http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Creator/JohnKricfalusi

John K with his two most famous creations.

John K, "Film Threat #7" . "Everybody's ugly in real life. You just have to look close. Look inside anybody's nose."

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Michael John Kricfalusi (pronounced as kris-fa-LOO-see, born September 9, 1955), also known as John K., is an often controversial Canadian animator. He is best known as the creator of The Ren & Stimpy Show. Throughout The '90s, he was famous for his brand of insane and insanely-animated cartoons which borrowed heavily from 1940s-era Golden Age shorts and was hugely influential on TV animation during the decade's animation renaissance. In addition to his own work, for many years, he was the go-to guy for critiques and opinions on Looney Tunes and classic Hanna-Barbera shows (whether said opinions were welcome or not is a discussion for another site).

Born in Chicoutimi, Quebec, Kricfalusi attended Sheridan College for exactly one semester in 1978 before getting expelled for poor attendance. He uprooted to Los Angeles with a couple of colleagues, including Bob Jaques and his then-girlfriend Lynne Naylor, shortly thereafter to work on various shows for Hanna Barbera, Filmation and Ruby-Spears, most of which only for a single season. Being a huge fan of Bob Clampett and Fleischer Brothers cartoons, Kricfalusi was vocally hateful of the fact that the only work he could get was on bland, stiff TV animation and made it his goal to bring the aesthetics from the cartoons he loved to a new generation. His penchant for being opinionated became infamous, and would go on to define his public image perhaps moreso than his actual works.

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In the mid-80s, Kricfalusi was hired by Ralph Bakshi to work on Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures. It turned out to be a dream gig, not only because he was working for a respected animation legend but because it was a show in which all of the creative decisions (writing, design, layouts, etc.) were made by the artists rather than by TV writers or executives. Kricfalusi would direct eight episodes of the first season before quitting over Creative Differences with Bakshi.

Kricfalusi would attempt to recreate the success of Mighty Mouse with a similar revival of Beany and Cecil, a show created by his personal hero Bob Clampett, a year later. Despite support from Clampett's wife, Kricfalusi's refusal to cooperate with executives made them wary to meet his demands to produce the show without writers or model sheets or include raunchier humor like he wanted (and unlike Mighty Mouse, Ralph Bakshi wasn't there to shoulder the blows from Executive Meddling so he could do whatever he wanted). The show only lasted five episodes before he and the network acrimoniously parted.

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Having burned too many bridges to keep getting animation work, Kricfalusi founded the illustration company Spümcø while occasionally doing freelance animation gigs. Around this time, a little cable TV station called Nickelodeon put out a call of independent animation studios to create pilots for creator-driven cartoons, or Nicktoons as they'd later be known, and Spümcø was one of the first on their call list.

In 1991, The Ren & Stimpy Show was unleashed upon the world. Immediately controversial for its Vulgar Humor and violent slapstick, its Deranged Animation made it a huge hit with audiences who, like its creators, longed for the kind of jokes and visuals they could only have seen in Golden Age-era theatrical cartoons. It went on to become one of the most popular and influential cartoons of the 1990s, making Spumco superstars of the animation world. Unfortunately, despite (or rather because of) its popularity, Kricfalusi's habit of biting the hand that fed him continued and his perfectionism worsened, famously delaying episodes anywhere from several months to a year. At the peak of the show's popularity, he and his studio were fired from production and the show continued production in-house at Nickelodeon's homegrown studio Games Animation (now Nickelodeon Animation Studio).

Over the next few years, Spümcø would create several short subject projects, including the groundbreaking web cartoon The God Damn George Liquor Program, the very first animated cartoon created with Adobe Flash and the first animated cartoon created exclusively for the internet, and its spinoff Weekend Pussy Hunt, as well as an Animated Music Video for Björk's 1997 single, "I Miss You" and a well-received series of Old Navy commercials. In the early 2000s, he created three Yogi Bear revival shorts: A Day In The Life of Ranger Smith , Boo Boo and the Man and Boo Boo Runs Wild.

At the Turn of the Millennium, Kricfalusi made something of a second career out of being a professional fanboy, appearing on DVD collections of and being quoted in books about classic cartoons, most of which at the request of respected animation historian Jerry Beck. He was also regularly quoted in animation magazines, often penning negative reviews of then-current animated shows and films, most notably a scathing review of Animaniacs (under the name Thomas Payne) before he'd watched a single episodenote One of the many bridges he'd burned had been with the show's creator, Tom Ruegger, while collaborating on an unfinished Halloween episode of Tiny Toon Adventures, so it was personal. in Animation Magazine and an inflammatory article about how Nickelodeon and the Games Animation crew ruined Ren and Stimpy in Wild Cartoon Kingdom. While his forceful personality and lack of filter earned him an almost literal cult of worship around himself among impressionable young cartoon fans, his derogatory hatred of non-artists and general tactlessness made him divisive among professionals.

2001 saw Kricfalusi's second attempt at an original TV show with The Ripping Friends. Creative Differences once again reared their ugly head, this time between Kricfalusi and the two Canadian animation studios animating the show - Red Rover Studios and Funbag Animation, respectively - who outright ignored his direction and eschewed his brand of Off-Model custom poses for a more standard-looking cartoon, resulting in a near-fist fight with Funbag head John Shaw when Kricfalusi visited the studio. The show ended up becoming another one-season wonder for Kricfalusi.

