Monkey Rag: An Animated Short By Joanna Davidovich

Without further ado, here it is:

 

Thank you to everyone who kept following the progress of this short and offered words of encouragement.  Thank you to my husband, Nate Foster, for helping me make this cartoon a reality and for believing in me more than I did myself. When I first put together the board-o-matic, I had no idea it would mean four years of labor on nights, weekends, and any scraps of time I had between jobs.  I just thought it would be fun to finally make the kind of cartoon I had loved as a kid.   And it had to be on paper- the fun of drawing is something I don't come by often in my work anymore.  There were many times where I didn't think I was going to make it- what was the point, really, of abstaining from real-life events, missing out on sleep and normal human activities, to pound away at an outdated method of animation to make a silly cartoon that wasn't going to make any money anyway?  I still don't quite know, but it is done.  I hope that it makes people happy.  I never got tired of the song, and I love these characters.  Watching cartoons like "Pigs in a Polka" or "All The Cats Join In" still energizes me- there is something magical that happens when you marry great music to animation.  I'm glad I was finally able to give it a shot.

Here are some supplemental videos to give an idea of how everything came together: