The Banned Animation Before YouTube (Rejected)

➡ The Cartoon Cabal is a place where animated secrets are discovered and discussed. The article talks about a short film called “Rejected” by Don Hertzfeld, which is a collection of bizarre, humorous animations that were supposedly rejected commercials. The film, released around 2000, is considered a starting point for internet humor. Despite its simple stick figure artwork, it effectively conveys complex ideas and has had a significant influence on animation and humor.
➡ The text discusses the experience of watching and creating animations, focusing on the details and effort that go into the process. The speaker appreciates the human touch in animations, like crumpling paper for a scene, and the importance of small details, like the expression in a character’s eyes. They also discuss the difference between actively watching something versus having it on in the background, and how this impacts the viewing experience. Lastly, they touch on the potential of AI in animation, but express that it might lack the substance and coherence of human-created content.
➡ The speaker discusses their attention span when watching movies or stories, stating that they easily get distracted if the content isn’t engaging. They mention an animation they found clever, created by a 23-year-old, and the costs associated with making such a project. The speaker also talks about their show, Cartoon Cabal, and encourages listeners to support them. Lastly, they share some lyrics from a song, possibly their own, which seems to express their feelings about their work and life.

People have tics coming out of their nipples, or someone’s anus is bleeding. So much for the finding games at the Cartoon Cabal. Beyond what’s just in the name at the Cartoon Cabal. See just at what cost comes name at the Cartoon Cabal. So much for the finding games at the Cartoon Cabal. Hello, welcome to the Cartoon Cabal where we bop around the animated world to find what weird secrets that we will. Isn’t that here? Over there it’s a paranoid American. How’s it going? Feeling rejected? Well now watch as angry tics come out of my nipples.

Yeah, there’s an animation for you. Animation we get today and Don Hertzfeld’s rejected. One of the reasons I brought this up is we were talking about Evangelion here, right? In the final episodes, the weird breakdown of animation kept making me think of this short film. Interesting segue in connection. Okay, I understand though. Yeah, as everything turns into weird squiggles because Aniva obviously was animated and then a lot of stills and then just the animatics. We didn’t quite get down to the schizophrenic squiggles that Rejected does, but that’s part of the joke here. Have you seen this film before? First time.

I feel like I recognize the artwork, but I’m not familiar by name, but I feel like I’ve seen it before. Okay, I was pretty much on the train. This was released maybe around 2000. It’s one of those things that at the time would show in animation festivals and stuff, right? 25 years, 26 years ago. But here’s why this film is kind of important. About five years later, YouTube starts, right? YouTube at the time only does what, 10 minute videos? This isn’t just under 10 minutes. Bootleg copies. This is sort of the ground zero, I think, for internet humor.

And that’s not my personal thought. That’s kind of like a general statement, I think. Okay. I’m surprised this one flew by my radar. I definitely saw some edgier things. This feels like kind of vanilla funny, like YouTube friendly sort of edgy humor. No, I mean, this does get to the point where it’s like there’s some of this in the family of an actor. I know I showed it to my wife probably when we were dating or whatever. So my spoon is too big or I am a banana or common phrases around the house.

My anus is bleeding, hopefully a little less, but yeah, you know, people have issues sometimes. That’s one of those things you don’t want to cry wolf too often because if you really have a problem and you shout that out, you want someone to take you seriously. But that’s kind of the weird existential dread of this thing, right? Everyone’s happy. Everyone’s dancing and this one guy’s anus is bleeding and then he drowns in the sea of his anal blood. Yeah, but that’s just him, man. It seems like things get worse for everyone at a certain point because then the universe implodes.

Yeah. And before he hit the record, you’re kind of asking, did this guy actually, Darren Hertzfeld actually do commercial work? Which the answer is no, this is a, you know, a completely artistic endeavor. It’s not, he was not making bizarre commercials for any of these people. What is it? It’s like the family life channel. Is that even a real channel? It sounds real enough. I’m sure it is by now, but so let me, I guess, let me give a quick recap because this was the first time that I saw it, but it’s pitched as if these are all rejected commercials that various companies have approached this artist to make, you know, little animations for them, like quick little things to put between shows or I guess online or something.

But every single one of them completely deteriorates rapidly where again, people have ticks coming out of their nipples or someone’s anus is bleeding or, you know, like you said, 2000 internet comedies. So like kind of the edgy stuff that you couldn’t really get away with on TV at this point. And that’s the whole premise. It’s a conceptually, it’s a whole bunch of these rejected commercials, but none of them were real. And most people probably realize that right off the bat. But again, I’m the person that thought that the guess who piece is actually talked back to you.

