Rappers these days are too busy knitting clothing, being good fathers and watching cartoons to deal with the drama of murders, drugs and rapes. Similarly, the release of The Mouse and The Mask suggests that hip-hop is heading in a more slapstick direction. And although Danger Doom resurrects a handful of old school characters, like Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Judy Jetson, their album centers mainly on the new wave of cartoon satire. Both rap and cartoons trivialize violence and are often the scapegoat to juvenile felonies. The rap/cartoon hybrid, though, makes just as much sense as the collaboration of Doom and DM. They're two separate genres fusing together, but still clearly in their own lanes. Listeners don't need to be avid Adult Swim addicts to understand the genius of The Mouse and The Mask and they won't feel compelled to flip on the Cartoon Network after hearing the album. The cartoons smoothly swim in and out of the album without producing wake, drowning any initial assumptions of the cross-promotional reasons for the album's production. The relationship between the artists and the cartoons is more than the superficial, marketed marriage between Michael Jordan and Bugs Bunny. The album's 14 smooth, Pink Floyd transitioned tracks, totaling a modest 40 minutes, piece together slices of pop culture, creating a work of art in itself.

The collaboration of Doom and DM generates a musical collage in its most complicated form - a nearly seamless woven web of rhymes and melodies. It layers the old school with the new, innovative rhymes of Doom atop of DM's experimental beats, garnished with the dim-witted voices of cartoon characters like Master Shake and Harvey Birdman. Much like the sarcastic cartoons aired during Adult Swim, this album screams post-modern. The Mouse and The Mask, however, is surprisingly intelligent and well-crafted. It would be an easy, yet premature, assumption to automatically regard this album as an immature and trivial project created by two attention-hungry hip-hop artists. It was the perfect project for DM and Doom, two self-described cartoonheads the latter of which even admits to conversing with cartoons when he's alone. For example, the main character whom we follow throughout the song carries himself in a more modern, laid-back manner than you might see back in the day.With The Mouse and The Mask, Doom, still riding the success from Madvillany-, his collaboration with Madlib, and Dangermouse, made famous by his production of The Grey Album, the remix of Jay-Z's' vocals from The Black Album with the instrumentals from The Beatles' White Album, work so well together one would think they've been doing it for years. ThatвЂ™s why, in the end, we ended up breaking away from some of the animation languages of the time. A lot of implications rested on every decision, especially as we were sticking to the specific aesthetic. The 1930s-40s cartoons feature very rubbery, happy characters, but this piece speaks to the serious subject matter. Making storyline and character choices proved difficult from a conceptual standpoint too. While the old animated shorts we referenced would take around 9 months to create, we had six weeks from the initial call to delivery. We knew it would be a challenge replicating these incredibly controversial cartoons from the past in an authentic way вЂ“ authenticity being the key вЂ“ within such a short time frame. Mark came to us a couple of days after meeting with JAY-Z and we began developing a way to use the conventions of that style of animation to portray these terrible stereotypes, delivering a message through JAY-ZвЂ™s voice. He and Mark brainstormed an idea for this film where the track would play over visuals derived from old, racist cartoons from the 1930s-40s. It all started with JAY-ZвЂ™s new track, вЂThe Story of O.J.вЂ™. Art Director, Tim Devlin comments, вЂњThe project definitely evolved.

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