MORE ABOUT
John Kafka + Animation
I‘m an LA based Animation Migrant Worker; most recently of the director/producer variety, although over the years I’ve done almost every job that it’s possible to do during the making of animated projects. That has given me a perspective that has gotten rarer as the industry becomes increasingly compartmentalized.
This page attempts to serve as a brief introduction to me and some of my work.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
The First Iteration
1988 Murakami Wolf Swenson
My first long-term directing job turned out to be on a massively successful world-wide cultural phenomenon that continues to this day (no connection!).
It's hard to describe what it was like; everything just came together beyond anyone's wildest dreams. The general weirdness of the show hit the audience just right; the emerging technology of home video revealed a then brand new revenue source; the toys took off; the show proved the value of original content for syndication, etc. etc...and it was fun!
In order that you kids fully appreciate the 1980's viewing experience, this clip is digitized from an actual 1988 VHS cassette. Enjoy the video artifacts and the bad tracking lines on the left side of the screen; hear the typical VHS audio playback errors, gaze in awe at Peter Chung's original title sequence, and consider how much higher the coolness factor would have been if the Ramones had recorded the title track.
The world would have frozen solid, Daddy-O.
Riddick: Dark Fury
2004 Universal Studios
Watch an excerpt from a 45-minute special project designed to fill the story gap between the Vin Diesel 2000 film Pitch Black and 2004's sequel The Chronicles of Riddick.
I co-produced it with Jae Moh and Peter Chung was the director.
MC Skat Kat: Big Time
1992 O Pictures/Virgin Records
Following the success of Paula Abdul's Opposites Attract music video in 1988, her animated co-star MC Skat Kat headed out on his own to make history. His album The Adventures of MC Skat Kat and the Stray Mob was released in 1991 and I produced 2 videos: Skat Strut and this one, Big Time. Strut enjoyed some heavy rotation on MTV, but Big Time never aired, as far as I know, although you can find it on You Tube. Business and legal entanglements killed the projects, which is truly unfortunate. I think this guy could have gone far; imagine a well done live-action/animated feature film at the early days of hip hop...Makes me plug in my lava lamp just to think about it. You can occasionally find Skat in a bar telling people how he coulda been a contender; the guy sitting next to him crying into his beer is me.
Directed by Candace Reckinger & Michael Patterson; some animation greats worked on it: Eric Goldberg, Tom Sito, James Lopez...a very much lesser talent, me, animated 2 scenes.
Cinderella II: Dreams Come True
2002 Walt Disney Pictures
And now for something completely different.
The immense popularity of home video in the 1990's prompted the Disney company to mine every animated property they owned and extract a sequel or two (or three) out of them. These were unloaded on the world in an unceasing atmospheric river of product. Cindy and her crew weren't spared; they were dragged out of a well deserved retirement, kicking and screaming that they'd been living happily ever after and hadn't that been good enough?
I was the director and did my best to whip them into shape. We made a sequel of sorts; the original production schedule was 9 months with a "100% approved script" to work from...more than 3 years and 18 rewrites later, Cindy 2 hit big box store shelves all over the world.
I had a great crew and the animation was done at Disney's Tokyo studio. The clip is a look back in time at one of the last gasps of 2D animation...
Action Dad
2013 Toon Zone Studios
This was an independent production: created by Andrew Dickman; written & designed at a small studio in LA; recorded in Vancouver; animated in Flash by freelancers God knows where; premiered in Brazil. I directed and co-produced, co-designed, co-edited, and co-swept out the studio.
The clip is a good look at that ol' Flash magic. I'm pretty sure nobody uses that program anymore.
Dino Mom aka Dino Time aka Back To The Jurassic
2010 Toion Studio, Myriad Pictures, CJ Entertainment
I co-directed this CG film with Yoon-suk Choi; he was in Korea and I was in LA. It worked out surprisingly well; I handled a great crew of storyboard artists and worked on the animatic while he lost a couple of years of his life in a dark room in front of a hi-def monitor. Jae Moh, Jae Woo Park, and David Lovegren produced.
There were some delays in the journey to the big screens of the world. The film premiered in Korea in 2012 but waited until 2015 to appear in the US. In that time it was painstakingly rendered into 3D, renamed twice, and most of the voices were re-recorded.
The clip below is the sales tool shown at the American Film Market in Santa Monica in 2010.