So I’m a little slower. I think everyone was like slightly confused when they first saw this. This is a world like, you know, around 2000 DVD explosion is happening and you would get like weird little compilations of things like this. Or I remember going at my university, you know, going to a few, going to a few screenings of, you know, film festivals and stuff. So I don’t know. Do people still do film festivals like that? Short film festivals? Or is it all just YouTube now? No, they definitely do. They’ve got one in or I mean, they’ve got one in every city, every major city.

Okay. So yeah, that’s the thing. I grew up in Atlanta. So we’ve talked a lot of Pixar. I remember actually seeing Pixar shorts in like the late 80s and early 90s, because we go, you know, downtown and see one of the, see the animation film festivals and they’d show like 10 toy or something. So I used to have this kind of thing somewhat on my radar. So I actually really appreciated this. And I think it’s a good testament to how even just stick figure artwork and animation can clearly convey complex ideas.

Like you don’t need Evangelion style mech explosions and tiny little detail. It’s cool. But again, if you’re bringing up that comparison, it’s like, they could have saved some money in the first 20 episodes and it wouldn’t have had to have devolved into stick figures if they knew how to manage everything. This one, I really, I like this one. You’re forced to stay in a tiny little limitation and figure out your way around that because this one, as it devolves, since you can’t really sketch an explosion or sketch the universe imploding in this style, the paper starts getting crumpled and wrinkled and like waves going through it.

And it just looked amazing. Like it was a great use of this medium. And I’m surprised 25 years old already, right? That I haven’t really seen this particular effect done as well. No. And this was Hertzfeld stick. He had done another short film shorter and this called Billy’s balloon, which got some attention, has the same style of humor, but this is kind of taking it and, you know, like maximum, maximizing it. Sorry. I don’t know if I said that right or not, but yeah, but Hertzfeld got enough attention though. He’s still creating short films, things like that.

He has not broken through into any mainstream, except he did some Simpsons. I think he did like the one of the title screens for the Simpsons, you know, where they all sit down on the couch once or something. Like it’s in one of the actual episodes around that period. So what, what was the skit that like sold you on this and early internet culture? We were like, Oh my God, I have to watch this a thousand more times now. Well, it’s still good. It’s still funny. It did used to be a lot edgier when you’re in university and around the year 2000 that skits played, right? Yeah, I get, I don’t know.

In 2000 people were showing me like rotten.com and like maybe I had worse influence circles than you. That might’ve been it. I think we are more like video store like Athens, Georgia. He had a video drone and video gallery and just weird independent VHS stores, you know, and then you would just rent things and then have your two VCRs and make your crappy copy of a weird sixties caught movie. So this was kind of in that zone. You’d have like the weird VHS copy of this. I appreciate that. I wish I would have had that experience for some reason, my life experience, like people want to show me some pretty horrific things sometimes.

And I don’t want to see it most of the time, but I guess I just, I have a face that someone wants to see something crazy. No, this is definitely a film. Like we’ve built a gravity bong. We’re not moving from this spot on the wall. So it’s time to watch Don Hertzfeld’s rejected, you know, for 10 minutes. It sounds pretty quick, man. Well, after that, you can get off the wall. And what do we do? Oh, here’s, here’s the other thing. This is my, my university roommate. One, we build a gravity bong and then he’d get a go on the keyboard and I get on my guitar and make eye contact.

And we had an act called the mood farmers. We, we thought we should go in the local holiday ends and people are like, give us a mood, right? And then we make eye contact and we play the mood, right? That was our, that was our thing. We weren’t a real band that played real gigs, but the moon farmers never actually happened. Should have probably, then we wouldn’t have been successful. I think this is where the age thing starts to separate us a little bit more, right? Cause 2000, I think I’m just playing cool borders or cool borders too on PlayStation for most of that year.

Yeah. That see, I’m already in university. I’m being a hipster. You know, I’m trying not to watch TV. I don’t have a TV in my house. And I mean, well stations, we had a VCR player and you know, for to play weird bootleg tapes off of, so that was easier to take a stand against when there was only like 20 channels. And then like 12 of those were TLC and USA. But we were Simpson’s fans. I remember us like strategizing where we would eat dinner on Sunday night. So we know we’d be at a restaurant that would be playing the Simpson.

So we could like eat, you know, a slice of pizza while watching the Simpsons. Cause we didn’t have terrestrial TV. When, when I saw this tune and I had no idea this was 2000, like this could have been five years ago, probably new. So knowing it’s 2000, I feel like it’s kind of also on par with like an aqua teen hunger force sort of humor level. Like it would have been in that block. I think this is kind of the genesis of this. Maybe space goes coast to coast was on TV at this time, but this is, this was kind of a sensation.

