By Becky Hurwitz
When I opened juliusandfriends.com, a short movie began playing to
introduce me to the world of Julius, a cartoon monkey, and the cast
of his other cartoon friends. Julius is the monkey found on a line
of clothing and accessories that you may have seen in the windows
of Urban Outfitters. As the creator Paul Frank says, these characters
"already had personalities when [he] drew them," so the
natural progression was to tell their stories.
The main page site is easy to navigate. It is mainly a fan page for
the Julius and Friends characters, offering brief bios of the wacky
characters. These bios are not animated, and are instead, simple still
slides of the character's information. Other links lead to a trailer
that shows a brief preview of images from episodes of Julius and Friends,
episode summaries, a virtual store where the Julius merchandise is
displayed, and finally, to mondominishows.com, the site from which
you can view the movies.
The information available on the main page tries to introduce the
user to the characters and to the idea that there are short three-minute
films, but it does a poor job at showing where exactly the films are
located. The site is provides more information about the Julius merchandise
than anything else. This was confusing to me, a user unfamiliar with
the characters aside from the occasional sighting in store windows
A series of three-minutes movies about Julius and his friends are
entertaining, but not revolutionary. Frank says that he would like
to see Julius and Friends as a half-hour series on television, "to
help educate kids…If my characters could turn into real characters
on TV." Maybe the problem with the short movies is that no real
story can be told in three minutes. His movies, for now, are limited
to three minutes due to various limitations of web movies. As a web
viewer, I rarely have the attention span for animated movies on the
web that are much longer than three minutes. For me, using the internet
is a way of getting information quickly, and I feel the same way about
entertainment on the web. Additionally, a longer movie might take
longer to download. As short as my attention span is for viewing content
on the web, my patience for downloading content is even less.
The movies are located at various other sites that serve as hosts
for Mondo Mini Shows. The emphasis on merchandise and the complete
separation of the main page from the corresponding movies is a clear
indication that the web is being used both as an area for exhibition
of works as well as a market place. The common evolution of such a
pairing would be from film to merchandise, with the merchandise playing
a secondary role. The stress on the use of the web as a market place
for Julius merchandise leads me to wonder if the films are a secondary
thought. Perhaps they would be more entertaining if the films had
spawned the merchandise.
Julius and Friends seems to have the foundation for what may develop
into a successful series, and as Frank creates more episodes, perhaps
the characters and the stories will become better developed. For now,
Julius and Friends functions best as a line of merchandise, a fact
evident to any user of the website.