Cool Disney and other Character Paintings

Look at the great painting technique in these old cereal box displays.

The drawings even have a lot of style and character.
Compare these artist made paintings to the style they paint characters in today:

http://disneyshopping.go.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/DSIProductDisplay?catalogId=10002&storeId=10051&productId=1200873&langId=-1&categoryId=13709
It seems like there is only one style of character painting now, the boring not fun style. You just take an airbrush, and paint a rim light in a lighter color of your main primary color, and then airbrush a darker version of the same primary color inside that. Paint all shadows and highlights in parallel fuzzies all around every character and object.

Now you can do it in Photoshop, so we don't even need artists anymore! I think it's the plan of every corporation to completely rid the world of pesky artists. When they get computers to do a cheesy approximation of every aspect of cartooning that is still done by artists, that'll be the end of us.

What I can't figure out is why they don't write a program to write cartoons. That oughta be easy as shit! Program in the 7 stock plots. Add in which characters you are going to use and what their catch phrases are, and then print out the scripts. You could churn out hundreds of scripts a day. The scriptwriters all place a great value on how fast they can whip the stuff out. I bet a computer could beat them! And computers don't smell as bad.

Here are some other cool painting styles from prehistory.



http://theimaginaryworld.com/page4.html

Real Dialogue versus Cartoon Writer Dialogue -On Dangerous Ground

Here's a scene that's typical of what happened at Filmation's cartoon studio all the time.

I had just read the script for "Disco Droopy" and someone tipped me off on where the scriptwriter was hiding out.
I chased him down and began to deliver God's justice upon him I beat him within an inch of his cheap life
I felt the foul meat of his face tear off on my fists
in a flash my older wiser supervisor stopped me in my murderous rage
His knuckles connected with my skull and loosened my enraged flesh

When my brains stopped rattling, I woke up to have the harsh modern world explained to me in the coldest meanest wordsI felt the nastiness of reality ooze over me like fish vomit coating a fresh babe


reality sunk in slowly; it produced a last rebellious and futile spasmic outcrythis is what artists face every day of their lives in the terrible icy world of animation scripts.


The scene starts out with the evil writer's whimper.


CLICK HERE TO WATCH AN ARTIST SMACK A WRITER GOON



How about the dialogue in that scene?! When you have great words to say and really good actors to say them, and great direction, you can get intense performances like these!

I've seen these same actors in movies with lesser scripts and they can't do as much with them, despite their obvious talent.

Compare that dialogue with the kind of dialogue animators today get to work with:

What can you do with this kind of dialogue??? Only what Robert Ryan did.

Try reading the lines out loud and see if you don't turn beet red.



Now you could spend 30 bucks and learn how to write dialogue like this:


Or, you can read my articles on writing cartoons for free and aim for something like this:

CLICK HERE TO SEE REN THREATENING STIMPY AND SVEN



By the way,Evan Oliver did this great restoration of that Sven Hoek clip. That is a sequence that Nickelodeon kept cutting up every year until there was almost nothing left of it.

I found a 3/4" tape of the rough cut, made before before Nickelodeon destroyed the master. I cut the missing scenes back in, but they had timecodes on it.

Evan Oliver and David Mackenzie took the finished cut and using digital magic, erased the timecodes:

CLICK HERE TO READ ABOUT RESTORING SVEN HOEK

Acting-Expressions-Ralph and Norton act surprised

Ralph and Norton act surprised
Uploaded by chuckchillout8

This is an example of live actors approaching a similar acting problem that McKimson did in that last post this week. Henery Hawk's father was consciously acting something out - he was overacting on purpose, as Ralph and Norton are here. In the animation, the scene was done with strong body poses, but not much facial acting and no extra layering of subtleties that happen so easily and naturally with skilled live actors performing in real time.This is actors making fun of normal people - non-actors trying to act. This takes a lot of observational skill and insight, especially to make it so funny!

"Pardon My Glove" (1956)

There are so many levels of thought to pulling this off. They have to make their actions seem "natural" in this sense: A normal person pretending to do something will be a bad actor. He won't be believeable. All his expressions and gestures will be simplified caricatures of what the normal thinks is natural.

Actually, it's quite similar to the way many feature animators draw their acting when they are sincerely trying to be realistic or wanting to wring pathos out you-very unnatural and cornball, but we are so used to seeing animated characters move in artificial ways that we don't question it much. Most of us, anyway.

If we ever saw real people acting like typical animated characters we would think they were from space.





Feature animators like to "keep things alive" so they have their characters randomly wave their arms and bob their heads around. It doesn't matter what character, whether it's Stromboli, Cruella DeVille, Ludwig Von Drake or that kid up there - they all move the way Art Carney makes fun off Norton trying to "act". The kid's facial expresssions are copied from Cruella and Mowgli and pasted onto his bobbly head.Here, Jackie Gleason and Art Carney make fun of how not only "normal" people and cartoon animators might act something out, but how two very specific normal people would act something out.

In Norton's case, he is acting out how he thinks Ralph should act which adds even more levels to the farce.

Art Carney is playing Ed Norton playing Ralph Kramden.

These guys are so brilliant that they can make us believe that them acting unnatural is natural!

This is a real brain twister to figure out. It would be murder to pull off something with this much layering in animation!

If I had a feature budget I would sure aim for some of it though.

Hey, I don't expect every animator to be a brilliant actor. Certainly not a serious actor. It's not something that cartoons are naturally good at. There are so many things that cartoons easily do better than other art forms, that I wish we would do more of that.

I love old musicals, Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly movies. I bet a lot of animators do too. But does anyone go to them to see the acting?

Many people suffer through the story filler and bad acting just so we can see the brilliant dance numbers. What is this fascination that Hollywood has with filler? Just give us the entertaining parts!

If I wanna see good acting I'll watch movies with good actors, which I do all the time.

Once in a blue moon there are rare talents who crossover to more than one skill. James Cagney is a great actor and dancer! Well, that's a wonderful combination and I can enjoy a dance movie with him both acting and dancing and singing, because he can actually do all those things.

Ever see Brando dance? Or Clark Gable or Cary Grant? It's hard to take seriously, but they are all fun to watch acting. Why should we expect every animator to be a good actor?