And I think this is the genesis for that kind of humor, which was on cartoon central for a few years and then kind of morphed over to a YouTube or daily motion or wherever you are, you know? Okay. I mean, I liked it. I think I recommend it. I’d recommend it to someone else, especially as a 10 minute investment. It’s pretty serviceable. Just taking a look through my notes here. Of course, we get our Beethoven or Mozart or whatever. Nice pompous music, which helps. Well, it’s fun. You have the, you know, giant orchestral pieces with, with stick figure animation.

You, you, you’re an animator, but you say you can’t draw. Could you do this? I believe so. Yeah. I mean, when I say I can’t draw, what I usually mean is that like, when I draw something, I don’t like it. And I’m, and I’m such a perfectionist that I realized that I would spend a month getting done. What I know, if someone else hired me to do it, I could probably get it done way faster. But when it’s for me, I can’t ever finish something. So I have like, I usually just rely on other artists I know to do the things that I care about the most.

So, and eventually you do that long enough and I just stop drawing my own stuff because I fall in love with other people’s stuff. That’s, I mean, I do music and that’s what’s happened happened with lyrics. I think not too long ago, I actually tried to sit down and write some lyrics. I’m like, Oh, I can’t really do this anymore without some practice because I haven’t done this for 10 years. Right. And, and also, I mean, there’s so many other good lyrics, unless you really, really have a passion, like you need to do it.

It’s not wrong. They shop something out. If, if you know someone that can do better than you, I mean, I think that’s, so this one, yeah, I think I could, but honestly, that was one of the first things that went through my mind, especially when it got to the wrinkled sections, most specifically the crumpled paper section. And I was like, damn, I wonder how many pieces of paper they actually had to crumple physically in order to get all of those different frames. Because if I had to guess, this is probably at least 12 frames per second.

So that one little segment where it’s crumpled, it’s probably at least like five or six seconds long. So we’re talking close to a hundred pieces of wrinkled paper plus drawing on each one. There could have been after effects, special stuff going on. It like made that all easier. But when you add just that tiny little five second clip and think that you had to crump up a bunch of pieces of paper and then draw on them and then animate them and then use onion skinning or, you know, a before and after frame to make sure that they all line up because they do.

That’s not just like a quick little afternoon thing. That’s like a weekend thing. You know, hopefully had an intern that could be a crumpler for him, you know, five or six interns that are crumplers. Yeah. I mean, you really do have the feeling this is a guy in his basement and he was Don Hertzfeld was like 23 or something making this like he, it wasn’t like he was a grizzled animator at that point, you know, you know, AI can’t crumple paper yet. So there’s, there’s like a nice little human touch to something.

Yeah. And even with all the stick figures, like obviously there’s a lot in the eyes of these characters, sometimes aliens stealing the eyes out of these characters. But I do feel like a lot of what needs to come through comes through through the eyes of these various stick figure characters. The other thing too that I think is interesting to know is that I can’t imagine this getting any less detailed and still making sense. It feels like the absolute bare minimum you need to have convey like, Oh, that’s a person. Oh, that’s a blood coming out of their anus.

Like if, if you were to remove any extra level of detail, so it’s interesting to just see like how far could you push this? I’m sure someone could make it even more minimalistic, but at a certain point it like loses the fact that it’s an actual cartoon and then it would start being like artsy. You know what I mean? Well, I do, I mean, again, this was playing at film festivals and stuff, so it does have a little bit of an arty bent to it, you know? Well, I guess the end too, specifically when it turns into mixed media mode, that’s definitely like art house style.

Yeah. That’s kind of what I’m getting at with the YouTube generation, modern internet comedy. Like this set, this seems very, like this would have seemed way weirder in 2000 and now, now, you know, your YouTube algorithm at least has one video along this line for you. Unfortunately, I do think AI could probably be trained on his art style like without sweating too much. You know what I mean? Yeah, but I mean, some of the things that have been coming through recently, like I always mentioned I’m a Star Trek fan, so I haven’t clicked on it, but I see it because it’s playing the AI video of someone walking around and taking selfies with every crew from every show.

And I’m like, there’s one of friends or someone tried to like recreate friends. So all the characters look almost right, but not quite. And then all the beats are correct. Like, oh, 30% of the show is people bursting through apartment doors and saying something mildly amusing. And then someone responds, blah, blah. But, you know, the construction is all wrong. There’s no substance there, right? So it’s now just like everything’s on time and happening on time, but none of it makes sense anymore, which this that way you would lose. So then you just have complete incoherence, which is the end of this rejected.

