A good friend of mine, City of Angels citizen and saxophone accompanist to Molly Ringwald’s jazz crooning, animates probably the only thing I watch on YouTube, short clips about a hopeful dreamer and down-and-out hero named Smigly. Smigly was recently featured in a big article in Tina Brown’s The Daily Beast. From writer James Gavin:
“If it pains you to see flesh-and-blood contact disappearing in a digital world, you might relate to Smigly, an average guy in search of love. Dumped by corporate America, he sits on the landing of his apartment, blowing his saxophone while a neighbor jeers: ‘You know the tune, ‘Go Get Lost’?’ He chokes on a nut, and his girlfriend won’t look up from her laptop. He becomes a ventriloquist, and gets laughs only when the dummy pees on him. The irony of his quest for human feeling is that he too is unreal; he’s just a figure on a computer screen.
Smigly is a rising YouTube cartoon series with an emotional theme: How do you survive today’s onslaught of rejection while keeping your soul intact? The show’s creator, Allen Mezquida, knows that struggle. When his career as a jazz saxophonist floundered in the late ’90s, Mezquida took up animating and entered the movie business, which repelled him. Now he funnels his conflicts into Smigly. To Don Barrozo, a trumpeter who has edited The Simpsons since its inception, Mezquida’s funny-sad nebbish is the Charlie Chaplin of the cartoon world; his walk alone, says Barrozo, ‘tells you all you need to know about Smigly’s state of mind, be it dejection or elation.'”
Allen says: “Hopefully the SMIGLY article helps spread the word…”
Read the article:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-09-03/youtubes-rising-cartoon-star/
I think Smigly’s TV station is linked on here somewhere.
PS I almost got a job recently doing (I shit you not) re-reporting. That’s sort of what this feels like, though I have a slight edge with this topic, I think…
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