Jerry Lewis is a hilarious comedian and a great dancer-but terrible at serious pathos stuff.
It's torture to sit through the heartwarming scenes in his movies. Or when he sings!!! You just want to get to the scenes where he makes fun of the handicapped-the good stuff!

Someone in our past came up with the crackpot idea that animators have to be "actors with a pencil" (probably Walt) and it makes animators ashamed to be animators and cartoonists first. Every entertainer wants to be taken seriously now. Comedians wanna show their sensitive deep inner selves. The cartoon feature writers write all kinds of shameless contrived pathos and dramatic scenes and make the animators try to pull them off, rather than let them make cartoon movies with stories that show off what animation can really do better than every other medium.

I love good acting and I love good funny cartoon acting and I'm a zealot when it comes to adding specific acting in cartoons. But I've never in my life seen convincing "serious" acting in even the most expensive features. I don't say it's impossible, but the animator who could actually pull it off doesn't seem to have visited earth yet. So why do we keep writing for it?

Anyway, obviously the kind of stock acting we have in features is never going to go away. It's too ingrained in our business, but I just want to plant the idea in young animators' brains that there are other and more fun ways to do things. Maybe someday we'll have an alternative to what we get now.

Being a cartoonist and animator is already a lofty profession by itself. It's full of creative challenges and magical ways to entertain.

If we really want to add good acting to what we do we have to study good live action acting to see what it actually is, analyze it and then find ways to adapt it so that it works for animation. ...rather than studying the Rescuers over and over again and copying unnatural "animation acting" that we have already seen in 200 animated features before and since!

Walt Quote Of The Day

"All cartoon characters and fables must be exaggeration, caricatures. It is the very nature of fantasy and fable. "

Walt Disney
Walt said a lot of smart things, and this is one of the smartest.

The Real Ripping Friends

The original Ripping Friends-created in 1988 were actually a watered down spin off of my Brik Blastoff concept from the early 80s.
http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2007/01/brik-blastoff-of-outback.html
Brik himself was modeled after Kirk Douglas in Detective story.
So was Rip. Crag is a variation, as are some TV and CG movie guys.

I watered the "CARTOONS FOR MEN" concept down to what I thought would sell on TV. It took ten years to get it on TV and then it got watered down even more, to the point where I shudder watching it. I shudder even more seeing all the rippoffs which are also watered down - in weirder and weirder ways.

But here's how they were originally conceived:
Here they are as super geniuses, drawn by the great Jim Smith.
Jim draws them tampering with the laws of the universe with their ungodly scientific instruments.
In an article from Chris Gore's Wild Cartoon Kingdom-early 90s.
Here's their girlfriend, Dr. Jean Poole.
People tell me they've seen her before, just not in my cartoons.

The drawing below was done by Lynne Naylor and inked probably by Libby Simon.
Here's a doodle I did for a line of children's clothing accesories. It's Rip modeling the latest Mattel Idiot-Ride-'em-Helmet.


I'm sure I have some more early sketches somehwere. I might even have an old story outline for a movie idea. I will hunt...This is as close as the show ever got to using my drawings. They still changed them and blanderized these from the originals, but they are at least recognizable as my style.

Cost Per Chuckle

This probably cost a couple hundred bucks to shoot and a few bucks more to pay the talented puppet. It was shot live in real time too.





CLICK HERE FOR SOUPY SALES CLIP!

Anyone want to hazard a guess as to how much this bit cost? Or how long it took to make? Or how much in Psychotherapy the animators had to spend for having to look at these character designs every day for a couple years?

Foghorn Leghorn - Bob McKimson Director - Henery's dad poses

Walky Talky Hawky, 1946
Here is a great "pose to pose" scene from a Bob McKimson cartoon.
You can tell these are drawn by Mckimson himself. They are really solid.

Each pose contrasts from the previous pose and the next one.

This is really good cartoon acting. The poses are over the top, and totally readable. You know exactly what the character is feeling and portraying.

The character himself is acting. He isn't sincere. He is pretending, which adds a level to the cartoon acting. Very funny!

Someone commented that he thought I was suggesting pose to pose being better than straight ahead animation. Not at all. They are just different approaches that you can use and even combine for different purposes.

Pose to pose eventually became limited animation. But in most limited animation, the poses are not really poses. They are just characters standing straight up and down, and there is no excuse for that. Poses should be "posed". It doesn't cost more money to draw a pose, than to draw a non-pose.

Classic cartoon acting tends to put more emphasis on the body than the face.

Drawing specific expressions is hard. It depends on tiny subtle details that all have to be depicted in line, and then turned in volumetric perspective as the character moves his head around. That's why to this day, most cartoon expressions are not even expressions, they are just animation cliches.

Because real expressions are so hard to draw, animators evolved a style that is more stagy than live action, where you can read the characters' emotions through their body language. Their poses.

This applies to all the classic studios: Warner's, Disney, MGM, Fleischer and the rest. Sometimes in closeups, the odd animator would experiment with more subtle, detailed and specific expressions-Rod Scribner, Willard Bowsky, Grim Natwick to name a few.




CLICK HERE TO WATCH CLIP

By the way, McKimson is one of my favorite cartoon directors and one that is extremely important to cartoon history. After Clampett left Warner's in 1946, McKimson's cartoon unit became the backbone of the Warner Bros. team of units.

Jones was the arsty experimenter who would sometimes deliver pure cartoon humor (esp. in 1948). Freleng basically just followed what everyone else was doing-whatever the current trend was, he would conservatively mimic it.

McKimson wasn't as artsy as Jones or as well-rounded and inspired as Clampett, but he knew his audience maybe better than anybody. He aimed at regular folks and you can tell he felt it was his duty as a cartoonist to entertain the masses-especially the masses of Dads.

His cartoons are hilarious and brilliantly timed and animated. He carried on Warner's tradition of full animation longer than any of the other directors. By 1950 Jones and even Freleng were animating more stylized, more limited and less cartoony stuff. Against the pressures of tightening budgets and UPA's influence, McKimson kept making lively fully animated characters for a few more years.

Without McKimson's cartoons, Jones' tendency to make "art" and sweetness might have run wild and the WB studio might not have kept up the reputation that Avery and Clampett bought it. Looney Tunes are remembered today and still beloved for being mass appeal, honest-entertainment cartoons, the antidote to Disney.

