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Hi. Soon this will be a space where special weird random stuff will appear. What kind of stuff? We don't know! Maybe music, maybe writings, maybe pictures.... Until then, please enjoy this "review" written by John Hagelbarger:
LITTLE SNIPPETS 101
How can I explain "Little Snippets" to anyone who hasn't seen it? Unlike a lot of current cartoon shows, it doesn't have some high concept like "four filthy-mouthed grade-school kids with kindergarten animation". It just follows the doings of the title character - a cute girl-bug musician - her bug friends and band of bugs, and her many dates with crummy boyfriends (also bugs). Most of the plots revolve around Little Snippets (actually, Abigail - but few fans call her that), her attempts to get gigs for her band "The Phantom Beat", and her disastrous love life.A typical "LS" cartoon starts with her meeting the new Crummy Boyfriend and falling for him, continues with the two going on t date where his shortcoming (which the audience have seen from the first frame) become impossible for her not to notice, climaxes with her reaching the point of having to remark upon them, which she does in the form of a song to him or to the audience ( with the band popping out of manholes, jumping from paintings, or appearing in some other unlikely way), and ends with her sadder but wiser. A few involve her band's star-crossed hunt for success, and usually end up with them playing on a ferryboat, the sidewalks outside the venue, or back in the basement for a few friends. Simple stories - but the execution has a textural inventiveness, an attention to detail, and an emotional realism that the cartoons have rarely had.
Part of the true-to-life quality may come from the artwork, directed by animator Byron Grush. It has a strong classic Thirties flavor - more like Popeye than Warner Bros. or Disney. In an era of animation that makes Terry Gilliam's Monty Python crudities look like "Fantasia", solid traditional work can shock us with its quality. While the plots, characters, and cultural references firmly place "LS" in the present, it has an exuberant comic ingenuity at inventing, building, and topping gags, a visual excellence, and a sheer richness that place it with the classics. Even with the wacky, herky-jerky silliness, something soulful shines through as well - you care about Little Snippets, wish she'd find someone who deserves her, and almost believe that this moving drawing of a skinny, hyperkinetic girl bug, with her bobbing antennae, pointy nose, and receding chin, actually lives and breathes. Mr. Grush has said that he considers the character his daughter, and I can see why he would.
The musical scores contribute a great deal to that classic quality. Imagine Carl Stalling as a producer and arranger for female singer-songwriterrock and you might get the idea. Besides the actual songs - most in a careening New-Wave idiom with wild tempo and key changes, all sung in Little Snippet's thin but forceful soprano - each has all sorts of zigzagging background scoring, from the sound of an avant-garde ska band played on a skipping CD player, to moody wind-instrument chamber music, to faint echoes of Thirties hokum. A genuine musical intelligence, an artistic voice, shines through the tunes, very different from the perfunctory hack-work that often accompanies recent animation. They sound a bit like Progressive Rock at 78, with the voice sped up to a squeak, song-forms pared to the point of barely repeating, style-switches stepping on each others' heels, solos chopped out entirely, and the developmental excursions cut to brief interludes or angular, climatic explosions. Most barely top out at three minutes. While they don't have the somber, brooding quality that signifies serious emotional insight and musical greatness to many, they have more depth than some might think: the sweet but disorienting music perfectly captures Little Snippets's conflicted feelings and some fairly sharp human insights go whizzing by in the lyrics. It sounds like most of us have sometimes felt. The rocketing turns of perspective often look at a situation from half-a-dozen angles in less than sixty seconds, and may make quite a point in the process. Through all this, each song and its associated instrumental passages still form a coherent whole, a single statement that hangs together through all the ricocheting changes. Not an easy thing to pull off.
Onscreen, the Phantom Beat appear to actually play the music, and here you know they're cartoons: no real human being has that skill andversatility. Even though she never wanks out conventional leads, Little Snippets plays guitar with superhuman speed and accuracy, leapin from end to end on the neck and jumping instantaneously from impossible fast chording to fingerpicking to harmonic effects; she also adds excellent klezmer-like clarinet or accordion on other songs. Cassie, her short, stocky, quiet, strong-jawed visual foil, plays French Horn and a ridiculous blue metalhead-looking bass guitar, while Frank, the normal-looking one, mostly handles drums but sometimes picks up an alto sax or fiddle, and has the only-in-a-cartoon ability to learn any instrument well in a few months. Both of them sing, too. A tall, skinny, Abe Lincoln-esque guy names Mark has appeared on upright bass in some episodes. Of course, the band execute their demanding material at an impossible degree of tightness.
The credits to each episode read, "Music and Lyrics by Abigail Grush", which, of course, leaves the question of who actually wrote and played it open. Some fans credit Ani DeFranco and John Zorn as the real team behind it, and the music might show traces of them as its probable creators. Others have brought up PJ harvey and Danny Elfman, but it sounds much more like a product of the East Coast, specifically NYC. I lean towards some obscure New Wave group come out of retirement, perhaps the Visible Targets collaborating with Tim Young (the background scenes contain Seattle references) - does anyone out there have inside information?
Though new and not yet hugely popular, "Little Snippets" has started to build a mythology among those who've discovered it, and discussions like the one above can go on at great length. Those who care about it seem to care quite a bit. I certainly got sold on the show, and though it won't satisfy everyone's tastes, it grows on you if you do enjoy it. The Cartoon Network currently shows a rotation of 13 episodes - just look for "Little Snippets" in your program guide.
* * * *
All of the above is true - and none of it is. Abigail Grush does have an animator for a dad (he drew her CD cover in the style I described),and does seem to have picked up a huge amount from the cartoons, in her persona as well as in her music. If a cartoon about a female singer-songwriter existed, it might resemble Abigail and the Phantom Beat. Her CD (on Barsuk Records) has 13 tracks. She writes a lot of Crummy Boyfriend songs, which sound pretty much as I described them, and she and the band actually have that level of talent. The adjectives I applied to the stories and visuals really apply to her lyrics and music, and the "real creators" just consist of the usual comparison-list. No one calls her anything but "Abigail", however, and "Little Snippets" (one of her song titles) doesn't really exist as a cartoon show. IT SHOULD, THOUGH, DAMMIT, IT SHOULD!
(John Hagelbarger is a Portland, Oregon based musician, thinker, writer, and seeker of interesting and challenging music.)