Web Gems: Not constricted by content or format, Webtoons splash across Internet

Kirk Baird

Monday, Nov. 15, 2004 | 8:25 a.m.

The Internet was supposed to change animation. With no restrictions, cartoons on the Internet were edgier in both content and style than what was being shown on TV and in films. Plus, with design software tools such as Macromedia's Flash and Adobe Illustrator, Webtoons were easy and cheap to make.

Not to mention with the click of a mouse, Internet surfers had access to any number of Webtoon sites, such as www.icebox.com, www.atomfilms.com and www.wildbrain.com. The dot-com bust, though, changed all of that.

Most of the animation sites went belly-up, as revenue from advertisers vanished as quickly as it appeared. Other companies went dormant, often for years, until they found alternative forms of financing usually through the merchandising of their products.

The Internet animation business "became the poster child for the dot-com bust," said John Evershed, founder and chief executive of Mondo Media, a San Francisco-based Internet animation company.

"Even an episode of 'The Simpsons' was poking fun at us, handing out (Internet company) stocks as toilet paper," he said. "It's an exciting business to be had. We just had to hang in there and grit our teeth."

Evershed's perseverance paid off, though, as it did for all of the Internet animation companies that managed to stick around.

Web animation is enjoying a resurgence, thanks to a healthier dot-com industry, as well as the increasing speed of Internet connections, namely broadband, which allows for watching bigger and better-looking animation files at a fraction of the dial-up modem download time.

Monda Media's "Happy Tree Friends," an adult-oriented Webtoon involving cute forest animals that meet a graphically gruesome demise, began life as a 60-second animated short on the Internet four years ago. Webtoons on the site www.happytreefriends.com are now viewed 15 million times a month.

"Happy Tree Friends" has even expanded beyond the Web to regular airings on MTV Europe and Asia, as well into the world of merchandising, including DVDs, T-shirts, plush toys, action figures (in either cute or bloody versions), lunchboxes, buttons, mints, shoelaces, magnets, keychains and lip gloss.

Meanwhile, Santa Monica, Calif.-based JibJab Media's political parody Webtoons, www.jibjab.com, were viewed more than 80 million times by Netizens all around the globe.

Driving most of the Internet traffic to the site was "This Land," a song parody of Woody Guthrie's classic, "This Land is Your Land," featuring animated versions of President Bush and then-presidential candidate John Kerry taking comical shots at each other.

"The piece was extremely popular, so much so that it caused our Web servers to come crashing down," said Gregg Spiridellis, co-founder and president of JibJab Media, via e-mail. "In July we did three times the traffic of both presidential candidates' Web sites -- combined."

Popular links

The success of both "Happy Tree Friends" and "This Land" is indicative of most of the popular animated Webtoons, in that they rely more on word of mouth than traditional advertising to attract viewers.

Typically, that word of mouth is in the form of an e-mail link to a Website that's passed along to friends, family and co-workers.

"The Net is such an efficient, viral medium," Evershed said. "If I like something, I'm telling my friends. I get those (e-mails) all the time at work, friends send something that's cool on the Internet. It's almost like the audience becomes your marketing."

The fact Webtoons aren't restricted by content or beholden to advertisers also gives them an advantage over their television and film counterparts.

"With the Internet you're really able to appeal to certain niche audiences and don't have to worry about how an advertiser greets it," Ramin Zahed, editor of Animation magazine, said. "You can really create a following for yourself ... especially for edgy products that push the envelopes that you wouldn't be able to air on national television during prime time."

And, unlike traditional animation, Internet animation is easy and fairly inexpensive to create.

Kenn Navarro, co-creator of "Happy Tree Friends," was trained in traditional cell animation in college. While at Mondo Media, he made the switch to computer-based programs such as Flash for creating cartoons.

What once took him weeks or even months, drawing and coloring animation cells by hand for a minute's worth of footage, can be done in days and even hours using a computer.

Navarro can't imagine using anything but Flash for animation.

"You no longer have someone sitting in a room waiting for the cell to dry. It's all done by computer, which frees you up to do all of the fun stuff," he said. "I use Flash for everything these days -- even work documents. It's pretty sad."

Flash work

While Flash was written as software to create computer animation, it's by no means limited to the Web.

No doubt fueled by the cost-effectiveness of the software, animation studios are creating their own Flash-based cartoons, including new shows such as "Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends" and "Atomic Betty," both on the Cartoon Network.

"Flash animation really helped drive the next generation of animated series on television," Zahed said. "Since they're made much cheaper, they have allowed companies to do work in-house instead of doing it overseas."

But it's not just animation companies that are benefiting from the savings.

Software such as Flash has made creating cartoons affordable for independent filmmakers as well.

"Just about anybody can do it," said Gus Sorola, a 26-year-old Austin, Texas, filmmaker and co-founder of Rooster Teeth Productions.

"Almost any software we use, people can go into Best Buy, buy it and make their own videos."

Rooster Teeth is the company behind the popular "Red Vs Blue" Web series.

As cinematic as it is animated, "Red Vs Blue" is the often slapstick chronicles of a group of red- and blue-colored soldiers from the video and computer game "Halo: Combat Evolved."

The digital characters are manipulated in the game according to the storyline and recorded to video, with pre-recorded dialogue then added. It's a relatively new style of animation called "machinima" -- a combination of the words machine and animation -- which uses video games or pre-rendered environments to create film.

"James Cameron actually used machinima for blocking scenes in 'Titanic,' " Sorola said.

While machinima may be too cultish for mainstream tastes, having "Red Vs Blue" on the Internet -- www.redvsblue.com -- has allowed the series, now up to its 43rd episode, to build an audience.

When the "Red Vs Blue" Web site was launched in April 2003, Sorola said he was hoping to receive a thousand hits a day. By the second day, the site received triple that amount. And by the end of the month the site was generating 50,000 hits daily.

Rooster Teeth no longer bothers counting the number of hits to its site. Rather, it measures the number of times a video is downloaded. When "Red Vs Blue" is in production, the videos are downloaded anywhere from 800,000 to 1 million times a week.

Although videos of "Red Vs Blue" are available for free, Rooster Teeth makes money from its $10 premium-service fee for members to download high-quality videos of the series, as well as sales of "Red Vs Blue" DVDs and T-shirts.

While Sorola doesn't understand the cultish appeal of "Red Vs Blue," the show's success has allowed Rooster Teeth to create another machinima series, "The Strangerhood," a sitcom spoof using characters from the hit simulation game "Sims 2."

But the popularity of "Red Vs Blue" would not have been possible without the Internet.

"What we do is more akin to a weekly radio series, with cliffhangers to draw people in," he said. "It's weird. Television killed radio and here we are on the Internet doing what radio used to do.

"I'm not claiming we're going to kill television, but it's weird the way it cycles."

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