I love Jones and am glad he was so arsty and experimental, but the audience needs a balance of down to earth human entertainment and that's what McKimson delivered. Vincent Waller was my McKimson. His down to earth funny world view balanced all my weird ideas.

McKimson cartoons appeal to the same base entertainment needs that The 3 Stooges provide.


I have lots more observations about McKimson. He had a really funny world view, especially how he perceived the behavior of men. His characters behave as though they have a set of Commandments that guides them to be the best assholes they can be.

I'll tell you the commandments in another post.

CONSTRUCTION

BTW, these drawings are really well constructed so if you are trying to improve your own construction, copy these.

http://www.coldhardflash.com/2007/04/john-ks-guide-to-surviving-end-of.html

Clampett Fun Song

I love how the early cartoons are so musical. The early 30s were especially written around music.

By 1940, some of the animators and directors drifted away from long song sequences, in favor of sweet sentimentality, sarcastic humor, realistic special effects and whatever else were the trends.

Clampett was aware of trends, but wasn't a slave to them. He did what he thought was entertaining, whether it fit whatever everyone else was doing or not.

He kept up to date with the current advances in animation, started new trends in creativity and technique, but didn't abandon the best traditions of early cartoons. He directed by instinct and great artistic-cartoonist taste rather than blindly following what the other guys were doing.

This is a really fun sequence from "We, The Animals Squeak".

I wish there was a magic studio somewhere that would preserve the great traditions of the first cartoons while striving to add new and fun techniques and creative ideas. Historically, as new ideas come along, many creative people discard the good ones from their own past, rather than just adding the good new ones to the good old ones.

Clampett followed this philosophy. His cartoons were fully modern, prophetic and yet traditional all at the same time. And so musical!


CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE FUNNY CLIP!

BONUS THRILL PRIZE!!

Here is that other great musical cartoon master, Friz Freleng. (from the same year!)

JORGE LOVES THIS



Learn about The Cartoon School that should be!
http://www.coldhardflash.com/2007/04/john-ks-guide-to-surviving-end-of.html

Interview at Cold Hard Flash

Hi folks, I'm gonna put up an article about fun cartoon musical bits later today, but for now, here's an interview that Aaron Simpson conducted with me:

CLICK HERE TO READ INTERVIEW

I talk about what would make a good cartoon school and other stuff...

Aaron is a good egg. Buy anything he'll sell you.

Life Sucks 2 sc 4-Storyboards are for STORY, not finished art

Here's an earlier sequence from Life Sucks. This is where Ren first approaches Stimpy in his garden. Stimpy thinks nature is proof that the world is full of beauty and joy and Ren begins to burst his bubble by explaining how much torture goes on in his lawn every minute of every day.




These two still drawings are Nick's cleanups of my scribbly roughs. This animatic is mostly drawn by me in my "bus doodle" style.

I have a few different drawing styles and I use them for different thought processes. When I am writing ideas, I draw them, but I draw really fast, with no regard to construction, perspective, line quality or any finished techniques. I am purely drawing feeling. I am trying to draw in real time as the events play out. I look like a complete spaz when I'm doing it and people make fun of me and imitate it.

The drawings are very scribbly but have the germs of all the visual ideas in continuity. Once these scribbles are complete, then I switch my brain to style mode and draw bigger versions of the same drawings that use more solid principles. This step (layout) requires slower, more carefully choreographed drawings and uses a completely different part of the brain to do. If I was trying to storyboard a scene in this finished style, it wouldn't work. I would be thinking of pretty drawings rather than story and emotion and continuity.

This is a major flaw with TV studio systems today. They expect their storyboard artists to draw finished clean drawings "on-model" so they can send them overseas and then have the animators just xerox them up. This is an extremely inefficient way to use storyboards.

Storyboards are called "story"boards because the story artists are supposed to be writing the stories, not doing the animation and layouts. The more time they waste doing clean stiff on-model drawings, the less time they have to spend on making the story work.

Executives do not understand storyboards anyway, let alone rough drawings. They are easily impressed by a clean inked line, and even if the story isn't working they will quickly sign off on a fancily rendered finished looking storyboard.

Stupid.

You should look up some of Mike Maltese's storyboards for Chuck Jones to see how writers used to work.

Anyway, this animatic is made up mostly of my bus-doodle style. Scribbly but emotional. The few clean and semi-clean drawings are done by Nick Cross and Matt Roach following me up.
LS
Uploaded by chuckchillout8

Eddie has a great storyboard drawing style. It's simple but full of amazing life, fantastic strong clear poses and staging and composition. I used to shudder when layout artists would get his boards and then instantly tone down all the poses when they added the details and put them "on-model". I loved doing layouts from Eddie's boards because all the thought and life was there, and I got to add my own creativity in the finished design details and adding a few poses.

CLICK HERE to buy
"A GODDAMN CHRISTMAS CARTOON"
From John K., the creator of Ren and Stimpy

R.Ramjet - "K.O. Corral" - come on, Rimpot

CLICK HERE TO WATCH CLIP!

Funny drawings,

funny stylized designs,

funny verbal gags

funny timing

Funny men made this

There are lots of funny cartoonists and voice talents in the business today, but they are not allowed to be funny anymore.

Leave us alone to do what we were born to and make lots of money off us.

Bill Tytla - Terrytoons - Pose to Pose Animation - character with fly swatter

POSE TO POSE ANIMATION

I think this cartoon is inspired by The Dover Boys. The poses are extreme and graphic. The villain is very similar to Dan Backslide.

Terrytoons had a funny habit of copying what other studios invented and then misunderstanding it. Usually they waited a few years until after a west coast studio made a revolutionary cartoon before they would copy it, but this time they were right on the heels of The Dover Boys.
I'm pretty sure this is Bill Tytla. He is animating pose to pose, as the animators in The Dover Boys, but the way he gets to each pose is different. In the Dover Boys, the animators use big blurred inbetweens that have come to be known as "smears".

POSE TO POSE means you draw all the key poses first and time them so that they have the most frames on screen. The motion is less important than the held poses. That way you really see the poses, as opposed to "straight-ahead" animation which tends to keep the character moving constantly and you don't plan the poses ahead of time. You just go where your pencil takes you.

