Happy 4th!

An encyclopedia of animation and cartooning techniques in one scene

Design and Appeal

Design and appeal aren't exactly the same things but they are related. This character was designed in a modernistic style (for 1944-45) by Hank Ketcham. It's very different than the mid 40s WB style. But this cartoon is animated by Bob Clampett's unit of guys and the combination of styles is spectacular.

Hank's design is appealing and the poses drawn by this animator are extremely appealing. You can take a design and draw it in appealing poses - or not - depending on how appealing your own style is.

Line Of Action

The features of the character's design are stretched along clear and strong lines of action.

Construction and Related Features

The construction in most of the drawings is great. Construction, by the way is not merely a solid looking drawing. That's only part of it. The other part is that each of the features fit into the larger forms and weave in and out of the expression and pose. Remind me to do a whole post about that. A house can be solidly constructed, but a creature has to have construction and fleshy parts that stretch and squash, push and pull and all cause each other to react sensibly.

For example - look at his smile line and cheek and the back of his cheek in the profile - they all relate to each other and together create fleshy forms that flow around his head and make his expressions.

Arcs

When this guy turns his head moves in an arc which helps make the action smooth and pleasant.

Overlapping Action

His hair doesn't get to his poses as fast as his head does.

Asymmetry

Note that his expressions and poses aren't perfectly even on both sides.

Funny Expressions

His expressions are not only clear and direct functionally, they are funny and fun to look at. They are beautiful designs in of themselves.

Specific Expressions

A lot of the shapes used to make his expressions are customized to his thoughts. They aren't stock expressions. When you watch this part in the clip, watch his mouth shapes change. You can't find these shapes on any model sheets or in other cartoons. The animator is making them up as he goes along - by feel and instinct. He's acting.

Spontaneity and Looseness

In the animator's rush to make his poses and emotions flow from one to the next, he made a mistake in construction on the odd pose, like the one above. But it's a great pose anyway.

Flow - Organic Feel

To make characters both constructed and flowing is no easy feat. It takes a lot of study, thought, practice and skill.

Exaggeration

Drag

The faster the action, the more drag you can use. This whole action here is amazing as you'll see when you watch the clip. He does a whole whirly sort of overlapping action as he brings his mop into the scene.

Anticipation and moving holds

In the middle of the clip it cuts to another animator.

The timing of this animation is full of variety, some slow soft parts, some fast wild parts and it moves very naturally, even though it uses all kinds of technical drawing and motion principles. It doesn't come off as a formula.

WATCH SOME GENIUS ANIMATION

The first scene was animated by Rod Scribner, who I think is the most talented and versatile animator in history. (take a look at some of his UPA style stuff and see how cleverly he approaches it). Most animators have their basic principles and if they are extra gifted, maybe one or 2 strengths on top of them. Scribner puts together all kinds of skills and makes them flow as if there was no effort involved at all.

The second scene also moves beautifully, but the drawings aren't as fun as Scribner's. They don't have as much appeal. Appeal is a very rare trait and can't be forced without looking contrived - although many do try to contrive it. Some people just have it naturally.
This cartoon is full of great stuff, and I'll post more soon.


This is a great scene to study and copy the drawings if you are a student trying to learn classic skills.

Wayne Boring's Superman

Mike Fontanelli says he hates superheroes because they don't make sense.


Unlike talking rabbits who walk upright - which makes perfect sense.

I disagree with Mike. To me superheroes are an American tradition and the more preposterous they are the more I like them. Superman has to be the most preposterous of them all and he deserves the most preposterous artist to bring him to life with absolute stiffness.
Wayne Boring is the best Superman artist in my opinion because he draws everything so wooden. The whole concept of a Superhero is crazy. Men with god-like powers who run around in long underwear taking the law into their own hands. - and normal people completely accept it!
The fact that you can't recognize the secret identity of a superhero just because he takes glasses on and off can only work if every character in the comics looks exactly the same - and you can't hear their voices. It helps if no one ever opens their mouths to talk and also never opens their eyes.
All emotions have to be treated exactly the same. Here is deep romantic love. Can you feel it?
One thing I love about Wayne Boring is that he draws the cranium smaller than the jaw.
I made a cartoon once that celebrated the stiffness of Wayne Boring's poses, and made these model sheets from his comics to inspire the animators for once to be stiff on purpose - but in a certain way.

