After amalgamating almost all of the artwork I made during my school years into my portfolio archive, I decided to make some blog posts featuring my best works from over the years.
I’ve always been interested in cartoons – as a kid, I would often fast-forward my Disney VHS tapes to the end to watch “The Making Of” featurettes, as they fascinated me even more than the movies themselves. And watching TV series such as Rocko’s Modern Life, Little Bear, and Fairly Odd Parents was something I looked forward to every day after school.
I re-watched many of those shows and movies into adulthood and continued to study the animation, really trying to understand how they were put together (although I’m not even ashamed to admit that I still genuinely enjoy well-made children’s cartoons, and not just to “study”). Many of my childhood favourites have withstood the test of time, and some are actually more enjoyable to watch as an adult (Rocko’s Modern Life is often considered to be an adult show disguised as a kid’s cartoon). And of course Disney, Dreamworks, and Studio Ghibli are renowned for capturing the hearts of everyone in the family, no matter their age.
Growing up in an animation renaissance in the 90s and 00s, it’s no surprise that my generation developed a penchant for animated media. As it turned out, this created the perfect conditions for another golden age some 20 years later.
As far as kids shows go, we now have things like Steven Universe, We Bare Bears, Bee and PuppyCat, and My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic; I hardly need to say anything about the quality and wide appeal of these shows.
And series such as BoJack Horseman, Helluva Boss, The Midnight Gospel, Rick and Morty, and Aggretsuko have taken centre stage as their adult animation predecessors fade away into obscurity. Mainstream adult cartoons can no longer be regarded simply as long strings of visual gags and pop-culture references; we have now almost come to expect complex plot archs, meaningful character development, and explorations of brave and bold themes and philosophies.
Okay, I’m done name-dropping my favourite shows. This post is about Moggy.
I made this animation in 2011, when I was 17 years old, for my high school computer graphics class. I’ve learned a lot about art and animation since then: I did 2 years of fine arts at uni, and I have continued to closely study my favourite shows and the people who made them from a professional perspective. At the time of Moggy’s creation, I still didn’t really have a grasp on things like anatomy, colour theory, composition, and timing keyframes. Not to mention, I severely underestimated how much work was involved in drawing every frame and background in a three-minute-long video. As you can see, I had to cut some corners in the frame-rate to get the project done by the due date.
And yet… I am still really proud of this. For how little technical knowledge I had back then, I accomplished a lot by myself!
These days I have a particular interest in the current wave of independent cartoon shows that are being produced – with platforms like YouTube and Patreon and a variety of opensource software programs, the barrier to entry in producing a quality series are lower than ever. It will be interesting to see how this will change the animation field in the coming years.