By Suzanne Sprague
DALLAS – (The story opens with the theme music to "King of the Hill.")
Suzanne Sprague, KERA 90.1 Reporter: For some families, this is the soundtrack to their Sunday evenings. It's the theme music to "King of the Hill," featuring Hank Hill - the husband, father and purveyor of propane who mimics the typical, or perhaps stereotypical, middle-aged Texas male. Stylistically, this animated series is geared for young people. But its humor is aimed directly at adults.
Clip from "King of the Hill":Neighbor: Who wants to go play miniature golf Friday night? Two dollars off!Hank Hill: Sorry, but that's the night of the Abstinence Dance. I promised Luann I'd help her and Rhett chaperone. You know, make sure the kids have a good time, but not a great one.
Bart Weiss, Director, Dallas Video Festival: Clearly, there is a - particularly in "King of the Hill" - a very Texas kind of humor that we don't generally see that. Yeah, they're kind of funny and goofy, but still there's something sort of dignified in that kind of goofy humor. It's kind of wonderful.
Sprague: Dallas Video Festival Director Bart Weiss was part of the committee that chose "King of the Hill" creator Mike Judge for special honors at this year's festival. The Festival has featured animated videos throughout its 14-year history. And Mike Judge is not the first animator it's singled out, but his award follows an almost exponential growth in the animation industry during the 1990s.
Heather Kenyon, Editor-in-Chief, Animation World Network: We have cartoon shows on cable. We have cartoons on television. We have cartoons in feature films out there. We have them on the Internet.
Sprague: Heather Kenyon is the editor-in-chief of Animation World Network [www.awn.com], an on-line magazine. She credits one 1994 blockbuster movie with this trend in animation.
Kenyon: "Lion King" made a billion dollars (laughs), to put it really bluntly. "Lion King" made so much money that everybody really stood up and paid attention and was suddenly like, "My God, look, we can make a billion dollars if we make an animated film."
Sprague: There are now enough animated films released each year that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is expected to award its first Oscar for best animated movie next year. Kenyon admits animation doesn't make the same kind of money on television, but she believes that's where the trends in animation begin. And according to Festival Director Bart Weiss, the latest course appears to defy the notion that cartoons are just for kids.
Weiss: There is a trend more recently of more animated work that's meant for adults. You grew up watching animation. It's part of the way you think about media and television. So as you grow older, it's part of the things that people making media will present to you.
Sprague: People like Keith Alcorn.
Keith Alcorn, Co-Owner, DNA Productions: That's Fat Man. That's what we did for "The Weird Al Show."
Sprague: Alcorn is the co-owner of DNA Productions in Irving and the creator of the animated shorts "Nanna and Little Puss Puss," a perennial favorite at the Dallas Video Festival.
Alcorn: Nanna is an old woman, and she has this cat, and they don't necessarily like each other, but they put up with each other because they're all each other has. And it's just kind of their misadventures, adult misadventures.
Clip from "Nanna and Little Puss Puss":Nanna: Oh, Puss Puss. I've never felt worse. I'm 88 years old. I've been widowed for 68 years. I can't find my teeth. And my boobs hang like snot on my chest. Mother of God, I'm depressed.
Sprague: We can't air a lot of what Nanna says. In fact, a "Nanthology" of the cartoons scheduled to run at the Video Festival carries a "not recommended for children" warning.
Alford: My mom's never seen them, and there's a couple of them I don't even show my wife because there's no point in hashing that (laughs).
Sprague: Animation is usually pretty edgy at festivals, since there's no commercial restrictions on what animators can create. But Heather Kenyon with Animation World Network says that doesn't mean cartoons always have to be funny.
Kenyon: There's animated films about child molestation. There's animated films about war and people having to leave their countries and - .a lot of the experimental animation, they're not telling a story, they're more kind of imparting a feeling or an impression.
Sprague: At the Dallas Video Festival this year, there's a 30-minute feature called "Still Life with Animated Dogs." It's a series of touching essays about one man's relationships with the dogs in his life. The animation is primitive and quick. It has nothing on "Toy Story" or "The Lion King," technically speaking. But it practically bleeds with sentimentality, as when the man remembers his sad years living in communist Czechoslovakia.
Clip from "Still Life with Animated Dogs":I kept a dog. He complicated my life, of course. And just to make things a little harder, I named him Roosevelt.
Weiss: It's really well-written. I mean, the piece works as a personal journey that's illustrated in a very personal kind of way.
Sprague: Again, Video Festival Director Bart Weiss.
Weiss: When you work with cameras, you have to work with crews and a lot of other people. But when you work with animation, you can work more singularly to create a division and a style and an impression, and it allows more of a poetic voice to come out.
Sprague: That's what "Still life with Animated Dogs" is: video poetry. Weiss says animators in this new century are more focused on such storytelling than on technology, even in an era of computer-generated graphics. That's evidenced by the reel of short animated videos that SIGGRAPH, the Special Interest Group for Computer Graphics, sends to the Dallas Festival each year. Carl Machover, a computer graphics consultant in New York, has been part of SIGGRAPH since its inception.
Carl Machover, Machover & Associates: And in the earlier years of that, as we were beginning to develop technology, people would applaud wildly when they saw fabric moving in the breeze or they saw clouds of smoke being simulated - things they were never able to do before. Of course, now we take that for granted. And that becomes one of the building blocks to create a better story.
Sprague: On this year's tape, SIGGRAPH animators show how they make objects three-dimensional and cast shadows. And there's an elephant sequence you'd swear was real. But there's more storytelling than in the past, whether the subject is a post-modern Romeo or the state of our wildlife. The Dallas Video Festival continues through Sunday. For KERA 90.1, I'm Suzanne Sprague.