Kricfalusi's next project saw him once again taking the helm of Ren and Stimpy for the raunchy revival, Ren & Stimpy "Adult Party Cartoon". Now with carte blanche to do whatever he wanted, everything both on screen and behind the scenes was cranked Up to Eleven: the Vulgar Humor, ultra-violent slapstick, sexual innuendo (if not outright porn) and especially the production delays. The show was canceled after three episodes, with three more in production, after unanimously negative reception from critics and fans - his career never recovered. Spümcø was soon relegated to Kricfalusi working out of his apartment until it was sued into bankruptcy by former colleague Bob Jaques and his studio Carbunkle Cartoons for years of unpaid outsourcing work, officially closing in 2008.

In 2006, he started John K. Stuff, a blog which detailed practical knowledge for aspiring animators, analysis on classic cartoons and his unfiltered opinions on the medium, which include often overwhelming rants about what he considered good or bad animation, most notably his steadfast belief that story and character are unimportant to a cartoon's success and that it should rely on good drawings. There is also a more distilled version with advice and lessons on cartooning and animation, John K Curriculum . Both are often recommended by animation teachers for its useful information about technique and history (although they recommend taking Kricfalusi's opinions with more than a pinch of salt).

In 2012, Kricfalusi attempted to produce an indie short, Cans Without Labels, through Kickstarter. The project could not have been more of a disaster. Communication with backers was minimal, including delivering rewards, with Kricfalusi claiming that he'd somehow blown through the budget before production was even half-finished, if not outright lying to followers. The short missed its 2013 deadline, much to the uproar of fans. That same year, he took a hiatus from his blog to start plans for a new studio in Florida, which never came to be.

Kricfalusi's only released work by the middle of the The New '10s had been graphics for Miley Cyrus's "Bangerz" tour and a handful of [adult swim] bumpers, all in a new, extremely abstract style which his dyed-in-the-wool fans did not take to, as well as selling drawing commissions and "phone doodles" (literally absent-minded drawings he'd do while talking on the phone) through his website. During that time, negative rumors about his poor work ethic finally began to catch up with him, and it would be one in particular that would kill what little good faith anyone had in him outright.

In March 2018, at the height of #MeToo, Robyn Byrd and Katie Rice, two former Spümco employees whom he had hired when they were teenagers, accused Kricfalusi of grooming them , up to and including multiple acts of statutory rape. He was also accused to have possessed child pornography on his computer, as well as Polaroids of himself having sex with Byrd, Rice and other underage girls. Former colleagues, who had held a professional stance on their opinions about him by that point, immediately came forward in abundance to confirm these and other rumors, including a general history of verbal and emotional abuse to his staff. Former fans began pointing to hints of his preference for underage women throughout his later work, with jailbait characters like Soda Pop and the beach girls in the Adult Party Cartoon cartoon "Naked Beach Frenzy," as well as several questionable drawings on his blog and barely-concealed pederastic remarks he'd made in the past (most famously during an interview on The Howard Stern Show and a segment on the Adult Party Cartoon DVD of him making perverted remarks to Rice). Several female artists to whom he'd offered jobs at his Florida studio, most notably respected freelance artist Vane Flores, claimed to have been suspicious when they realized he was only offering jobs to young women.

Kricfalusi's efforts to make a public apology, claiming that he had "poor impulse control", from living with ADHD and bipolar disorder, as well as a history of alcoholism, were dismissed by Byrd and Rice as a "non-apology" which deflected from their accusations and earned him even more ire from people suffering from these and similar illnesses, accusing him of perpetuating the stereotype that mentally ill people are inherently dangerous as a means to save his own skin for the consequences of a crime against nature. Kricfalusi closed all of his social media accounts (except Facebook) shortly thereafter.

While legal action couldn't be taken against Kricfalusi due to the statute of limitationsnote Both this case and that involving Bill Cosby have convinced lawmakers to re-examine the law., the scandal stained his reputation beyond repair. Nickelodeon removed his photo from its wall of creators and temporarily pulled Ren & Stimpy from its streaming service and broadcasts on NickSplat for a year while also effectively erasing the characters from their history. Cartoon Network announced that they would never work with him again. One of his other victims, Hyde Goltz, started a petition to get him banned from Instagram. Cans Without Labels was finally released a year later through Shopify to unanimously negative reception.

In 2020, he appeared as an interviewee in the Sundance documentary Happy Happy Joy Joy: The Ren and Stimpy Story. Despite initially turning down an invitation to appear (presumably because he knew it would bring to light many unflattering stories about him the same way that Sick Little Monkeys had), he changed his mind once his history of abuse went public and the filmmakers decided to recut the already-finished film to address the matter. In his interviews, he announced his semi-retirement from animation while acknowledging and, at the very least, attempting to apologize for his sexual abuse, though he doesn't quite get the last word on the matter.

Not to be confused with fellow Canadian and Steppenwolf lead singer John Kay, nor with Florida pop singer John K. or American actor John Krasinski.

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