Canadian-born animator John Kricfalusi is perhaps best known for warping the minds of countless generations when he gave the world Ren & Stimpy in 1990. Never one to rest on his laurels, Kricfalusi launched the first internet cartoon in 1996 (The Goddamn George Liquor Program). In 2007, he collaborated with animation auteur Bill Plympton for The John & Bill Show. Most recently, Kricfalusi was honored with the Winsor McCay Award, one of the highest honors given to an individual in recognition of his lifetime contribution to the art of animation.

For the third installment of The Origins of Our Communication, John Kricfalusi discusses the first time the “world wide web” came into his life and how his vision for Flash animation revolutionized the industry, for better and for worse:
It was right after Ren and Stimpy. Jenny Lerew was telling me about these Ren and Stimpy Newsgroups and I didn’t know what the hell she was talking about. She invited me over and she printed out these old IBM computer sheets and tore them off for me to read. I was stunned.

Soon after, AOL called me and asked if I would make some content for them. This was around 1993. They gave me an account so I could get used to the net.

Shortly after that, Michelle Klein Haas started talking to me about “The World Wide Web” and I was getting mad. How many names are there for this internet crap? Then she showed me websites with images and stuff and it dawned on me that this would be the place to make cartoons without a network involved.

From Björk’s video for “I Miss You”, directed by John Kricfalusi

A couple years went by and AnnMarie McCarty came to Spumco looking for a job. She told me she was a Flash animator, whatever the hell that was. She showed me some Winnie the Pooh games and activities she had done for the Disney site and I said “Aha! I bet we can make real cartoons with this Flash thing!”

I hired her and we started experimenting. I remember the Flash manual at the time had nothing in it about animating cartoons and it said not to try to synch sound. We were hired by Microsoft Network to do a cartoon series and their Flash expert told us not to bother doing lip synch; that it was impossible. He told us a bunch of things were impossible so we went ahead and did everything he said not to and created the first internet cartoon series “The Goddamn George Liquor Program”. We also started “Weekend Pussy Hunt.”

I got a press agent and we started publicizing what we were doing and all of a sudden the Flash revolution began. Everyone jumped on the bandwagon: kids in their basements, big corporations, Dreamworks and Warner Bros. - everyone was doing Flash.

I hired 35 young artists one summer and trained them to use Flash. Those kids are now some of the top Flash animators in the business.

When we first started making Flash cartoons, everyone told me I was crazy, that the future of cartoons would always be TV. All the TV execs told me to stop it. Now they have hired all the folks I trained and almost all the TV cartoons today are being done in Flash, which is not at all what it’s designed for.”
Check out all kinds of stuff, John K.’s daily blog of animation lessons, musings, and histories

Previously in The Origins of Our Communication series.