I love cartoons, so it was with a kind of perverse curiosity that I attended Jerry Beck's presentation on the "Worst Cartoons Ever" during the Sept 13th session of the SPARK animation festival thrown by Vancouver's Siggraph chapter.

There's something truly fascinating about bad art. Mediocre art is boring but bad art is just fun. At least I thought it would be fun. Before the screening began, Beck suggested we leave, and somewhere between Winky Dink urging kids to draw on their TVs, Rocket Robinhood making jokes about Little John not fitting into his spandex short-shorts, the out-of-synch audio tracks on that weird pelican cartoon and Sir Gee Whiz's Mexican talking rope that lives on the dark side of the moon, I was beginning to wonder if I was causing irreparable damage to my brain.

I would say, however, enduring the worst cartoons is probably more useful than watching the best cartoons because the mistakes are so obvious in the worst ones, while the techniques that make the best ones amazing often disappear behind the story like they should. For anyone with an interest in visual storytelling, Beck's collection of the worst cartoons ever is a very practical lesson in why you plan out your scenes (so you don't have to loop the last 30 seconds when you realize you ran out of animation) and why you should basically never set your cartoon in outer space or have characters speak in fake Chinese or switch a character's voice and think nobody will notice.

I have nothing but the utmost respect for Jerry Beck, a true scholar who must have sat through hours of pain to bring us the worst cartoons. His knowledge of cartoons is encyclopedic and he publishes a great deal of his research online at http://www.cartoonresearch.com/