Simple Message= Simple Cartoon

Most people think of Saturday morning loony toons and Disney when they think of cartoons, yet some cartoons are meant to make you rethink your lifestyle. Adbusters.org, a self proclaimed journal for the mental environment sponsored a a “Slow Down Week,” in January of 2006. To promote and spread the week, artists created short cartoon. The “Won’t You Slow Down a Bit,” cartoon blazons a relatively simple message, by using a relatively simple cartoon concept.

The cartoon is mostly drawn in black and white, and the main character of the piece is a stick figure that could easily be drawn by Flash’s pencil tool. Although this might seem like an “easy way out,” the choice to implement stick figures actually broadens the message to everyone. Four and five year olds draw stick figures to represent people. Stick people have no color, ethnicity, religion or other definitions that more thorough or ‘realistic’ cartoon animation might carry. The choice of using a stick figure to depict the average working man, who wakes up early in the morning to sit in traffic, work nine hours and shortchange his wife, universalizes the message.

Also, the fact that it appears to be drawn by a young person, underlines the elementary observation that some people work too hard.
The cartoon character wakes up as his alarm clock on the left side of the screen, a ubiquitous symbol throughout the cartoon. His black eyes are highlighted by vein marks drawn by red lines, this is the only other color in the cartoon. The cartoon wakes up and stares out at the viewer, as his bed and hair kind of move in a liveliness that does not mimic real life, but further drives home the elementary aesthetic of the piece. It also undertones the motif that everyone is in constant motion, without even thinking about it. This element of liveliness in what would otherwise be still shots comes through throughout the piece, in the car the character drives to his desk and the drive-thru window.

The piece is relatively easy to do on flash, I feel like it would take a lot of time, but once the foundation is laid, it could be easily accomplished, by saving certain symbols and setting key frames, I think I could “slow down a bit,” to create a similar flash cartoon.