to India, features in a London show, Royale With Cheese, at Aicon Gallery, 8 Heddon Street, London W1, where his eight-scene graphic narrative Che in Africa is displayed. You can see it here. And read the interview with him here: "I’m very interested in the disreputable men of history, especially the Big Men in Africa – the leaders known as the grandes légumes..."
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Royale With Cheese is at Aicon Gallery, 8 Heddon Street, London W1 until 3 April
Sarnath Banerjee's Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Christmas ballet would be unthinkable without The Nutcracker. But what kind of Christmas should it be? This year the UK fields an astonishing array of visions, from Biedermeier formality at the Royal Ballet, to Fanny and Alexander romanticism at Birmingham Royal Ballet, Elvis cartoons at English National Ballet, and expressionist German psychodrama at Scottish Ballet.Three of Britain's most famous designers, Gerald Scarfe, Antony McDonald and John F Macfarlane, talk here about their preoccupations as they set about picturing the fairytale ballet, and in the gallery elsewhere see a fabulous Read more ...