Look how relaxed Superman is in repose.
I really love how thick Boring draws Superman's torso. Very appealing.


The flying poses kill me too.








I think that Superhero comics were ruined when the artists and writers started taking them seriously in the 70s. The drawings got really serious too. Some artists like Neal Adams even took the bold revolutionary step of opening Superman's mouth!When you try to hard to explain preposterous ideas, they lose their charm - and it's even worse when you try to make silly things socially conscious. Didn't the Hulk have a gay friend in the 80s who died of Aids or something? Jesus, that's sure what the kids want to read about in their long underwear stories.

No, to me the art and stories and concepts have to be as insensible as possible to make Superhero comics work. Like I said, everything about Superman is unbelievably illogical and the writers in the 50s and 60s had their tasks cut out for them. They had to keep coming up with ways to get around the fact that you can't hurt Superman, because he can do everything. How do you find conflicts for that? They had to contradict all their own premises to be able to continue writing millions of stories about God and his friends. And they did it!


The only other comic character that comes close to the preposterousness of Superman is Batman - a character who can afford the colorful long underwear - BUT HAS NO SUPER POWERS AT ALL! And we're expected to believe that you can't kill him. Isn't he the most popular character too? It's because it makes no sense that he's so beloved.

I made a cartoon with a character based on Wayne Boring's Superman and I'll get a clip from it to show you soon. It was hard to make because I had spent all my previous time on the series trying to loosen up the animators' drawings. Now I had to tell them to draw stiff on purpose - but with style.

At the San Diego Comic Con, I'll show a cartoon I made that parodies Batman. Hope you will be there!

What Causes Tit Eyes? - 2

The situation and the resulting reactions from Claude are funnier than some of the gags that prompt them.
This is a stock kind of cartoon gag. It's drawn and animated beautifully though.
The gag itself is just there to get to the real point of the cartoon - that the mice are trying to convince Claude that he is going crazy so they can take over the house. Claude's reactions to all the things that happen to him are the real point of the cartoon, and where a lot of the humor comes from.
This reminds me of when we were writing Stimpy's Invention - we needed to prompt Ren to get furious and then crazy to prompt Stimpy to create a Happy Helmet for him. Some of the gags that did the prompting weren't that funny on their own, a couple were. Sometimes when you have a pre-ordained structure that all your story details have to fit into, some of the details that connect the structure end up contrived and thus, less spontaneous. This is the difference between just letting your characters take the story wherever the gags lead. Both story approaches have their plusses and minuses. No one approach is the correct one.



Flying around like a balloon is funny when you see it for the first time, but it's a cartoon staple.


This is the part that's funny.
It's pure Chuck Jones. He can create expressions that are impossible to make in real life, but tell you exactly and specifically the complex emotion a character is feeling.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF CHUCK JONES' STYLE

It took Jones a long time to get comfortable making pure entertainment cartoons - almost 10 years.If you look at his first year of cartoons, not a single one is a WB style comedy (maybe the Daffy Duck one was an attempt to please Leon, but it doesn't come off as sincerely wacky). They are all meant to be sweet and cute and precious - very strange for a Warner Bros. director - a risky road to take at the funniest cartoon studio. The next year is even slower and sweeter! Except for 1 important ground-breaking cartoon.From 1940 to 1945 he began doing more funny style cartoons on purpose, but little by little each year.
Here's something odd: the first 3 cartoons of 1942 are all comedies, then the rest of the year is filled with slow conceptual cartoons. Maybe he got yelled at just at the start of the year; who knows?
He got over his cutesy thing after a while and exchanged it for more experimental stylistic cartoons. I really like these cartoons from around 1946, even though they aren't super funny. Chuck seemed consciously intent on creating his own style and personality and was searching for ways to distinguish himself from the other directors. Clampett and Avery on the other hand just made cartoons in their own confident personalities. They didn't have to find themselves. Their natural personalities fit and established the Warner Bros. style.These mid 40s Jones cartoons are full of great ideas in staging, design, stories based on high concepts or influenced by other mediums like radio. His timing is still kinda plodding for the most part.

