La Cartoonerie

» see lacartoonerie.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

French kids with a cartoon studio in the browser. That was the product, and the banner across the top said so without hedging: deviens la star de l'animation. You picked characters, picked a set, gave them dialogue, dropped in props and sound effects, and the thing rendered a short animated film that you then published to the site under your own name. The homepage promised that making your cartoon took a few clicks in your own studio, and then you shared it with the community of 300,000 cartooneurs.

Everything about it was built for an audience under about fifteen. There was an about-page written for parents. The site carried ICRA content labels, which is the 2000s equivalent of a child-safety rating. Its partner logos read like a directory of the French kids' web of that decade: bestofkids, citizenkid, jedessine, marmikid, toupty, mescoloriages. Teachers used it; the site published an RSS feed specifically for workshop usage.

I was already twenty by the time the archive first catches it, on the wrong side of a border and a language from a product aimed at French ten-year-olds, so this is reconstruction rather than memory. What makes it worth a grave is that it outlived the technology it was built on by two full years, on the strength of the people who had grown up inside it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the day the plugin stopped ~

Adobe Flash reached end of life on 31 December 2020 and browsers dropped it within weeks. A site whose entire product was a Flash animation studio has no gradual decline available to it. The ArchiveTeam register files La Cartoonerie under that date along with the other Flash casualties, and functionally that is right, though the homepage kept serving for a few months afterward. It was still up and still advertising the studio on 6 March 2021. By 26 April that year, lacartoonerie.com was a redirect to forum.lacartoonerie.com, and that is the whole story in one HTTP header: the studio was gone and the forum was now the site.

~ who actually owned it ~

The last years were run by volunteers. Moderators had taken the site over from its previous custodian and kept it going, and then found out what they had actually inherited. The rights to La Cartoonerie, the domain name and the artwork included, had never been transferred. They sat with the original founder, known on the forum as Bérisa, who was not willing to hand them over. The people doing the work had no legal standing to do it, up to and including no authorization to keep the site open.

There is a thread on that forum titled "situation actuelle de LaK" which is where the community found this out, and a later one from a group calling itself the mouvement de préservation de laK. By the time a group of users has to name itself after preservation, the thing is already most of the way gone.

~ the last post ~

The forum carried on through 2021 and most of 2022 with the studio already dead, which is a strange and quite moving thing for a community to do. The Wayback Machine's last crawl of it is 30 November 2022. The announced closing date was 31 December 2022, and nothing answers after that. In May 2024 the crawler returned and found a NameBright page reading "lacartoonerie.com is coming soon", which is what a lapsed domain says about a site that has been finished for eighteen months.

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