As my second blog post, I thought it fitting to address the origin story of the creator of another piece of animation that lies close to my heart, Adventure Time with Finn and Jake.
Pendleton Ward grew up in San Antonio, Texas, with his mother, Bettie Ward, and found a creative focus early in life. Around age seven or eight, Pen learned the basics of cartoon animation. “As soon as I figured out the secret of moving drawings, I was hooked. I knew what I wanted to do.”
Bettie, a painter, immersed Pen in the visual arts. She arranged for animation instructors to lecture to the students at the North East School of the Arts in San Antonio, which Pen attended. At home, doodling Post-it-note flip-books was his favourite activity. “I was really into post-apocalyptic movies and worlds, and I did a lot of flip books about that kind of thing.”
It wasn’t the family-friendly films from Disney or slapstick cartoon shorts from Warner Bros., MGM, or Fleischer that inspired Pen. “When you’re a kid, you’re trying to make sense out of stuff, and you’re trying to be older.” The adult humour of The Simpsons, the grittiness of superhero comics, and the fantasy adventure of video and role-playing games provided the thrilling themes that helped Pen aspire to maturity.
Pen’s childhood Simpsons– watching habit was so devout that his mother’s most effective method of punishment was not to say “No TV!” but instead, “No Simpsons!”
Pen would spend hours looking at pages of comic-book heroes while imagining what it’d be like to have their powers and how he’d use them. An obscure cartoon image that stuck in Pen’s memory was an anthropomorphic inkblot in Ralph Bakshi’s 1992 film Cool World. Starring Kim Basinger as a cartoon femme fatale desperate to become real and interact with humans, this film had the PG-13 sensibilities that roused young imaginations. During the climactic scene, Basinger opens a portal to the cartoon world with the “spike of power,” releasing undulating ribbons and blobs of inky energy with screaming faces. “This one blot, it had a face that opened its mouth and kept opening its mouth until the lips wrapped around its entire face… inverting the face and revealing a new face… it blew my brains out. It left me wondering how that creature worked.” Though only on screen for a few seconds. This imagery fascinated Pen. The surreal possibilities of expressive cartoon animation were not lost on him, and – in this film’s context – he saw that they could even be “a serious thing, and part of a serious world.”
In junior high school, the role playing game Dungeons & Dragons was a sandbox in which Pen and friends could create imaginative stories. Illustrated dungeon guides provided information about scads of wild fantasy creatures – orcs, chimeras, carrion crawlers, dryads, dragons, cloud giants, flesh golems, were bears, orche jellies, jellies, shriekers and shambling mounds among others. Improvised adventure stories were collaboratively written as they were played.
During his high school years, Pen attended an animation summer camp on the CalArts campus: the California State Summer School for the Arts. In this competitive program for highly motivated students, Pen found a mentor in instructor and animator Cornelius “Corny” Cole. Corny screened his film Heaven and Hell, a tour de force of intricate drawings in constant movement depicting dark, violent acts from prehistory through atomic carnage. For Pen, the film became a pillar of animated achievement that he would re-watch year after year. “It’s an awesome and overwhelming film that really blew my mind open. When I saw it in high school I cried because his drawings are so beautiful and they’re flashing by you at something like eight frames per second. I tried making artful life-drawing films in college, but I couldn’t pull it off. I was better at making funny nonsense.”
Conal's Blog 