Pimping animation
John Sekerka
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The Animation Pimp, by Chris Robinson (AWN), 368 pp.
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The Animation Festival's Pimp hustles his new book
It was late, real late. The soothing, crooning sounds of Holly Golightly can usually lull me into a sumptuous dream state, but not this time. An insistent pounding at the door disturbed Golightly's eardrum caress. It was the Pimp. The Animation Pimp. I never thought he'd show, but here he was. He had shambled over to my studio to hustle his new book, to pimp the Ottawa International Animation Festival and to just generally pimp - a role he's particularly good at. He was not wearing a hat or hiding behind sunglasses, as the cover of his book The Animation Pimp might suggest. No, the local author doesn't need to hide. Chris Robinson moves around in relative obscurity, 'cept of course when in the presence of animators, since they know the Pimp well. He has written about them, sometimes glowingly, sometimes harshly, but most always truthfully.
"The Animation Pimp was born in 2000 out of frustration of running the [Ottawa International Animation] Festival. I felt it was just one big meat market where everyone [in the industry] was whoring themselves for each other. What was I doing there? I was never big on cartoons and it seemed to be becoming a career. So I wrote a rant and pitched it to Animation World Network, which is the big online site for animation. It turned into a column of my observations, of what I liked and didn't like, and from there it went nutty. The writing inspiration definitely comes from that whole rock music critic scene of the '70s - of incorporating your own
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idiosyncrasies of life into the text, a bit of the gonzo and Beat influence. "The initial reactions to the Pimp column were very hostile. The community really takes itself too seriously, whether it's the art people or the Family Guy people. I just ripped shreds wherever - whether industry or concerning the artistic side of things. As a result, I got a lot of hate mail. This lasted five years and then I pulled the plug. But then AWN decided to get into publishing and decided this [a compilation of the columns] would be my first book [for them]."
It's no shocker that Robinson got hate mail. No one is spared in his past columns, not even himself. The Pimp shreds himself in glorious fashion ("You get to see my mental downfall throughout," he tells me), dishing blow-by-blow accounts of an alcoholic dealing with family and life. It's all glorious, self-deprecating fun. One of the most captivating bits in The Animation Pimp is Robinson's account of the Ryan Larkin saga, which runs throughout the entirety of the book. The Oscar-nominated animator (Walking), who ended up drinking and living on the streets of Montreal, was convinced by Robinson to don a juror's hat at the 2000 festival. The tragic Larkin saga evolved into an Oscar-winning film but ended this past spring when the enigmatic artist lost his battle with lung cancer.
Just to be difficult, the Pimp does throw some mid-book curveballs. His experimentation with different ways of laying out texts - words are squashed into vertical columns and one column is even written in backward sentences - is a classic fuck-you style that was used by the Beats.
Whether you detest, embrace or ignore cartoons, The Animation Pimp is an interesting glimpse into a strange world - one that just happens to be here this week in Ottawa as the International Animation Festival gets underway. Visit www.ottawa.awn.com for the full schedule of events.