The animation in them is more full than what he did a short time later - it coincides with Bob Cannon's tenure in Jones' unit. After Cannon left, Jones started doing funnier cartoons - but more pose to pose and less fully animated. I don't know if that's a coincidence or not.
Hair-Raising Hare is the most typical Warner Bros. style cartoon of that year.

In 1947, right after Clampett left, he tried making a couple Clampett style cartoons:
Little Orphan Airedale is actually a remake of Clampett's "Porky's Pooch" from 1941. In fact, right after Clampett left, the whole studio started making Clampett-style cartoons and this lasted for a couple years. His creative momentum and energy inspired the rest of the studio for years after.

By 1948 Jones seems to have decided to make the complete leap to comedy cartoons. Every one of the cartoons on this list is funny and many of them are true classics - some of the best cartoons ever made. They also have a great combination of straight-ahead and pose-to-pose animation.
One thing that confuses matters is that these dates don't match the dates on the films on the DVDs. But you could safely say, Jones did his purest WB comedy cartoons in the late forties.

By 1949, you can start to see a radical change in approach in his cartoons. They become more talky. (Excluding the Roadrunner which has no dialogue at all!) There is less animation and more reliance on the key poses. There are great cartoons in here, but in my opinion it's not quite as powerful a year as the one that came before.

http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/Jones/48mousewreckers/ClaudeCatTitEyes2.mov

Clampett Studies

Here are some of Geneva's latest studies. Good stuff.





I have one criticism: The lines are too hard and clean and I don't totally feel the construction underneath. I would soften the lines and leave the construction lines to be sure I understood how the drawings are built, not just what the proportions are.


I like the finish on this older study of hers.
Remember that the goal of copying other artists' work is to eventually be able to make your own poses applying the same principles that underlie theirs. It's not to just be able to make a 2 dimensional imitation of a specific drawing.

What Causes Tit Eyes? - 1

I have a theory about it. And a few more about this period of Chuck Jones' career.
I think that once he teamed with storyboard/writer Mike Maltese, his cartoons started to become funnier. Maltese's gags themselves were not the only funny thing about the cartoons though.
The way Jones' drawings reacted to the gags really sold them to the audience.
In a way, I think Jones was competing with Maltese's gags by coming up with visual toppers -like the tit eyes that happen after each gag in "Mouse Wreckers". It was a way of punctuating the gags and competing for attention with them.
Mouse Wreckers is full of great gags, but the structure of the cartoon is built around Claude Cat's reactions to them.
You remember the gags of Hubie and Bertie nailing the furniture to the ceiling and tieing Claude up and pulling him through keyholes, but what really stands out in the cartoon are Claude's tit-eyes. The drawings and timing are perfect too.
Mouse Wreckers is from the period of what I think of as Chuck's funniest/best year - roughly 1948.
It's after the "Bobe Cannon period" and before the stylized angular pose to pose talky period.
More about all that in the next posts. This is a fantastic cartoon, don't ya think?
http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/Jones/48mousewreckers/ClaudeCatTitEyes1.mov


Oh, to introduce another subject, after watching the clip, go back and just listen to the music. I'll do a post about different approaches to music sometime. This is one approach, where the music is added afterwards and has no melody; it's just there to help to punctuate the action - acting like sound effects.