When Disney closed the doors of its Orlando, Florida animation studio in January 2004, many saw it as the death knell for traditional hand-drawn animation. Of the 18 big-studio animated films to be released this year, only a handful will be done in 2D animation and of those, only a couple will even make it into theaters, according to KeyFrame-Online.com. In 2001, the first Oscar for an animated film was given out and the 3D animated "Shrek" took the prize. Since then, only one 2D animated movie snagged the award, 2002's "Spirited Away."

But like its hand-drawn predecessor, 3D animation is still expensive and requires copious amounts of computer power and animators. While big-budget 3D animated movies are the most visible step in animation's evolution, they only make up a small portion of the cartoons out there. Some of the most innovative, interesting animation is being created using Flash.

Flash for beginners

At its simplest, Flash is a program created by Macromedia for creating images and animations, which then require the corresponding Flash viewer in order to watch them. However, the ubiquity of Flash can hardly be overstated--as anyone who has set up a new computer can attest, you can't go three steps on the Web without being prompted to download the Flash player for your virgin browser in order to properly view the Flash objects embedded in the Web.

The object in question might be as tiny as a button or an ad embedded in a normal HTML page, or as elaborate as an animation or entire site constructed wholly in Flash. Once you've installed the player, though, the Flash becomes a seamless part of the Web, and you never think about it again.

But if you were to wave a magic wand that removed all the Flash objects from the Web, cyberspace would suddenly look like Swiss cheese. Great swaths of it would go black. There are one million developers using Flash now, according to Sandra Nakama, public relations manager for Macromedia. This number doesn't include the thousands of amateur animators, ranging in age from 15 to 50 years old, who are creating their own cartoons in bedrooms or small studios across the country.

Flash made its first appearance in 1995 as FutureSplash and was used to deliver animated content over narrowband Internet connections. Macromedia bought the company; since then, it's evolved into a complete Web application development program that can be used to do everything from creating animated shorts and interfaces for databases to creating interactive websites with MP3 audio and full motion video. There are over 515 million computers using Macromedia's Flash player, according to the company's Web site.

Long a staple of college kids and bored cubical dwellers who pass links to Flash sites around in e-mails, Flash animation is starting to hit the big time. Gregg and Evan Spiridellis, the creators of JibJab.com, were thrust into the national spotlight just before the 2004 presidential election with their Flash short "This Land," a parody of the song "This Land is Your Land" featuring animated versions of George W. Bush and John Kerry. There was a deluge of media coverage, with the political toon getting airtime on all the cable news networks and other big media outlets, as well as making its way to e-mail inboxes and message boards across the Web. After the election, the Spiridellis brothers followed up on their success with "Second Term," a celebration of Bush's victory sung to the tune of "She'll Be Comin' 'Round the Mountain."

But the JibJab toons are only the tip of the growing cartoon iceberg that Web surfers are careening into on a daily basis. Legions of amateur auteurs are using Flash to drive the animation revolution.

Like a tiny digital snowflake, each Flash short is unique. Unrestrained by the bureaucracies and focus groups of big-budget studios, the political hang-ups of network censors and the shortsightedness of fickle advertisers, Flash artists are free to produce a dazzling array of short films and series as diverse as the individual minds they sprang from. Consider Salad Fingers, a sickly-green human-vegetable hybrid with a British accent who loves to fondle rusty spoons and mutilate himself. Or Nylon Futura, a spunky redhead whose good looks halt an alien invasion. And then there's Bitey of Brackenwood, a mischievous goat-man who duels with a witch after breaking one of her flowerpots. The inhabitants of Flash Nation are a strange lot, but it's a story as old as the Web--put the means of production in the hands of the people, and they will make weird, weird stuff.

For their creators, traditional, hand-drawn animation is a memory, a cumbersome, expensive dinosaur that can't keep up with ever-changing technology. Flash is the future, they say, an emerging medium that, already enjoying a ubiquitous presence on the Web, is poised to take over TV, DVD and everything else.

cartoons for the people

Tom Fulp, creator of Newgrounds.com, a popular Flash animation repository on the Web, said his site has 700,000 registered users, many of whom are frequently submitting original Flash content. Newgrounds receives more than 200 submissions a day. The shorts on Newgrounds usually run about three minutes in length and cover the gamut of genres, from "Comissioner Kong," a slickly animated neo-noir that casts a monkey as a police commissioner under siege, to the ridiculously offensive "Birds 'n Bees," a take-off of '50s sex-ed films that extols the joys of abortion. Users vote on each short; a high score will keep the file on the site, while a low user score will send the piece to the trash. Previously, the only reward for having a high user score was visibility on Newgrounds; now, Fulp said he's starting a monthly selection of the top five submissions, with each winner receiving $250, a T-shirt and an award certificate.

"I have always believed in Flash as an emerging medium," Fulp said in an e-mail interview. "Every year the submissions to Newgrounds continue to improve."

Games produced using Flash are also popular on Newgrounds. Fulp's game "Alien Hominid" has been played more than a million times since appearing on the site in 2002. Last year, it was redeveloped and made the crossover to the PlayStation 2 console.

