It’s impossible for me to think back to my middle school days without thinking of Flash. Flash is a web technology best known nowadays for interactive banner ads and streaming video. What is often overlooked is that it also gave anyone with a computer the power to create cartoons, and more than anime itself, it got me excited about the art of animation.
Most of the stuff I created and watched in my teenage years was unspeakably crude. But in 2000, a kid named Nelxon released a trailer for his six minute short Genryu’s Blade, and my mind was blown.
Genryu’s Blade was made entirely by one person and it took a year to complete, using nothing but a mouse and keyboard. The animation steadily improves over the course of the short, with the final 60 seconds setting the bar so high that it was easily unmatched by Flash animators for years afterward. Genryu’s Blade garnered so much acclaim that Macromedia, the company which created Flash, actually licensed it, and it aired on television multiple times.
Since then, there has been no shortage of studio-quality animation made by lone individuals using Flash. The increased affordability of Wacom tablets and bandwidth meant more people could draw their animation frame by frame, rather than relying on the automatic interpolation Flash offers (tweening). For example, the Bitey of Brackenwood series, by Adam Phillips, debuted in 2004 and evolved into the next gold standard.
Genryu’s Blade might appear rough around the edges by today’s standards, but seeing something so awesome made by a single person was awe inspiring. I can watch it all these years later and still get excited over the best parts. When you compare it to some of the digital animation that was just starting to come out in Japan at the time, it’s even more impressive.
The Flash animation scene is now an enormous beast with many tentacles, nevertheless GB remains a watershed moment in its development. There’s nothing quite like it.
There’s no longer a high-quality official source for Genryu’s Blade, however many mirrors exist. Here’s one that’s working at the time of this writing. Like a lot of would-be animation talent, Nelson “Nelxon” Hurst has gone on to work in the video game industry. You can visit his official website and follow him on Twitter.
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Your sentiments reflect mine so closely, but my first realization was in college when I saw what students were doing with 3D animation. One person could be director, actor, sound, visual, everything. It seemed to open so many possibilites. Then when Flash came out, a couple of years later, it lowered the level of entry even more. I was doing rudimentary Flash cartoon style animation when I came across all sorts of eye-opening stuff that was being done. The early 2000′s were a golden age for this Flash-based animation: Whirlgirl, Joe Cartoon, Stan Lee Media’s stuff, Strong Bad, and a couple others whose names I can’t recall (the best of which was a futuristic western called **somthing** Ace and a very stylized Noir style called **somthing** Joe – I have those saved on a CDROM somewhere, they were so good).
Joe Paradise – that was the second one I was thinking of. WildBrain did it: http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=WildbrainAnimation
Thanks for reading! I know what you mean–that era of web animation was truly a product of a particular time and place. Unlike nowadays where HD cameras are built into phones and everyone has bandwidth to spare, back then it was easier and more affordable to string together a flash cartoon than release a live action video. Otherwise so many kids wouldn’t have bothered, I think.