The Visual World of 'Samurai Jack'

Samurai Jack background art by Scott Wills Welcome! It’s a new Sunday issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter, and here’s what we’re doing today: 1) On the visual approach of Samurai Jack. 3) Animation newsbits. With that, let’s go! 1 – Stories in pictures Images alone can tell a story. Just look at Flow, the Oscar winner that has no words but captivates anyway. It stays tense, and puts across character, without a line of dialogue. That’s hard to do in a movie. It might be harder in a series: the projects are more broken up, more chaotic and usually faster. Lots of animated shows use talk-y scripts to get through — because it works. Even a classic like The Powerpuff Girls relies on its snappy, funny writing. Genndy Tartakovsky was central to that show — just after Dexter’s Lab, his hit from the mid-1990s. Dexter involved plenty of writing, too. And Tartakovsky was getting sick of it. “After doing Dexter and Powerpuff, I was burnt out on dialogue,” he once said. He wanted t ... Read full article.