Name that toon

Colm and Bren Russell, the two brothers who script, animate and voice the massively popular and frequently hilarious Eyebrowy cartoons, are as inconspicuous as a blue jersey when the Dubs are in Croker or a goatee in an art gallery. And that’s the way they like it.

In fact, the duo aren’t exactly comfortable with the whole promotional circus surrounding the release of their first DVD, I Prefer The Early Stuff.
“One of the things we do is to take the piss out of people who would maybe be a bit precious or take themselves really seriously in interviews. But some of the interviews we’ve done, we’ve read them afterwards and it sounds like we take ourselves too seriously,” Colm admits. “It was like we were becoming the characters we were slagging. Plus, we like to bring in the characters whenever we can for promotional stuff and let them do the talking because it’s a better showcase for what we do.”
If anything, releasing the DVD has encouraged the brothers to feel more respect for some of the musicians they lampoon.
“It’s only when you do something like this that you realise that you can’t actually get the perfect thing you always wanted,” Colm notes. “You have to make sacrifices. So you then realise that when bands put out albums, there are a lot of factors that have to be taken into consideration that they’re not in control of.”
That said, while Eyebrowy animations have always cast a wry eye at Ireland’s independent music scene, they’ve also been quite warm towards the characters, imbuing them with an innate vulnerability that makes them ultimately likeable. In other words, these genuine music fans picked up on certain idiosyncrasies and made them funny without being vicious.
“We never wanted to piss anyone off or to be cruel,” Colm explains. “At the same time, we don’t really worry about what the people involved are going to think about it. It’s like a bunch of mates having some good-natured slagging: if somebody gets a bit cruel, it’s not really funny, it’s just awkward.”
“We are music fans and have a lot of respect for anybody who is doing it,” opines his brother Bren.
Regular viewers of the Eyebrowy cartoons, whether on the web (www.eyebrowy.com) on TV (The Last Broadcast) or at live events (Electric Picnic, Choice Music Prize etc), may be disappointed to hear that the brothers feel they have taken their set of Irish characters as far as they can go without descending into lowest common denominator caricature. According to Colm, the DVD “is the perfect way to draw a line under the stuff we’ve been doing on the Irish music scene”.
“By the time we did The Last Broadcast, we felt like we had said all we could about the people we’ve covered,” Bren adds. “We didn’t want overkill.”
His brother continues, “There are only so many times you can say ‘The Thrills are posh’ or ‘Glen Hansard talks between songs at gigs’. After you’ve said it once, you either turn the characters into caricatures or you move on.”
For this viewer, some of the funnier characters are the non-musicians, from the two touts who display an inordinate affinity with the music of DJ Shadow (Bren’s favourite characters), to a hilarious Damien Duff parody, as the wing wizard shows off his knowledge of all things Jape.
Indeed, as the cartoons have grown, their audience has broadened from the relatively niche gig-going fans of the earliest cartoons (‘Oh Harmonica Where Art Thou?’ etc) to their latest creations, such as ‘Natural Born Singers’ or ‘Ryan Complimentary’, which definitely have the potential to hit a bigger audience.
“When The Last Broadcast showed our stuff, we started to realise just how niche some of our early stuff was,” Colm admits. “Some of the characters weren’t exactly household names and we felt that people mightn’t get the jokes, which would be a shame. Also, we just saw stuff like Ryan Confidential and thought, we could do that, and it would be easier for more people to get into it.”
They also enjoy the freedom of creating totally new characters, however, as Colm explains: “With well-known characters, like Damien Dempsey, you have quick access because people already know them and you don’t have to give any background, but after a while you run into trouble because there are limits to what you can do. But if you make up your own character, you can do and say what you want.”
As the canvas has broadened, the quality has similarly improved, while the voices are now far closer to those of their original subjects than any of their early work.
“As we started to take it more seriously, we put a lot more effort into it,” Bren admits, “in terms of the animation, the voices, every aspect of it.”
They’ve come a long way, especially when you consider that Eyebrowy was initially created just for a laugh. When Bren and his friend Mick McGovern were working on an animated project for college, Bren inadvertently drew a cartoon character that resembled Frames frontman Glen Hansard.
“I just started to imagine him as a cartoon character and it grew from that,” Bren smiles. “We thought, if we could do Glen, we could do a whole load of other characters and it was just like a little sitcom waiting to happen.”
“Every time we made a cartoon, we felt that it was going to be the last one, but we kept getting e-mails asking when the next Eyebrowy was on the way,” Colm adds. “It was just a hobby, and it was only when we were approached by the Electric Picnic that we realised it could be more than that.”
Perhaps surprisingly, most of the real life singers and musicians who make up the cast of the Eyebrowy adventures really like them.
“Turn and The Frames have shown some of our stuff before their gigs,” Colm says. “We’ve heard from a good few of the people involved that they like it. I’m sure there are a few who don’t, but more often than not they seem to think it’s a bit of fun being a cartoon character.”