| iR:
So how did "Angry Little Girls" begin? |
| |
| In 1994, I was a sophomore in Berkeley where
a friend took me to see "Spike and Mike's Sick & Twisted"
for the first time. I came out of the theater feeling
very upset. I didn't like those cartoons at all. They
were showing videos that were very chauvinistic and male-humored,
and I didn't think they were funny. My friend suggested
that I should make a cartoon about myself, so I went home
and started drawing a little Asian girl with a red shirt,
black pants and pigtails. I made a story about this girl
at her first day of school who was being introduced to
the class. When the teacher asked her how she spoke English
so well, being the angry little Asian girl that she was,
she just exploded. |
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| iR:
That was completely before your acting career? Tell
us about your background. |
| |
| Yes, actually I did the video before I started
acting professionally. I graduated from Berkeley in 1996.
I was born in Los Angeles, and I also lived in Korea on
a chicken farm until I was four. I grew up in San Dimas
until I was eighteen. I went to college at Berkeley, and
I came out here to LA after. |
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| iR:
But you didn't do that much to it until a few years
later. Why did you decide to come back to the angry little
Asian girl? |
| |
|
I was watching a lot of animation like "Southpark." In
fact, I saw a bootleg copy of an early version of "Southpark"
and thought it was similar to my little girl idea. So
I animated the first episode, along with four more new
episodes put it altogether and sent it out. I eventually
also added four more little girls and it became "Angry
Little Girls" featuring the "Angry Little Asian Girl."
When I sent it out to American Cinematheque and Spike
and Mike, Spike & Mike purchased the exhibition rights
for all the first five episodes. American Cinematheque
had it reviewed in LA Times and LA Weekly, and the reviews
were great. I was stunned. There was suddenly this whole
buzz about it. I wanted to make some T-shirts, so I initially
made 300 of them. I made my good friends buy them. They
bought them and started wearing them outside. Soon my
phone was ringing off the hook. I was even getting strange
phone calls after midnight for my T-shirts. So I decided
to make a website to sell the T-shirts and launched it
in 1998. |
| |
| I also sent it to NAATA (National Asian
American Telecommunications Association) to get my first
episode shown, but they rejected them. It was funny that
around their film festival's time I met Kayo Hatta up
there, who was on their board, and she said she was glad
to show the film. And I told her that they weren't showing
it. She was quite surprised. |
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 |
|
Lela
Lee among the cast of "Yellow," a critically
acclaimed Korean American teen drama set in Los
Angeles
|
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| iR:
What happened after you launched the website? |
| |
| MTV heard about it, and they wanted to talk
to me about doing something. After they reviewed it, they
said it was cute but there was no market for Asians. Basically
I couldn't force them. They said no, so I was pissed and
thought that wasn't true at all. When I was out selling
shirts, a lot of people really liked the shirts and the
video. The website was also getting a lot of hits. I felt
like I hit on a nerve of some sort. |
| |
| A lot of people like the attitude, and it's
not for only Asians or only about Asians in that matter.
It's about being an underdog. So I expanded "Angry Little
Asian Girls" to "Angry Little Girls." |
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| iR:
Why are these little girls angry? |
| |
| The whole thing is about being a girl, growing
up as a girl and how difficult it is. What happened in
college was that my bubble was burst about how the real
world operated. There were a lot of things that didn't
make sense. I had no part in creating them, yet they affected
me. That was why I was angry. But as I got older, I realized
that's how the world worked. It was this idea of disruption
and disappointment. I hope my comics appeal to people
who are disenchanted. |
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| iR:
So "Angry Little Girls" are both animation and a comic
strip? |
| |
| It started off as animation. Then people
started calling it as a comic strip. To be honest, the
animation is a quite lame and pathetic (wink). So I started
thinking about it as a comic strip and then as comic books.
Before that, I never really read anything or follow anything
about comic books. |
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| iR:
So right now, what is the direction you're taking? |
| |
| Now each of the Angry Little Girls has their
own comic book, and I hope to get them in the newspapers.
I've been working a lot in terms of honing that art. I've
been studying a lot of the line work of other cartoonists.
I want to improve but also keep it simple. The time that
I took to hone my art has really paid off. "Angry Little
Girls" has improved a lot. |
| |
| iR:
So what are the good stuffs on the website (http://angrylittlegirls.com)? |
| |
| T-shirts, mugs, and mousepads. Soon there
will be magnets and more styles of mugs. |
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 |
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The
Angry Board where people can post their angry
experieces
|
|
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| Every week, I post new comic strips. There's
also an area where people post their angry experiences. |
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| iR:
Who do you think is your audience? |
| |
| Teenagers in high school and also people
in college. On the angry board, the postings are mainly
from high school students and people in college. |
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| iR:
Are there people who feel threatened by "Angry Little
Girls"? |
| |
| There was a time that the website was really
raw and dark. At that time, people sent strange e-mails
and they basically said, "What's wrong with you?" In a
way, I've gotten tired of being angry (on in one-dimensional
way) and my art sort of changed. I had the same core of
things that upsets me, but it has become more subtle.
There are people threatened by it, and (funny) a lot of
them have been Korean. They'd say something like, "What
kind of a Korean are you? We are so ashamed of you." A
lot of them were Korean males. |
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| iR:
How did you respond to them? |
| |
| I didn't respond to those e-mails. My attitude
is that if you don't get me, I'm not going to bother.
Whatever. |
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| iR:
Tell me more about each of the Angry Little Girls |
| |
| One of them is very disenchanted and depressed.
The other is very active, wondrous and very positive.
The thing is really about anger and how different people
react and deal with things that make them angry. One girl
gets depressed about it, or another girl responds to it
as a challenge. Their core emotion is a lifting of the
wool. The wool's coming off and they're seeing stuff. |
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| iR:
So how's the website doing in general? |
| |
| I get about 800,000 visitors consistently
a month, and at holiday seasons it goes up to about a
million. |
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| iR:
What are you working on now? |
| |
| Right now, I'm working on books. They're
"Angry Little Girls" books. I can't tell you what they
are, but I'm really happy with them and I'm getting them
out. I felt like that it has come a long way. |
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| iR:
What are you working on now? |
| |
Once I'm done with the books, I'm going to
do more FLASH. I want to animate the comic strips I'm
drawing and posting weekly. For now, people can see
the first five episodes on-line..jpg) |
Interview
with Lela Lee: Creator
of Angry Little Asian Girl & Angry Little Girls