Newgrounds started as a fanzine for the NeoGeo video game system in the early '90s. It wasn't until 1998 that the current form of Newgrounds hit the Web, just in time for the dot-com boom. Investors were dumping loads of money into sites like IceBox.com and others that were offering original Flash content.

"During the boom, a lot of big companies were investing millions in Web entertainment and not making a dime in return," Fulp said. "I know of several sites that spent over $20 million and never saw anywhere near the traffic of Newgrounds, which was being run from my college apartment."

One Flash series that got its start on Newgrounds is "College University." Created by Mike and Andy Parker, "CU" chronicles the adventures of Mike and Parks, two freshmen at the academically questionable College University, a place where monkeys teach monkey physics and Optimus Prime (of "Transformers" fame) is head of security. The series is like a cross between "The Simpsons" and "Family Guy," with heavy doses of smart-ass pop culture humor and non-sequiturs.

"Andy came up with the idea to base it in a college setting, and with obvious influences from 'The Simpsons,' it grew from there. We originally wrote a script for a 30-minute TV pilot, but when I discovered Flash, we split the script up, and I started adapting it for the Web," said Mike Parker in an e-mail interview.

"CU" premiered on Newgrounds in 2000 and moved to its own site shortly afterwards. Mike Parker said the site has since logged four million hits and has 4,000 registered users.

"Our diehard fans are the best," Parker said. "They support everything we do and swarm like fire ants when anybody tries to badmouth the show. Without the killing, of course."

Despite the popularity, "CU" is still very much a small operation. It takes about three months to produce an episode. Both brothers write and provide voices, while Mike animates the show in his free time.

"I've got my day job that pays the bills and fuels my appetite for fine china," he said. "I do side freelance and side projects here and there for extra income, but nothing too involved because it ends up taking time away from CU."

It's a sentiment expressed by other Flash artists. Kirk Millett is a self-taught animator whose short film "Souvenir" appeared in a number of short film and Flash film festivals last year. It was selected as a runner-up in 2004's "The Greatest Story Never Told" contest. Millett is also the creator of "Nylon Futura," an action-adventure series that chronicles the exploits of a sexy, flame-haired heroine.

"Making money with Web content is still a tough racket. It has to compete with TV, DVDs, movies ... and then there's the whole broadband issue," Millet said in an e-mail. "On the upside, it's still the easiest and most affordable way to market your movie ideas. I do make a living off my contract work, and it's mostly animation, but it's not all glamorous stuff-a lot of ad banners and product demos."

While most shorts don't achieve the same kind of fame that JibJab did, Flash artists say the medium is no longer confined to a small cult following on the Web.

"Flash has made it to the mainstream," said Nicholas Da Silva, creator of FlashTV.com and "The Greatest Story Never Told" contest. Some recent mainstream successes for Flash animation include "Lil' Pimp," which started out as a series on the Internet and was recently released as a full-length animated DVD. There are also a handful of cartoons on TV that are animated with Flash, including "Mucha Lucha," a series about a family of Mexican pro-wrestlers on the WB network, the ill-fated Comedy Central series "Kid Notorious," and Cartoon Network's "Atomic Betty" and "Foster's Home For Imaginary Friends." Other cross-over successes include Mondo Media's "Happy Tree Friends," which have spawned a line of DVDs and action figures and the short film "Karma Ghost," which won the viewer's choice award for animation at the 2002 Sundance Online Film Festival.

"With Flash, you're able to produce something at half the cost," Da Silva said. "The cost of the software isn't as expensive as high end software for animation. One or two people can have a studio at home and crank out their own stories."

Da Silva launched Flash TV in 2000 as a place to reach out to Flash artists. In 2004, the site sponsored the first "TGSNT" competition. The contest received 256 entries from across the globe, Da Silva said. This year, entries were down to 110, which Da Silva attributes to the $30 entry fee he had to charge to keep the contest going. Winners will be announced on March 24 in San Francisco. Other contests, like FlashForward, are also entirely devoted to original Flash shorts.

The versatility of Flash itself means the future of animation lies far beyond the Web, according to Da Silva.

"We can actually take a story, storyboard it, bring it into Flash, animate it, export it to the Web, export the same file to DVD as well as broadcast TV, (and then) bring it down in size for wireless phones," he said.

building a killer app

Along with its creative applications, Flash animation also has a great deal of commercial use, said Jeremy Clough, creative director for Hatchling Studios in Portsmouth. Hatchling specializes in 3D animation and Web development using Flash.

Hatchling's clients have included Proctor and Gamble and Gigunda Group, a marketing firm that specializes in "experiential marketing."

"(The majority) of the audience out there are not analytical, they're visual; Flash is just a great way to represent information in a flow," he said. "Flash is the bridge between static information and animation."

This means using Flash for everything from advertising tool bars to interactive product demos. Flash can integrate video and sound onto a Web site and can be used to build Web sites with or without HTML.

Will Powley, owner of Mad*Pow Media Solutions in Portsmouth, said about half the design and Web development work he does uses Flash. Some of Powley's clients include American Express, Timberland and textbook publisher McGraw Hill.