Here the inbetweening is more evenly spaced and the effect is softer than in Jones' pose to pose style.

It's possible that Tytla did the main poses and someone else did the animation.

The timing isn't as snappy as the Jones and Bobe Cannon stuff. Maybe that's because of Terrytoon's inbetweeners. Who knows?

It still looks really cool and cartoony and fun! I like this kind of thing a lot better than when animators try to imitate what they think is "realistic", because realistic animation looks corny and falls far short of actual real life acting.

These poses are purposely stylized and wacky. A real person would never strike these poses, but in a cartoon you totally accept them, because cartoons are supposed to be silly.

CLICK HERE TO SEE CLIP! (1.11mb)

Serious Hates Silly- rules vs fun

When I was a kid, everything had rules. Mowing the lawn had to be done according to the book. You had to read your comic books only at designated times. Hair couldn't ever be hanging over your ears. Tanning hides had its own special procedure at Chris Peterson's house. "Who taught you to hold a brain like that!?"

Rules made the world go around.

Especially at the dinner table.

You had to hold the fork in the right hand. You couldn't hold your knife facing the wrong way. I can't even remember all the rules, there were so many! There was a meat knife, a butter knife, a nose hair knife. The fork goes on the left side of your plate, the pickle fork goes in your ear...
What I do remember is how funny it is to break the rules. The more you did things wrong the more mad Dad would get. And even funnier than mad, sometimes is the frustration at how stupid and immature an 11 year old kid was to him.

"You're 11 years old now! GROW THE F***K UP!
It's time to put away your little comic books and starting thinking about the future!"

That line is burned in my brain forever!
Anyway, comedy is full of scenes where an authority figure is driven to violence by the immature and frustrating antics of the undisciplined silly character.

Remember how funny high school was? Did you have a history teacher who would get so mad at your talking and joking in class that he would break his pencils and throw them at you? Which would only make the situation funnier.How many times have you been told to stop laughing by a red faced authority figure?

This is how violations of sacred rules were resolved before political correctness ruined the world!

I've made this Stimpy face many times.

Look how satisfied Ren is that he has taught a valuable life's lesson.
Uh oh! another violation in table manners. You never balance a spoon on your head with the pea still in it!


My Dad used to shove his eyes into his brain all the time when lessons didn't sink in to my silly immature dumbass self.This didn't happen though. That's what cartoons are for.

Have any funny stories of you driving authority figures to frustration and rage?


I wonder why more cartoons don't get inspired by real life type situations and expressions? It's so fun to draw!
But you won't get any of the expressions off a model sheet. You'll have to observe the real world and find a way to interpret it.

BTW, The Animation world is full of arbitrary rules too (that change every few years), under the guise of "styles". You gotta get a lot of drawing skill so you can recognize what an arbitray stylistic rule or dogmatic routine action is, versus a solid principle. Then you can really start having fun. Of course the authority figures will hate you though.

Moe angry at Curly - learning table manners

"Half-Wits Holiday" (1947)

Here's a big inspiration for Ren and Stimpy. The silly man upsets the serious and stern man. This is a classic situation most people can identify with.


Note how the performance is much more important to the humor than the writing. I defy you to write this scene on paper and see if anyone laughs at it.


I love when low class people try to act high class.


CLICK HERE TO WATCH CLIP!

writing for cartoons 9 - Dialogue

I was pleasantly suprised when my cartoons first hit the air and people I had just met would quote whole passages word for word to me. Passages that I had never memorized myself. Stuff I had never really even thought was that important at the time. People have asked me many times what the secret is for good dialogue. Is there a secret?

Hmmm...I thought writing about dialogue would be easy, since I have done so much of it. It turns out that I don't think much about it when I write it. I just do what feels and more important sounds right... but that would be lousy advice to give someone else who wants to know the tools of good dialogue. I also know when I read bad or awkward dialogue -when I do it or anyone else does it.

The main tool and one that can't be acquired is an ear for words that sound good together, but not just random good wordplay, but character driven wordplay.

Dialogue has to sound good out loud and you don't know if your written dialogue works until you try to say it. Or maybe until the voice actor says it...or stumbles over it. I learned a lot from having to act out my own characters and I'm not much of an actor, but if I got into the recording studio and couldn't read a line right, I would change the line to something that read more naturally. I did the same for my other actors. If they couldn't get a line right, I blamed the writing, not the actor and would ask them to help me come up with something that had the same meaning but flowed off the tongue better.

When I try to analyze all the considerations that have to be controlled when creating good dialogue, my list gets longer and longer.

Dialogue partly tells the story, but should not be the main storytelling tool.

Dialogue has to sound natural. It will never actually be natural, because that would be boring, but it should feel natural and that is a vague quality that is hard to define.

Dialogue should be appropriate to the characters. You have to have a feel for character if you are to write good personality dialogue.

Anyway, I'll try to backtrack to see what tools I have to either be aware of or instinctively apply when I write my dialogue scenes.

Dialogue

Be In Character- Good
Dialogue needs to be prompted, motivated and be in character-and hopefully be funny too! Ren and Stimpy say different kinds of things and say them in different ways. They use different combinations of words.

Boo Boo, Yogi and Ranger Smith are different characters and have to show their emotions in different ways.
When Boo Boo gets mad he has to say it in a way that sounds kinda sissy, because he is usually such a nice goody-two-shoes guy. You have to push him pretty far to get a cross word from him, and that was the whole story for Boo Boo Runs Wild. He has to have trouble getting his frustrations out.







Writerspeak - Bad:

A lot of characters in modern cartoons are simply mouthpieces for the writers. They speak in the writer's voice rather than the character's voice, tell the jokes that the writer and his writer friends think are funny, but are totally out-of-character for the character who is actually saying them. This common writer's flaw is known as "writerspeak".

"I'll bet that asteroid will burn out in the atmosphere and shrink to the size of a chihuahua's head". That's writerspeak. It's informational, a setup for a gag that is supposed to happen at the end of the cartoon. A gag that the audience will predict the second they hear the writerspeak setup and congratulate themselves when they find that they were duped into being right. A gag that the cartoonists are not allowed to actually make funny by drawing the payoff funny.

