We recently connected with Jason Williams and have shared our conversation below.

Jason, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Did you always know you wanted to pursue a creative or artistic career? When did you first know?

First off, thank you guys for inviting me back. As always I appreciate the exposure. I would say I knew the moment I wanted to pursue cartoons and illustration as a career as early as five or six. I could see and draw shapes in everything, so I taught myself how to draw Fred Flintstone from a cereal box and Popeye from a can of his Allen’s brand-name spinach. I remember asking my mom after seeing the credits at the end of a show, is that these people’s jobs? To make cartoons? When she told me what a cartoonist was and did, I was hooked. Here was something I was into and that I could do. I could draw, I loved creating characters and stories, so I really could not see myself doing anything else.
Cartoons were my safe place.
I could still tell you to this day what some of the 1980s television lineups were by the day and channel. As a kid, I knew what time it was by what was on TV before I could even read time on a clock.
I also thought as a kid that when you reach the ripe old age of ten and get to double digits out of third grade, you graduated and you were done with school.
As I sung and attempted to poplock to “I-only-have-two-years-left-of-school” dance the night before first grade, my mom informed me that there were 12 years and college… I was devastated.
So that night I stayed up teaching myself how to draw Charlie Brown, Snoopy and Woodstock into the wee hours of the night. Years later, I saw a documentary on Charles Schulz and how he drew all of his Peanuts comics from home.
I was hooked.
I KNEW there were work from home jobs that weren’t in telemarketing.
It took a few years out of college, twenty to be exact, but after years of only drawing up hundreds of storyboards for indy movies and TEACHING future artists how to draw and animate in the heart of the entertainment capital of the world, I realized that I’m not going to get that golden ticket invitation and no one is going to open that magic door to the Golden studio for me.

So I made my door, and my studio, and made my cartoons and my showcase where others have the chance to see THEIR dream on the screen too.

Jason, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Well I’m a writer, art teacher and animator and I do a little read aloud show called The Storytime Show with Story J. It started after I modified my story time activity from a summer day camp to an online childrens program during the Covid pandemic. Over time it evolved allowing me to use what I learned in animation and film school, taking the stories I created during summer camp and turning them into animated cartoons teaching children lessons of compassion and empathy with a parodied superhero format.

My worst day is redoing the animation for a character on a sequence or finding the right music for a read aloud – but my biggest problem is finding motivation to do a children’s show for an audience I don’t see. While I’ve gotten reactions and feedback from viewers, I can’t see them as I did when I was Story J in front of an audience of summer campers. So I never know if what I did lands or not. I’ve learned not to expect eyes on it from a lot of people due to its being a children’s show (even though I like to think of it as a kids show grownups can get into). But knowing that has allowed me to take it to a higher level. Sometimes I’ll spoof an old TV show or make a safe-but-ironic Generation X reference to see if anyone’s paying attention.
Case in point… (1:37-3:03)

To earn a living, I work as a freelance animation and graphics artist where I’m either working on the illustrations of a children’s book or animating a short cartoon – one in particular will be premiering soon. It’s called “100 days Inside” and it’s being produced by the author Fionna Wright and her daughter (and co-author), Madison will be narrating it. The three minute teaser will premiere on the Storytime Show while the full animated short will be available on the 100 Days Inside website. I’m very excited to share this story and Fionna and Madison have done a fantastic job.

I’m really proud of The Storytime Show. While it’s still a work in progress, I love being Story J. One of my favorite things is being able to promote authors and artists that audiences haven’t heard of while trying to create a safe space for all kids and grownups to feel welcome. There are times when I get a read aloud from an independent author and it’s begging to be animated, I’ll ask them if I can animate it for them and premiere it on the show, and since I’m the one asking, it’s no charge.

Making an animated cartoon and promoting authors who were teachers and social workers, parents and caregivers, to share their work and make their characters move on the screen, I can do that all day.
I’m basically trying to create a virtual library with a stage and everyone’s invited.

What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?

Invest in us again.

Pay creative’s what they’re worth and not settle on an app just because it’s ‘cost effective for production.’ Put money toward projects that connect us instead of funding more tools that keep us settled in our loneliness and detachment. Bring back apprenticeships, give people experience they so want to have. Artists, writers, teachers; the givers are now giving to the point of breaking.

Creatives are now paying to be seen, only to have views and be given empty AI bots disguised as subscribers.

