John K's Cans Without Labels

[Weeping Prophet]

Anyone that needed closure on John K's 2012 Kickstarter, here's the...um, resulting cartoon.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ue7kVAkGW6M

It's been pointed out that, adjusted for inflation, this had the same budget as Big House Blues.

[alan nagsworth]

What an absolute fucking mess. Also, John K is a full-blown nonce so fuck him twice.

[Weeping Prophet]

What an absolute fucking mess. Also, John K is a full-blown nonce so fuck him twice.

Well, yes, I just assumed we'd all be on the same page there.

But this...has to be seen to be believed.

[madhair60]

Jesus christ I'm in tears. This is incredible.

[alan nagsworth]

Well, yes, I just assumed we'd all be on the same page there.

But this...has to be seen to be believed.

Aye, soz, wasn't jumping down your neck about it!

Yeah this is a monstrosity. I'm really not a fan of merging 3D rendered stuff and line drawing traditional styles so that put me off right away. But beyond that, the sheer laziness of how characters actions are repeated is so glaringly amateur we may as well be watching a storyboard animatic.

The appeal of Ren & Stimpy to me was the way it so often masterfully used stock orchestral music to heighten the already frenzied and feverish tone, but here it sounds completely cheap, tacked on, and again just glaring and unnatural. There's no way to sink comfortably into the thing and enjoy the flow because it's a complete hatchet job.

[Twed]

The 3D is his insecurity I think. "I can do it too!" (he cannot do it too)

This is probably the last thing John K will ever do.

[bgmnts]

Remember Ren and Stimpy lads?

[Chriddof]

Christ, this is bad. Oh god. What's with the fucking sponsor advert at the end as well? He must have arranged that seven years ago - and that company's still around, so I bet they're delighted at having their name associated with a horrible load of shit they forgot about six years ago, when it should have come out.

The way the 3D stuff weirdly slides all over the place when it zooms in close! It's like I'm watching it while running a fever. I've never seen CG art behave like that, ever. How did he fuck that up? I'm genuinely curious as to how that happened. Well, to an extent.

The awkwardly recycled R&S music, the constant always full-on animation that never seems to pause when it needs to (which is 80% of the time), the sound editing fuck ups where you can audibly hear an odd audio cut in the middle of sentences... and who the fuck were those two people at the very end? Were they the top Kickstarter backers or something? If so, refer to my previous comment about that sponsor.

Oh, and the... touching?... tributes in the very long opening credits to the now-passed George Liquor voice actor whose final credit is now officially this pile of garbage, and to John K's family who I imagine won't want anything to do with him now, let alone having their names printed in a big hideous fake retro font in a total car-crash of a Youtube video. (Although his dad was reportedly a vile man himself.)

I agree that this has to be the last thing he'll ever make. Pure desolation, in 480p.

[Phil_A]

Holy shit. This cartoon would only acceptable in terms of it being a demented piece of outsider art, not something that took seven years and tens of thousands of dollars to make.

Probably the saddest thing about all this is that other than some grudging concessions to modern animation techniques, his style has not developed or changed in any way in decades. If anything it's regressed.

Look at it - it's the same box of tricks he's relied on since Ren & Stimpy. Same fifties pastiche title cards. Same stock SFX. Same library music cues. He truly is the [banned troll] of animation, trapped in a mobius strip of obsessions and childhood traumas that he can never escape from. But I can't bring myself to spare an ounce of pity on him, because he such is a grotesque and awful human being and nearly all his problems are of his own making.

His ego could never accept that it was other people that took his bizarre ideas and made them work, when they did work. And now all those talented collaborators have gone, the awful reality of John K is there for all to see in all it's naked, shivering glory.

One of the comments on there(and they're ALL negative as far as I can see) claims he was responsible for coining "Cal Arts style" as a term of abuse. I believe it, he's just that petty and bitter about people with more talent and ideas than him.

[the]

Didn't even know about the existence of this. It's shoddy and inexplicable for all the obvious reasons, thought there were a few good comedic moments in there though (along with all the bad ones).

Apart from the weird 3D stuff, it really is on a par with the R&S Adult Party Cartoons, for being flabby and gratuitous and tonally fucked. He couldn't get that in on time and in budget either, and that was while free of the supposed shackles of the Nick days.

The narrative he tends to put out about his creative vision being thwarted by the moneymen seemed bullshit at the time of Adult Party and it does now, it appears he's just got no discipline.

[Blumf]

Well... that was deeply disappointing, on every level.

Was the last decent thing he's animated The Simpson's opening?

[grassbath]

Can't stand to watch this. His Facebook page is pure desolation.

[sevendaughters]

this is awful. some of the best R&S stuff was in the later, more efficiently-produced series, though I am probably in a minority who think that ('To Salve and Salve Not' is just incredible). in general i think John K's being a nonce is the one that shook me the most, for whatever reason. i'm not like a huge fan or anything and i wasn't rooting for him to storm the limelight again, but it was like my own childhood was corrupted a bit there.

