Every Friday Chris Robinson unleashes improvised and hastily scribbled cheer or loathing on the animation community to be digested, swallowed or... expelled. This week: something very important.
Enough with the frivolities, it’s time we get serious here at the Factory. Enough with the petty moaning about inconsequential matters like festival fees and crooked distributors or those tedious sociosexualracialgender issues. Let’s get to the REAL crux of what is ailing today’s animation artists: cats.
I don’t know if it's Otto Mesmer’s fault, but since that feline Felix first appeared, there’s been no stopping the infiltration of those putrid pussies on the animation landscape. Year in and year out we’re sprayed with endless odes to those desthpicable cats kittens pussycats. That there are more cat films than films of romance and sensuality leaves me sad. That there are more odes to cats than the far superior dog strikes me as, to quote my loyal brilliant but irate pug, Pookie, “a travesty of a mockery of a sham of a mockery of a travesty of two mockeries of a sham.”
Understand, I wrote this not for me, but out of deeper concern for the well-being of animators. This meowddiction suggests that many animators are living lonely isolated lives void of human contact. I worry for you. I worry for your heart. It will be broken. You just can’t trust felines. They’re feckless fuckers who know they’re better than you and can play you with the mastery of a carnival huckster. I encourage you to open the front door of your one room apartments and RUN…RUN as far as you can from those narcissistic menaces. They will steal your food, your money and then they will heist your souls, leaving you alone and sobbing in the basement as you madly and obsessively sift through their shitbox in search of your broken remains. As the great tennis judge Ralph Ziffer once advised underwear legend, Bjorn Borg, "Come to know what is in front of you, and that which is hidden from you will become clear to you."
So, please, I beg you, stop celebrating these vicious unappreciative beasts. They don’t deserve it. You don’t deserve it. We don’t deserve it. I don’t deserve it.
A well-known figure in the world of independent animation, writer, author & curator Chris Robinson is the Artistic Director of the Ottawa International Animation Festival.
