This week in movies you missed: This one’s different.
Cartoon College isn’t on DVD yet. It’s also not in theaters. But you don’t have to miss this professionally made documentary that brings you inside Vermont’s own Center for Cartoon Studies. (Trailer here.)
If you love comics, you shouldn’t miss it. Especially if you’ve ever dreamed of drawing them for a living.
Filmmaker Tara Wray did. In 2007, she headed to CCS as a comics fan and potential student — but eventually decided she “couldn’t draw,” she told me in a 2008 interview. Instead, she stuck around to film the students as they progressed through the rigorous two-year program, from first-year “boot camp” to a nail-biting final thesis review.
Wray and codirector Josh Melrod ended up spending three years filming the students in White River Junction, and followed them to a convention in New York City where they strove to market their wares. The filmmakers collected interviews with famous indie cartoonists, such as Art Spiegelman of Maus, Chris Ware, Lynda Barry, Charles Burns and Francoise Mouly.
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