[sevendaughters]

guess how much he's selling the DVD of this 10 min short for
https://johnkstuff.com/products/cans-without-labels-dvd-1?fbclid=IwAR0d7egwqMmqLLMqi445qaFbJ938OE0DS-WC6x6MG8ATqzxrNYa0PnEQk4M

[bgmnts]

Another kick in the teeth for crowd funding.

[Phil_A]

Why does the DVD case have the old Spumco slogan on it? It makes no sense out of the context of a now defunct animation studio with a rude sounding name. What is point.

[Chairman Yang]

He didn't put in the joke! The one joke where it goes all close up and a eyeball or a mouth does a bad shape and you can see a stink line maybe. You never see the face in the can!?!

This is by far worst thing John K has done.

[madhair60]

This is by far worst thing John K has done.

It's really not, sadly. I got two or three laughs out of this hot mess. I got zero laughs from almost every episode of Adult Party Cartoon.

[Weeping Prophet]

He didn't put in the joke! The one joke where it goes all close up and a eyeball or a mouth does a bad shape and you can see a stink line maybe. You never see the face in the can!?!

This is by far worst thing John K has done.

Yeah, for all the extreme visuals, he thought the best way to reveal the face was a line of dialogue?!

[JesusAndYourBush]

It's a bit "cardboard cutouty"/"slideshowy".  If some random person had made it themselves in their spare time using flash or some animation software they'd downloaded off the net it'd be impressive.  But as a decent amount of money has been spent on it I'd have expected better.  Jesus H Christmas, I just googled the quickstarter page.  $136,723.  Fucking hell.

[Replies From View]

There's so much wrong with it that it seems almost churlish to criticise the comedy timing.  But it's dreadful.  The whole thing needed to be more tightly edited but maybe John K was anxious about taking the running time down so much after receiving all that money.

[Pearly-Dewdrops Drops]

I don't think it's bad enough to be remarkable really. Though if he raised $140,000 to make this it is clearly a scam.

The main problem is that there was a lol-random element to Ren & Stimpy that completely falls flat when you isolate it and build it up as a standalone short, or take it out of the context of a mid-90s show being produced by Nickelodeon.

[St_Eddie]

I actually quite liked this.  I agree with the criticisms leveled against it; particularly in regards to the terrible 3D elements (also the pacing and the painfully obvious punchline, which you can see coming a mile away).  However, I'll take below par John K animation, over no new John K animation at all.

Yeah, for all the extreme visuals, he thought the best way to reveal the face was a line of dialogue?!

Yeah, that was a baffling creative choice.

[SavageHedgehog]

I think that his humour has always built heavily on a sensibility and vision that only fully makes sense to him, and over the years he's lost the ability (and I suspect interest) in communicating it to others. I'm not sure anything he's done since Ren & Stimpy has been any good, really. This is somehow better than his idol Ralph Bakshi's Kickstarter project Last Days of Coney Island however.

[alan nagsworth]

I actually quite liked this.  I agree with the criticisms leveled against it; particularly in regards to the terrible 3D elements (also the pacing and the painfully obvious punchline, which you can see coming a mile away).  However, I'll take below par John K animation, over no new John K animation at all.

But he is a huge nonce though, so really good art or not he is someone who should not be celebrated for this and subsequently deserves to be forgotten about forever.

[Chriddof]

I just want to say that I would disagree with any attempt to write him out of animation / television history. Despite the terrible things he's done, he does form an important part of it in the United States. As for the original show, Phil A's comment about others taking his bizarre malformed ideas and translating them into things that work is spot on. The vast majority of animated films are collaborative efforts, and that really is the case with the original R&S show. That's how I can still watch it, and the brilliant 1987 Mighty Mouse reboot - the other main people at Spumco / Bakshi Animation have an equal amount of credit with them being a success, I think.

As I recall, his first project after Ren & Stimpy, which was The Ripping Friends (it ran for a single season around about 1996) was also bloody awful. I managed to get through two full episodes of it back in the late 90s and then abandoned it. I've not attempted to watch it again since.

[sevendaughters]

JK has moved in with a copyright claim so we, the brave, the chosen few got to see it.

[lazarou]

I'm not sure what I expected, but three idiots flopping around a table with barely a walk cycle between them wasn't it. Could he just not be arsed animating anyone below the waist for 90% of the cartoon? Admittedly that kind of thing's a pain to animate, but being a pain-in-the-arse perfectionist was about the one thing he had left going for him. Anyway, points to the man for somehow managing to create something that feels both overly busy and astonishingly lazy at the same time.

Edit: as the original link's been taken down, here's a currently active backup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WzzMe5d1BM

[Delete Delete Delete]

On its own in isolation its ok, funny in places. The problem is the John K element, the realization that its not just a warped fantasy world, but a warped fantasy world from a man with a damaged warped mind, with this in mind the part when the dads trousers falls down and he grabs his crotch was too much. Why would you animated a grown male exposing himself to children, it didn't eed to be there, but it is.

[Replies From View]

Was an earlier, unfinished version of this online a while back?  I seem to remember it was, but I can't remember if it was as awful as this.