This is a line of dialogue that could be read by any character in the story. To the writer of a line like this, the characters are interchangable, just an assortment of extra mouths for the writer, whose mouth doesn't appear on screen.

The writerspeak writer avoids writing character specific dialogue by using catch phrases. If you just tack on "D-oh" at the end of the line, then you know who said it. You could change that to "Cowabunga" or whatever else and instantly define your characters.

Exposition - Bad.
Many writers use dialogue as exposition-they have the characters tell the audience what is going on in the story, instead of writing the characters as characters living out the story.

"I am really sad."

"I am going to walk to the door and open it."

Sometimes exposition can be funny, as in Tex Avery cartoons or in slapstick comedy. It's funny because it's so ignorant. In a way, funny by default.


Musical Rhythm- Good.
Dialogue has to be easy for the actor to read. It can't be clumsy. It should have natural flowing rhythm. It's best to write dialogue by actually speaking it out loud until it sounds good, then sitting down and typing it up after you know it works. If it's hard for you to read aloud, it will be even harder for the actor.

Listen to the word music in this scene from Baby Bottleneck:

Acting - Baby Bottleneck
Uploaded by chuckchillout8

I find that if the dialogue has a musical beat with the accents on the important points of the sentences, it makes the meaning of the sentence sink in harder. It's much more effective than just informational dialogue.

Role-Playing Dialogue:
Sometimes a character plays a role, besides just being himself. Daffy Duck in the beginning of The Great Piggy Bank Robbery is playing a little kid-or a big kid that hasn't grown up. He loves comics, and his emotions reading his newest comic are the same emotions that little kids have. His dialogue reflects it-as does the animation and Mel Blanc's great voice acting.

The dialogue also has great rhythm and music.

GPBR - acting
Uploaded by chuckchillout8

Here's a clip of George Liquor from Man's Best Friend. Most of the dialogue is character driven. There is a bit of exposition in the beginning and there is one line of "writerspeak" that I couldn't resist putting in the speech. It was a line that I thought was just funny and ironic by itself, but it's not really something George would say. I sinned.

MBF_couch
Uploaded by chuckchillout8

Chris Reccardi wrote the line "Maybe I would take the car, but the goldfish took it." I laughed and put it in.




Here is a clip from Ren and Stimpy that is particularly dialogue heavy.

StimpyBreakfastTips
Uploaded by chuckchillout8

There were a lot of things I had to balance to make the dialogue work without competing with the ideas and gags.
Maybe I'll try to break it down in another post.



I will continue writing about writing cartoons and go into more detail on each of these writing tools, and give you step by step procedures of how we wrote our stories.

I'll also include premises and outlines from cartoons that I've had quoted back to me by fans.

I can't help you be creative or show you how to have original and funny ideas, but I might be able to help you make the most effective use of the ideas you do have.

50 cents plus talent, vs 50 million dollars and executive control

MEET POOKIE THE FUNNY LION



It's money vs talent!

The most expensive puppet in history:







Here is a talent contest between puppets. Which puppet do you think is more entertaining? Please vote.

The cheapest puppet in history:











CLICK HERE FOR LONG CLIP, 8mins 15 sec (19.5 MB)

CLICK HERE FOR SHORT CLIP, 1 min 20 sec (3.4 MB)


Money must have went a lot farther 50 years ago.

Executives today seem to believe that a lot of money is funnier than a lot of talent.

George Liquor StoryBible 2 - more characters

Here are some more of the recurring characters. George Liquor's world is much like the neighborhood I grew up in, only different physical laws apply depending on which character's point of view each story is told by.







http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2006/04/george-liquor-stories-3-fast-food-lust.html

R.Ramjet - "K.O. Corral" - trap tourists

CLICK HERE TO WATCH CLIP!

Scene Planning For TV - Setups for storyboard and layout 4

Here are the original 18 scenes in sequence, for reference. By using good scene planning and setups, we saved the background painters and background designers 11 backgrounds. That would have been a lot of extra work to do for no added benefit to the story. We also saved the layout artists and animators and assistant animators a lot of extra work too.

Acting 5 - Ren and Stimpy "realistic" sitcom acting

I don't expect everyone to want to do specific or realistic acting in cartoons.

I sure don't want to have only realistic human acting and expressions in cartoons.



We can't compete with live action by only imitating what live action can do. Real people can act real and make real detailed specific expressions and move with real weight and physics a lot easier than we can draw them.

Our drawings are flat colors bordered by lines. Real people have light, shadow, and lots of facial muscles that can make barely imperceptible shadings and super subtle differences that can convey a lot of nuance that is impossible for pencils to capture and more impossible for CG it seems, which I can't figure out.

Actors can do all this in real time.

By the time it takes us to animate 10 seconds of screen time, an actor can have acted a whole half hour show full of tons of original expressions poses and mannerisms. And if we tried to merely imitate realistic humans, we would fall pitifully flat by comparison.

Cartoons can beat the hell out of live action by doing funny impossible things though:



With all that said though, I still like to add some ideas from other mediums to my cartoon toolbox . I never want to abandon what cartoons can do that nothing else can, but there's no reason to not supplement our magic pencils with amusing things we observe all around us.

I've always thought real people were funny. Real specific people who have their own unique mannerisms and funny ways of doing things. I try to put a lot of that into my cartoons.

I think adding the dimension of reality to the characters makes the unreal impossible world they live in -where anything can happen because it's a cartoon- seem all the more accessible to the audience. It's like "Wow! What if I could live in crazy world like this? How would I react?"

Actually, now and then live action takes cartoon ideas and mixes them in with real people and gets hilarious results-like Monty Python and Green Acres.

So I combine cartoon expressions and poses with human expressions and poses. It's fun to do and more challenging than always relying on the same stock animated acting that is so prevalent. I've been yelled at it many times too! I had to do a lot of convincing to powers above that cartoon characters could make expressions that they had never seen cartoon characters make before.

I would go nuts if I was forced to draw expressionless drawings all day:




Here is Ren with half a cartoon expression and a bit of reality. Stimpy is almost pure cartoon:
Here are some frames from a scene that is an homage to classic live action comedy on purpose. I love the Honeymooners and the 3 Stooges. They depend on many scenes that contrast the relationship between an asshole and an idiot.