Anyway, I feel like this might evolve into a similar conversation as people that are like, no, you have to listen to vinyl or 24 bit. And someone’s like, eh, this 128, you know, stream seems good enough for me. Like, I don’t really care about the difference. There could be people that are like, eh, this Seinfeld episode that like nothing’s making sense because it’s all AI generated. I don’t really care because Seinfeld usually doesn’t make sense anyways. So you could just have an infinite 24 hour stream that never stops of just random Seinfeld episode, like an infinite Seinfeld.

I guess that’s part of the difference between actively watching something and say having things on the background. I only recently realized like in the past couple of years, when people say I’ve seen this TV show and I’ve seen this TV show, they kind of probably had on the background. They were doing something else. For me, I don’t say I watch something unless I like actively watched it. So, yeah, I’m definitely guilty of that. There’s, but there’s, there’s no way around it. There’s no way I’m going to not be distracted for like, uh, like an hour even.

Well, I might watch in a couple chunks, but you, I mean, when I watch things for this, I’m taking notes. When I watch things even, you know, for fun, when I don’t need to do something for a podcast, I am like paying full attention to it, right? I’m not doing something else. If I want to do something else, I will turn it off and go do something else. But I feel like it factors into how good a movie or a TV show or medium consuming is also how little I get distracted by other things.

Like if it’s legitimately good, even if it’s boring, even if like, there’s not a lot visually going on, if it’s a legitimately good movie or a story, then I don’t get distracted. But if there’s even a little bit of love, they’ve even gets into like, Oh, what feels like filler, uh, I might, you might lose me to my phone pretty quickly or a million other things. Yeah. So I guess the difference for me is I tend to turn off whatever I’m watching when that happens. And it’s like, I’ll get to it later.

Or maybe I half watch a movie. I never finish it. You know, there are things I’ve never finished. This one’s easy to finish 10 minutes. Um, then we’ve been talking for 17 now, so I guess we’ll wind it down. But, uh, I’m left handed. So my left handed animation would be better. Uh, this is how the world ends, not with a bang, but with weirdly cheap animation and existential pounding. Okay. Now that basically takes me through my notes, the existential pound. That’s probably my favorite part of this entire animation is there’s like a little stick figure guy.

That’s like knocking on the glass of the TV, essentially. And every time he like hits it, you see wrinkles, like emitting from his hand. And it looks like he’s trying to like punch through the screen again, like really freaking clever. I thought that was really, really well done. I mean, that’s the thing. This is, this one’s very clever and very clever for a 23 year old to make something like this. So it’s clearly, you know, I mean, it costs a little more money and you think it did probably, I mean, someone probably had to support this, but it’s still cheap.

You know, I mean, I’ve, I’ve got friends that are making 10 minute long animations right now and entering them in film festivals. And I mean, we’re talking five figures, you know, even if it’s like mid to low end five figures, that is not a insignificant amount of money. And I guess if you scaled this to 2000s inflation, maybe it’s we’re talking 50 bucks. Any final thoughts you want to throw on this one? Just another great episode of Cartoon Cabal. If you liked this episode and you want to see more, send us a million Bitcoin or else the dog or else the dog dies.

No nipple picks though. We don’t want nipple picks. I’ll, I’ll take some nipple. Okay, it’ll take a few. Two cars, say you’re back. Need that print. Nod your head. Give consent. Buy a comic three or four. Think the start. I want more. Buy a sticker from the store. Think the start. I want more. Just buy something. Just buy something. From paranoid American. Just buy something. Just buy something. From paranoid American. I scribble my life away. Driven the right to pay. Will it enlighten your brain? Give you the flight, McLean. Tape of the highs ablaze. Somewhat of an amazing feel.

When it’s real to real, you will engage it. Your favorite of course, the lord of an arrangement. I gave you the proper results to hit the pavement. If they get emotional, hey, maybe a language a game. How they playing it well without lay cause of a then. Whatever the cause, they are the shape shift. Snakes get decapitated, met is the apex. Execution aflame, you out nuclear bomb. Distributed at war, rather gruesome for eyes to see. Max them out then I light my trees. Blow it off in the face, you’re despising me. For what though? Calculated and rather cutthroat.

Paranoid American must be all the blood, smoke for real. Lord give me a day, your way vacate. They ain’t wait around to hate, whatever they say. Man it’s not in the least bit, we get heavy rotate when the beat hits. So thank us, you owe fuck the niggas for real. You’re welcome. They ain’t never had a deal. You’re welcome. Man they lack an appeal. You’re welcome. Yet they doing it still. You’re welcome. [tr:trw].