As some of you may recall, when I first started my online life a decade ago with my move to Southern California, I ran a second website called the Cinema 4: Cel Bloc, a site devoted to animation. Its original intent was to be someplace where I posted short one to two paragraph pieces about whatever animated film I watched that day. But, like most plans or cute little pet monsters, it quickly grew into something else altogether. The daily thing ambled on for a few months, but I was dissatisfied with the pieces I was producing. My manner gradually evolved into the style which I have adopted through today, less concerned with the hows and whys in which the film was created and more about how the film has affected me on a personal level or what influence it may have or may yet have upon me. As for the cartoon reviews, I felt it was important to give as full a synopsis of the film as possible in order to discuss some of the older gag references, song lyrics, cameos, and visual puns at hand. This made writing the reviews a little more cumbersome, and I burned out on doing them pretty swiftly. However, over the years, every time that I bought a new cartoon collection, I always made mental plans to resurrect the Cel Bloc and work my way straight through the set. Those plans never came to fruition, and my drive to bring the Cel Bloc back from the grave got swallowed up by the general depression controlling my life over the past few years.
The amazing thing (and I am not out of bounds using that adjective here -- so overused on the internet and social media and usually inappropriately as well -- because this fact really is amazing to me) is that the Cinema 4: Cel Bloc was my more popular blog. IS my more popular blog. The total pageviews I have gained on The Cinema 4 Pylon in the past month are still far overmatched by those of the Cel Bloc, even though (until yesterday) I had not posted on there since September of 2008. And that is with me posting more than three times as many articles on the Pylon overall. As excited as I was to see how many hits I was getting on my depression article here a couple of weeks ago, my largest post on the Cel Bloc (for my April 2006 piece on the Fleischer Bros.' Somewhere in Dreamland) has reached ten times that number. Yes, that post has had nine years of sitting dormant on the Cel Bloc to pick up stray visitors and the odd comment (I still get regular comments on films I wrote about ages ago, and far more than I do on the Pylon), but it had already far exceeded my current average Pylon count back in those early days.
As mentioned, last night I posted for the first time on the Cinema 4: Cel Bloc in just over seven years, and it felt really great. In keeping with the Halloween spirit, I tackled the Bugs Bunny and Gossamer the Monster classic, Hair-Raising Hare (the one where Bugs does the monster's nails), and had a great time doing it. What I really enjoy about building these is having to watch the same film over and over to get all the details, even watching sections in slow motion, and so I get to climb into the film a little bit. Doing so (often) builds even more appreciation for the animator's art. And I also get to become reacquainted with old pals in the process.
If you like animation, I hope you will zip over to the Cinema 4: Cel Bloc and check out my new post here. I plan on semi-regular posts there moving into the future, but not the daily grind. I don't want to burn out that quickly. And if you love animation, I hope that you will dig into some of my older articles as well.
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