Each new technological gift that is originally created to connect us is later bought and morphed into a machine that manipulates us. Television, internet, cell phones, social media. Artificial Intelligence came along and corporations couldn’t wait to, well to paraphrase the immortal Jeff Goldblum, ‘before they even knew what they had, they patented it, and packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic social media lunchbox … and well, there it is.’

Even as obvious and 90s airbrushed as those images may look, illustrators are still seeing jobs get scooped up by apps and thousands of children’s books are now oversaturating the bookshelves with clipart. It’s an insult to even read “illustrated by” when the characters are so stiff and symmetrical, it’s obviously done by a machine and not a person.

Profit and advertising has blinded investors and less is being invested in ideas that are original and outside the norm. As a result, we keep getting cookie cutter fashions, billboards with sticker art graphics, stories with the same tired formula and movie moments that are turned into memes.

I had hoped that during our time inside, it would at least give us time to reflect on what’s important and see how our mental health is coupled to this worlds growth.

We’re in a world now that’s so fast-paced where you have to be correct with every question in the moment, ahead of the game, hustlin’, stay-in-the-know to a point where we’ve gotten so detached and apathetic to what’s going on around us due to the volume of distractions and overstimulation of news. We can barely mentally invest in what progresses us as a society, let alone emotionally.

I think we need to invest in creative think tanks and art education again. I think if people young and old were to find something to inspire them again, an idea, a movement, we could move forward as a whole community.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

There are a few goals I hope to have happen whether I get five thousand subscribers or five hundred, it’s to expose kids not only to the world of reading but later into storytelling, so they go beyond just reading the stories and start writing, drawing, CREATING STORIES. I want to make a table big enough for everyone to have a seat, a stage big enough for everyone to be seen, a room big enough for everyone to feel safe. I used to reference this old kids show called Pinwheel. While I was never crazy about the bookend puppets they had (Plus and Minus still couldn’t hold a candle to Ernie and Bert), I loved the animated segments because they came from all over the world. Charlie’s Climbing Tree, Bunny in the Suitcase, Paddington, and one of the leads in live action was a musician named Jake who collected sounds in boxes, and it didn’t hurt that he was the resident Black artist at the Pinwheel house.

Off beat as it was, the show exposed me and countless other kids out there to animations and films – Academy Award winners like The Red Balloon and The Snowman. I got to see beyond the up-down, left-to-right animation of American cartoons to seeing the characters and the camera move through the third wall was cake for me as a young six-year-old wanna-be cartoonist. The off-beat and weird cartoons got a spot on the stage.

My wife and I occasionally watch Dick Cavett reruns and one thing we noticed that separated him from all the other talk shows was that he would ask a question, and the guest would take the time to consider it before answering, and they were given the time to ponder a question, let silence hang until it was awkward but were also allowed to say things, human things like, “I don’t know,” or wonder about it for a while before making a statement that allowed themselves the luxury of being wrong in front of an audience, without judgment.

I wanted to bring that back. What I didn’t realize was that all of the things I liked as a kid were slower and quieter in comparison to today’s entertainment. So when I get feedback from families, what they usually tell me is that the channel has a calming effect on them. Eventually I hope the show is distributed to a wider audience and I can do this fulltime. The world can be incredibly noisy. I hope that I can be a part of a quieter calmer movement toward empathy, listening and creativity. I’m excited to see what the next generation can do.

Contact Info:

• Website: storyjstorytime.com
• Instagram: @storytjstorytime
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@storyjstorytime
• Other: https://youtu.be/7uZGFHdgR3A https://youtu.be/NuBFeDvzjPk https://youtu.be/a6H0cVKK-dI https://youtu.be/ioNdLoatv4A

Image Credits
1. Image from upcoming animated short, 100 Days Inside, animated by Jason Williams, produced by Fionna Wright, 2023. 2. Image from Interview with Animator and Producer, John Semper, Jr. 3. from Storytime episode 203, an animation situation/Storytime Students’ Theatre 3000: Popeye Meets Sindbad the Sailor – a lesson in animation and the Fleischer Bros’ stereoptical process while paying homage to the classic show, Mystery Science Theater 3000 4. image from Storytime episode 204, read aloud, “Where the Wild Things Are.” 5-8.thumbnails from previous shows, including guest teacher Stephanie Shearer as Miss F and special guest, Dr. Francois Clemmons (Officer Clemmons from Mr. Rogers Neighborhood).