POLITICAL CARTOONS part 6: ANN TELNAES

Ann Telnaes, winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the Reuben award, achieves a distinctive look by blending her skills as a political cartoonist with her background as an animator. (She worked at Disney as well as at animation studios in Los Angeles, New York, London, and Taiwan).

Here are four ways I think her talents combine to make her work so exceptional:

1.)  Telnaes speaks with a strong, clean line in the tradition of Robert Osborn.  An animator's craft doesn't allow for second thoughts, asterisks and footnotes.  There's no cross hatching in animation. Telnaes chooses her best line and commits to it. 

White space is expensive in a newspaper but it's also valuable to a drawing

By sweeping away the clutter and simplifying her forms, she sacrifices explanatory backgrounds and similar crutches, but note how her use of white space strengthens her compositions and projects her ideas more forcefully.

 

2.)  Telnaes also brings an animator's plasticity to her subjects.  Look at how extreme and cartoonish she's willing to go with this horse's ass, contrasted with its tiny legs, or that ridiculous hat:

Telnaes is able to get away with this kind of extreme exaggeration only because she has the drawing talent necessary to hold the picture together.

She similarly makes full use of an animator's license by simplifying figures into geometric shapes.  I've previously written about this rubbery trapezoid Trump...

Her characters frequently take their strength from circles, triangles and other basic archetypal shapes.

3.)  Her caricatures, however caustic, have an animated cartoon quality to them.  I love her Rudi Giuliani...

Or this devastating Bill Barr...

...or Mick Mulvaney...

... and a handful of others:

A caricature of Jeff Sessions, more brutal than a drawing of his face

The creativity, drawing ability and political judgment in these faces are good examples of what I think caricature is about.

4.)  Finally, as a former animator Telnaes has pioneered the introduction of animated GIFs into political cartooning.  Her use of GIFs to portray an animated bobble head doll of Mike Pence , or the dynamics of the balance of power in the Supreme Court or a Trump Paddle ball  are not just superfluous gimmicks, but are integrated into the meaning of the cartoon and enhance the presentation in a way that a static drawing could not.  Another way in which the medium benefits from merging two strengths.