Upfront
Ant Sang
by Matt Nippert
Cartoonist, animator.
Ant Sang says that he has never sported a mohawk or plotted to bomb fast-food franchises. “I was a bad guitarist, but I was not a punk. I’m not Chopstick,” he says of the Chinese-Kiwi hero of his 2003 comic series Dharma Punks. That series of eight comics landed him a job as bro’Town’s designer, and at the screen awards three weeks ago his work on the cartoon show saw him pick up the award for Achievement in Production Design. That’s his self-portrait at right, by the way. The Listener caught up with Sang, 36, at Auckland’s Empire pub, where he relaxed with a cider after completing a third season of the animated comedy.
When you’re drawing, how fine is the line between caricature and stereotype? It’s kind of tricky. You’re not supposed to stereotype in this day and age, but cartoons rely on stereotypes, that’s what they are. If you draw a big muscly guy with a big jaw, he’s a stereotypical hero character. Draw people with slanty eyes and they’re Asians.
You have to identify people really quickly with cartoons, so you have to rely on stereotypes. I guess this works quite nicely with the Naked Samoans, ’cause their work plays on stereotypes as the major theme – and it works really nicely as a cartoon.
Are there any moments in bro’Town when you’ve thought that line might have been crossed? Father Pepelo – a fat, drunken, child-abusing dole-bludger – must get close. But he has to be drawn that way because that’s what his character is, that’s the way he’s written. It’s the same with Ms Taplili – she’s such a [laughs] monster of a woman.
So you don’t buy Dr Melanie Anae’s criticism in the Herald on Sunday that bro’Town promotes “the happy-go-lucky funny brown coconut, the kinds of stereo-types we fought against in the 70s”? No, no. [laughs] No, I don’t. I think it’s done a good job, eh? My whole take on the stereotype thing is that the Naked Samoans take the piss out of everyone and no one gets off lightly, so it’s hard to complain about it. We show how silly all people are, and how silly all cultures are. And what are you going to do about it? We have to live together, in spite of it all.
Bro’Town is illustrated both here and by a team of animators in India. Have they ever been stumped by kiwiana? Can the team in Hyderabad draw pavlovas? I see rough animations and I check all the backgrounds that they’ve done. But, yeah, there have been quite a few little things that they don’t know about because they’re so New Zealand or are maybe a bit foreign to them. Occasionally we get request for new designs – “What does this look like?” – and we have to quickly design something and fire it back to them.
How was it being the sole Asian working with the boisterous boys from the Naked Samoans? It was a quite a natural transition, really. You experience it and know about it just from living in Auckland.
In your earlier comic series Dharma Punks, the only characters interested in ethnicity seemed to be the skinheads from the White Front. Yeah, and they would have been after Chopstick anyway, because he smashed some windows! [laughs] So it was more, “Okay, he’s Asian as well, so that gives us more incentive to beat him up.”
Do you see yourself as a standard-bearing spokesperson for Asian New Zealanders? I try to steer clear of all that. In my own comics, I write about things that interest me at the time: it isn’t ethnic identity; it’s not something I’m tossing and turning over.
How much substance is there to rumours of a bro’Town movie? The Naked Samoans have started writing a first draft, but there’s no point in me starting to draw anything at this stage. Even for the series we try to leave it till quite late in the writing process before I start work on it. The drafts change, things change, and then you end up with a lot of wasted designs.
How far along is your own film project, a Dharma Punks screenplay? Bro’Town has kept me so busy that I haven’t really had time – the curse of nine-to-five work! I’ve been working on the script for years now, but it hasn’t progressed very far.
When most people think of comics, they think mutant powers and epic “Pow!” fight scenes. Yet Dharma Punks seemed centred in, of all things, Buddhism. Do you consider yourself a Buddhist? More than anything else. I don’t know how to officially become a Buddhist, but I lean so far towards it that I probably am. I just think it answers a lot of questions about life. The whole outlook on life just makes a lot of sense to me. It seems to be quite a logical kind of religion, and it says to try it out and if it doesn’t work for you then maybe it’s not right for you – but try it and see what happens. It’s relying on your experience and what happens when you try to follow the path.
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