Moe is the asshole, Curly is the idiot cartoon character.

Ralph is the asshole, while Norton is the surreal idiot character that drives him nuts.

Ren is the realistic character who is constantly driven nuts by Stimpy's unreal cartoonish antics.

In scenes like these, some of the comedy comes from the clownish character doing his clownish antics, but the silliness is enhanced by the mean character who is enraged by silliness.

This kind of classic comedy happens all the time in the real world. It's like when your Dad explodes at the dinner table because you and your friends are having a laughing fit, while you should be at the serious business of chewing your asparagus into a pasty bolus.

Moe Howard, Ralph Kramden, Oliver Hardy are all masters of the slow burn. It's part of Ren's charm too.
This starts out like many classic comedy shorts with low class characters trying to act polite and debonair, and quickly the scene reveals their true boorish nature.
Ren's expression here is purely realistic. I know because it's my expression when Eddie tells me a theory I disagree with.


Stimpy is making cartoon expressions. Ren is real. I posed in the mirror for all these Ren expressions. Katie drew the final scenes.

Because we are so unused to seeing cartoon characters making realistic faces it makes the cartoons seem extra weird. I think that had a lot to do with Ren and Stimpy's success. People thought they were looking at something weird even when something very real was happening.




Here Stimpy has an expression that is obviously impossible, but it still reads in context.

These Stimpy expressions are based on Eddie's pose in the storyboard. This is how Eddie acts out in high society when we take him to the opera.

Ren and Stimpy decide now that they are part of the "upper crust" they must learn to go around with their zippers up.
How sophisticated!

There are some purely impossible cartoon gags in this scene too, but Eddie asked me if he could post about them, so I deferred to his theory greatness.





The Honeymooners, "Pardon My Glove" (1956)Here is classic asshole and idiot situation comedy done by two geniuses in real time. I'm so jealous of this aspect of live performance!

Ralph wants a bite of Norton's pizza....

Ralph wants to eat Norton's pizza
Uploaded by chuckchillout8

George Liquor Storybible

HERE ARE MORE CHARACTERS FROM THE WORLD OF GEORGE LIQUOR
George Storybible 2

Acting 4 -SUBTLETY- Specific Expressions-exposition scene

Using subtlety and broadness together creates richness and entertainment.

"Pardon My Glove" (1956)

Variety is what makes things seem alive and certainly interesting. Some commenters have called this comedy acting "broad" and I have to challenge that. Yes, it's partly broad when Ralph screams and hits Norton, but even within the broad gestures there are very subtle nuances in the facial expressions and body language that make Ralph a specific character, not just a generic blusterer as you see in many cartoons.

Now these expressions are very obviously subtle to me but some would call them extreme, just because they are noticeable at all. We are so used to blandness today, especially in cartoons, that anything that makes a clear statement is considered broad or extreme. I disagree.

Subtle means nuanced to me. It means very slight twists and turns of details that add rich information to the main statement. The difference between "mad" and "saracastically pleasant while trying to convince Norton that Ralph is not mad so he can lull Norton into blind trust and then strangle him".

That second emotion cannot be made simply. It can be done with a single expression though that you can recognize in an instant, just as fast as you can read "mad". But it's a lot funnier and interesting. Here is cartoon mad:


Gleason's mads have subtle nuances in meaning and appearance. And he has a million different ways to be mad.

And on top of that, an entertainer such as an actor or cartoonist has to do more than achieve merely a rich meaning with his skill of subtlety. He has to make it entertaining.

That's what Jackie Gleason and Art Carney do that the average person down the street can't and even 90% of professional entertainers can't. That's what makes them great and lasting. And cabable of extreme subtlety. They have a wide range of specific expressions, gestures, rhythms, vocal control and on and on. That's why they have lasted 50 years and are still laugh out loud funnier than most other sitcoms.

If you don't believe these expressions are subtle, tell you what. Try drawing them and see if you can capture the nuances in the expressions. Then post your drawings and we can all start to see why it's so hard to get specific acting in animation.

I know someone who could probably do it:
http://kristens-sketchblog.blogspot.com/

Kristen not only caricatures real people's heads, she caricatures their specific expressions. She oughta be an animator, if she isn't already.

It's admittedly very hard to animate subtle specific nuances, but I'm not sure why so few have tried. I don't expect every animator to even want to. Animation is primarily about motion. Acting is another thing to add on to all the skills it takes just to move something smoothly at all.

But I'm hoping that once animators start to see the difference between specific and generic acting, some may be interested enough to want to add specific acting to their own characters.

What makes a character a specific personality?



Specific personalities are only specific in the evidence that our senses take in.


Personality cannot be explained in words as richly as it can be shown in actions by a creative skilled performer. You can promise in your script that a character has a rich personality, but someone has to prove it with evidence that our senses agree with.

Visual evidence. Audio evidence. An actor and an animator has to tell the story with pictures and some of the time, with added sound.

Their design, their unique and varied mannerisms, but first of all their expressions are what the visual evidence is. This has to work in context and coordination with the dialogue- the sound evidence.

These artificial artistic signals have to relay a clear and entertaining message to the audience. It can be broad like most classic animation, subtle like some old animation, or a combination -like the best of Warner Bros. cartoons, or it can be extremely bland, limited and formulaic as in most of today's cartoons. (Yes, you can find exceptions but too few.)

Animation tends to re-use the same expressions over and over again, many of which are not even general human expressions. Instead we rely on "animation acting" which is very limited because we animators blindly choose it to be. Probably not even on purpose. We are just so used to it being done the same way over and over again that we don't stop to question it.

The expensive studios even spend a lot of money pretending to study from life, but then make the final decisions to just animate and design things the same way they did in the last 15 pictures.

I put this live action acting up to show how much higher we have to aim if we truly want to have our animation heralded as good acting, or "realistic" acting.

This is great acting. It reminds me of many real life incidents I have personally been part of or have witnessed-with the boring parts cut out. That's what entertainers and artists ought to aim for- relate something about their view of the world to you in their style, but cut the damn boring parts out.

Great performers are also great editors. If they were perfectly realistic, then what would be the point of them? You can sit around the house and watch realism all day.