"We do visual explanations, whether it be for marketing, doing Web sites, doing systems, or building applications, so Flash is about a huge chunk of our business," he said.

One of the attractions of Flash as a development tool is that users can create and modify extensions for the program, Powley said. This means Flash developers can essentially customize limited portions of the program to fit their development needs.

"It's really helped the application grow," Powley said. "With the release of Flash MX Professional ... Macromedia is saying 'We don't want to have it just for animation, we want it to build any kind of Web application you can ever imagine.'"

In the future, Powley sees even simple systems, like hotel reservation programs, being built in Flash.

"The interface is completely customized and branded. From a systems standpoint, that's the very next level, creating very, very complex Web applications using Flash that could never be dreamed about before," he said.

the death of cell animation?

But with everyone becoming small-scale Walt Disneys in the comfort of their homes, what's the future of old-school cell animation?

"It's dead. Gone," Clough. said.

"You can do everything in Flash, without the overhead," he said. "One person could be a studio, two people can develop a great concept."

Flash eliminated obstacles like enormous file sizes and large frame rates that kept animation off the Web, Clough said.

Millett isn't so quick to write cell animation's obituary yet.

"Flash is just another animation tool. It's what you make of it. I don't think hand-drawn art of any kind will ever die. There will always be new toys, but there's no substitute for the fundamentals," Millett said.

As Flash artists become more and more sophisticated, Fulp said they will get closer to replicating pen and ink drawings.

"A Flash animation done with a drawing pad has the potential to look as good as something drawn with ink," he said. "Cell animation is expensive; Flash opens the doors for many more independent artists to create their masterpieces without a big budget."

Though there's no agreement on the future of traditional animation, there is an almost unanimous opinion that Flash is democratizing cartoons.

"I think Flash is changing animation by allowing everybody to give it a try. Before Flash really came along, if you wanted to do some animation, you'd better have a lot of paper and free time," Parker said. "Now anybody with a computer can give it a shot. I don't think it takes anything away from the art of traditional animation, but just allows more people a new way to express themselves."

For Da Silva, the future of animation lies entirely in Flash.

"It empowers the little people to tell their story. The technology out there also allows us to present it online to the masses," he said.

The members of Flash Nation are just getting started, though.

"The Web is taking more and more eyeballs from television and it will continue to do so," Fulp said. "We are a new generation of artists and are still in the process of getting organized."

Flash forward

Flash sites worth checking out

Newgrounds

www.newgrounds.com

One of the biggest Flash portals on the Web, Newgrounds receives more than 200 Flash submissions a day. Newgrounds has everything from games like "Samurai Asshole" to a series of shorts that pit Mr. T against a variety of opponents including Godzilla and Hitler.

Flash TV

www.iwantmyflashtv.com

Flash TV is like the older, more gainfully employed brother of Newgrounds. Birthplace of "The Greatest Story Never Told" (www.tgsnt.com), Flash TV features work by professional Flash artists, broken down by genre. Standouts include Hong Kong action-style "Deadly Thirst" and "Xombie," a post-apocalyptic tale with a zombie hero.

College University

www.collegeuniv.com

Fans of "The Simpsons" and "Family Guy" will appreciate "College University. "CU" follows the misadventures of Parks and Mike, two freshmen at College University. The two friends face the usual college pitfalls of angry lemurs, ornery monkey professors, and the watchful eye of campus security chief Optimus Prime. "CU" recently had former wrestler and current Slim Jim spokesman Randy "Macho Man" Savage stop by for a guest appearance.

The Happy Tree Friends

www.happytreefriends.com

If you like your animals cute and cuddly and your violence outrageous and gruesome, check out the Happy Tree Friends. Join Lumpy, Sniffles and Flippy the Green Beret bear as they meet a variety of untimely, bloody demises, each more spectacular than the last. Key episode: "Flippin' Burgers." Flippy visits a fast food joint and starts having Vietnam flashbacks. The ketchup and blood flows freely as Flippy massacres the restaurants' patrons with condiment bottles and other weapons. 

Homestar Runner

www.homestarrunner.com

Home of Strong Bad, The Cheat and an assortment of cartoon misfits, Homestar Runner's most popular feature is the series of "Strong Bad Email" shorts, where the Lucha Libre-masked character answers fans' e-mail questions. Old-school video game fans should watch the "Peasant's Quest" preview, a dead-on send-up of old computer RPGs.

Kirk Millett

www.kirkmillett.com

Check out Millett's site for the full series of Nylon Futura cartoons, as well as "Souvenir," a neo-noir tale of a shipwreck survivor taken aboard a mysterious submarine. "Souvenir" was selected as the runner-up in 2004's "The Greatest Story Never Told" contest.

Salad Fingers

www.fat-pie.com

Salad Fingers, the bastard lovechild of Swamp Thing and Mr. Bean, is one of the most twisted Flash creations out there. Creator David Firth's Web site includes all five episodes of "Salad Fingers," which follow the green-fingered British character's adventures with rusty spoons, a bunch of nettles and his puppet friend Hubert Cumberdale. Also look out for "Milkman," Firth's twisted short about a milkman whose workday takes a grisly turn.