In a dressing room in the bowels of Arts Court, I sat down with Jerry Beck, animation historian, former executive at Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network, and wearer of many cartoon hats.
He was in town presenting a series of Disney cartoons at the Ottawa International Animation Festival. He’s older than his photo but his personality is younger than your college reporter.
When I asked him about his role in bringing Japanese anime features to America in the ’80s, he started off by talking about when he was a kid in Flushing, New York, watching dubbed Astroboy, Kimbo the Lion, and Speedracer on TV. He said he was hooked by the unworldly style.
“The narrator would say, ‘Today, Ken is in an Oriental land’ to explain why there was Japanese writing in the background.”
Beck said that in the ’70s, when cartoons were dead and Disney was releasing its worst features, he was seeing compilations from foreign festivals screens at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.
“I loved all animation,” he said. “My mind was wide open.”
In the ’80s, he got a gig at United Artists to distribute and run animation festivals.
According to Beck, one of his first breakthroughs was screening 16-mm robot shows like Transformers, no subtitles or dub whatsoever, to Americans.
“They went nuts!” Beck said.
When United Artists was searching for more features to fill up programming, Beck said he pushed hard for Castle in the Sky from a bold new artist called Hayao Miyazakii.
During one of the first screenings he met Carl Macek, distributor of anime show Robotech, and they founded Streamline Pictures.
For the next five years or so they brought in one anime after another, including Miyazakii classics like My Neighbour Totoro and Katsuhiro Otomo’s dark apocalyptic masterpiece Akira.
At Nickolodeon, he was part of a pilot competition with a young animator named Pendleton Ward. Even though Beck had a horse in the race, he was pulled into a screening room by confounded executives who needed his opinion on Pen’s submission, a surreal adventure about a boy and his magical dog.
Beck came out of it saying, “This is fucking great. This is it.”
The short aired on Nickolodeon and years later Ward’s Adventure Time was picked up by Cartoon Network.
At this year’s Ottawa fest he’s talking all Disney all the time—and he’s happy the oft-demonized company is getting it’s due from independent animators.
“Disney’s the elephant in the room, or the big mouse in the room,” he says, “but the reality is they do a lot of great stuff, art-wise and story-telling wise. There’s often a snobbery among animators who say ‘well we’re doing art and they’re doing commerce.’”