All this applies equally to "serious" actors but I'll leave that for another day...

Ralph exposition
Uploaded by chuckchillout8

Look what Gleason does with exposition. Exposition is generally considered a bad writer's sin, but in some comedy it can be very funny. Moe Howard was great at reading exposition; he made it funny and obvious that he was just telling you an elaborate setup for a great payoff.

Tex Avery started almost every MGM cartoon with the boldest exposition, just to get the idea of the story over with fast so he could get to the jokes.

Clampett made many of his setups entertaining without exposition ... through character, atmosphere, music and tension.


In this great episode of the Honeymooners, Ralph just tells Norton (and the audience) the setup for a gag, and he does it with such entertainment that we aren't bored by it. At least I'm not.

R.Ramjet - "K.O. Corral" - I can fix

CLICK HERE TO WATCH CLIP!



Now don't give away the punch line in the comments...!

Acting 3 -Specific Expressions-afraid Alice will hear

"Pardon My Glove" (1956)

Ralph afraid Alice will hear him
Uploaded by chuckchillout8

More Gruntspeak - Boo Boo woos Cindy Bear

I started really getting into the gruntspeak after a while and found more places to use it.
You know how when you listen to classical or instrumental music, you understand the meaning of the music but you can't put it into the words? I tried to do that with grunt speak. I put in lots of inflections and even some dirty feelings.

It's too bad I don't have the raw track for this section to play you. You have to listen closely because Cindy talks over some of it. I tried to weave the most meaning full grunts through the pauses in her dialogue.












CLICK HERE TO SEE BOO BOO CLIP!

Carlo Vinci Babe Stimulates an Ass

This is some pretty serious heavy petting. I bet you are jealous!






"Irish Sweepstakes"(1934), Terrytoons



Clip:











Here's a little music video Hendry Porch put together to help you learn how to tell Carlo's style.


http://www.animationarchive.org/pics/flint3carlovinci.mov

Acting 2 Jackie Gleason - acting - reacting

Here is some stuff from the greatest sitcom of all time.

This is entertainment totally written for performers.

Watch how interesting and fun even the characters who aren't doing the talking are!

The one who isn't talking is still reacting with both body language and expressions.

This all can be helpful to animators. And fun to draw!

I use a lot of this character chemistry in my own cartoons. Characters should always feel like they are alive and thinking. Even Stimpy-as retarded as he is, thinks about each retarded thing he does and I got that not so much from watching cartoons (Warner Bros. excepted), but from watching people, and also from watching old movies and TV shows.



The Honeymooners, "A Woman's Work is Never Done" (1955)

The cartoon sitcom folks always compare their comedy to live action, rather than cartoons. They snub their noses at cartoon stuff. They think they are writing "realistic" situations. They aren't. They write mannequin situations in my opinion. Live action stories need to take the acting and performance into consideration and that takes a lot more skill (and experience performing) than the cartoon writers have. Have you seen any cartoon sitcoms that have scenes of acting and performance anywhere near this? Warm, alive... throbbing with engorged corpuscles?

The cartoon sitcoms to me, fail as cartoons and fail worse as live action. They don't even attempt to do what either medium is capable of.

The Honeymooners, All In The Family, The Beverly Hillbillies, Seinfeld are not only hilarious - they are gripping - because of the great performances and the writing that is geared to character, rather than writerspeak jokes and pop-culture references that could come out of any available open puppet mouth in the cartoon.

Alice Complains About Housework
Uploaded by chuckchillout8

Note how specific each character is in their design and their expressions and gestures. There is nothing generic about them. Note also, how often they go "off-model". Real humans are off model all the time. That's what's funny about us.

Only store dummies and modern cartoons are "on-model" all the time.



The Honeymooners, "Better Living Through TV" (1955)

Alice complains about Ralph's schemes
Uploaded by chuckchillout8

The strangest phenomena about modern cartoons to me is that they are not even as cartoony as real people are. I'll bet your Dad makes a million funnier expressions than any cartoon Dad you've seen.

Happy Easter bunnies, rodents and chicks and figments

R.Ramjet - "K.O. Corral" - cowboy fun

CLICK HERE TO WATCH CLIP!

Here's a real funny episode. The drawings are in a different style in this one. I wish I knew who did which style!

Acting 1 - Expressions- Cartoon VS Live Action

Acting starts with the face. No part of the anatomy tells you more about how a person is feeling than his or her face.

Cartoon Expressions:

Early cartoon expressions covered only the most general emotions in the simplest graphic way.

Happy

This is only happy. Not any particular kind of happy for any particular situation.
There isn't a shade to the happy.
It's not specific to a particular character either.
This happy smile can be pasted onto any character in any situation.
It works for most purposes in old cartoons, because old cartoons weren't about acting.
They have lots of other qualities.

AngryThis angry expression can be applied to any character. It doesn't define any particular type of anger or any specific character. It's a general visual symbol that we can instantly recognize.

Sad
This Donald is probably confusion, bit it's not graphically different than just plain sad.
Surprise


Screwy-Happy
Confused, Eager


Determined

Most cartoon expressions can be described with a single adjective - Happy, Sad, Mad, Surprised etc...
These expressions represent the simplest and most basic emotions.

These are all instantly recognizable and relate able by the audience.

Then there are kinds of expression that were invented for animated cartoons. Particularly Disney style animated cartoons.

Animation Expressions

These aren't really expressions. They are merely animation tricks to keep the character looking asymmetrical and pliable, and thus somewhat alive.

These expressions are made with a simple formula.
Squash one side of the face while stretching the other.

This adds a seemingly slight dimension to the symmetrical type of general expressions. But it doesn't add any actual definition to the emotion.

It's an animation trick that many animators rely on to make their characters seem organic.

IT'S ALL THIS GUY'S FAULT!

In this elaborate piece of highly skilled magical animation, there aren't any drawings of specific expressions. The animation is all about the subtle overlapping squash and stretch and difficult actions and timings.

"Organic" equals "Alive" to many animators.

This is a beautiful, well constructed and composed drawing, but it has only the simplest possible expression.

These aren't even expressions. They are less expressive than the basic Happy, sad, mad, surprised expressions. At least humans can understand those simple emotions. These kinds of expressions are for animators, not general humanity.

Amazingly, animators make a big deal out of this simplistic replacement for acting.

These types of squashed and stretched animation exercises don't represent any kind of human emotion that you can identify with. They avoid the problem of acting by replacing it with animation tricks - smooth actions that seemingly keep the characters alive merely because they feel organic.

Now I love classic cartoons, but usually for other reasons than acting. Animators love to quote: "An animator is an actor with a pencil." But if you acted out an animated scene from your favorite Disney movie in real life to a live actor, he would fall to the floor laughing at how unnatural it is.

Modern animation expressions

Modern animation has taken the unnatural unrelatable expression idea from classic cartoons to a hideous extreme.
Here's no expression at all.

Here's the squash one side and stretch the other side to connote the dreaded 'tude expressions.

This is the actor with a pencil's automatic response to a male character falling in love. It's in every animated feature since it first appeared in Jungle Book.These kinds of expressions are done by animators who have never observed real people in the real world. They don't get their ideas of personality and acting from anyone they've ever met, or from real actors in movies and TV. They get them from animated feature films and Cal Arts student films and for generations keep redrawing them by rote. I'm sure every artist is capable of more, they just haven't thought of it yet.

Now animators have mixed Anime in with 70s Disney/Bluth style and Saturday Morning Cartoon construction.If you ever met anyone who made faces like these, would you hang out with him?

This is the Cal Arts style that originates from Valencia, California. It's a look derived from 60s Disney cartoons, a few stock animation expressions, liberally mixed with a gay flourish.

This "wacky" expression seems to be in every feature now.
And in case you think this style is a thing of the past-as someone said in the comments, here it still is:




Warner Bros. More Specific Expressions and Designs

As I've pointed out before, Warner Bros. went quite a bit further in doing more specific acting. They started by drawing more specific expressions. More relatable characters. They took the first steps in making their characters act like real people, rather than always relying on stock Walt approved expressions.

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2006/10/specific-acting-scribner-clampett.html
http://www2.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=22406604&postID=115906579687901195
Live Action Expressions

The best acted animation in history is still not anywhere near what live actors can do in real time automatically.

In one scene from the Honeymooners, you can pick out more specific expressions than in the whole history of feature animation. (Marc is gonna give me lots more frame grabs of really specific expressions and poses from the Honeymooners for further posts.)

Expressions that can't be described even with 20 adjectives but are instantly felt, understood and enjoyed by the audience.

Specific to the characters: Alice makes different kinds of expressions than Ralph
Specific to the scene situation and emotion
Specific to each frame of film in many instances.

Animation can just not compete on an acting level with live action. It takes forever to draw 10 seconds of film. It takes 10 seconds to act it in real life.

Does it need to? Not always. Tex Avery cartoons have just enough funny specific expressions to get the cartoon gags across and lots or unreal impossible expressions that live actors could never do.

Can animation benefit from better acting? Sure. But if you want to be a better actor in animation, don't study animation for acting. Study your friends and family. Study classic movies and sitcoms. Study evangelists on the Jesus channel. Look for uniqueness and entertainment and individuality.

Start by observation of the real. Look for funny quirky expressions that people you know make that are unique to them. Understand real people's personalities and draw them-don't translate them into stock Cal Arts expressions!

But don't merely do realistic acting...because you'll never be as good as live action. You have to be better so add exaggeration and impossible stuff that only cartoons can do.

Ren and Stimpy stood out from all other cartoons in 1991, not because of beautiful fluid animation, or solid principles or great timing. 30s and 40s cartoons beat the crap out of us. The thing that really made it different is that I tried to make the characters seem real. People aren't used to seeing cartoon characters act like people they know so it seemed shocking when it hit. I don't study cartoons for my acting. I study people and figure out ways to draw individual expressions, poses and emotions that not many have ever attempted in animation. I will show you as best I can how I did that.

Anyway, this is just part 1 of a series on cartoon acting. There is a lot more to cover and I just wanted to put down some basic visual vocabulary of terms for you.


A combination of "realistic" human expressions with expressions that can only happen in cartoons....

Bill Tytla - Terrytoons - drunk mouse

Bill Tytla's known for his weighty powerful style of animation, but he seems able to jump to other styles pretty easily too.

This is him drawing and animating really cute. From a Mighty Mouse cartoon.
It's probably partly inspired by his pal Art Babbitt's Country Mouse animation, but I think this is cuter.










There is a lot of great animation in Terrytoons but the studio gets overlooked by many people who love animation and my guess is because it had a bad inking and and inbetweening department.

I noticed as a kid that the animation seemed sloppier because the characters wobbled around, and I later realized it's not the animation, but the tracings. Ever see those bad color retracings of old black and white cartoons? Like Popeye and Porky Pig? Those terrible ugly tracings ruined those great cartoons. It's not that bad in Terrytoons but it makes a lot of animators and historians kind of turn away from the wonderful animation in many of them.

(They'll all say it's the bad stories, but that doesn't add up. Disney had terrible stories and people love those cartoons ... because of the animation...and they have tight finishes.)

Some great animators who worked at Terry through the years:

Carlo Vinci
Jim Tyre
Bill Tytla
Connie Rasinski
Frank Moser
Ralph Bakshi!
I think Art Babbitt may have worked there early on...
I actually love Jerry Shields (if that's the name of the guy who doesn't do overlapping action)



CLICK HERE TO SEE small VERSION! (4.8mb)





CLICK HERE TO SEE LARGE VERSION! (11mb)

Cereal Character Displays by Mel Crawford

at least I think they are by Mel. http://www.animationarchive.org/2006/04/media-mel-crawfords-rootie-kazootie.html
Here're the same characters done in a quicker style by Mel:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/91502146@N00/43694823/


My BG painters have to from time to time paint characters in a cartoony rendered style. This isn't so easy. It seems like you have to have a knack for it. Some of my painters are great at it.

There were a lot of illustrators back in the 50s and 60s who turned character paintings into an art form.
There are lots of styles to do it in. This particular one is really charming, I think.

Note that they aren't over rendered. The shadows are not in logical places either. They are just put down artistically where the artist thinks they will help define the shapes (because there are no cartoon lines bordering the character you need to separate things somehow) and where they look good and FUN.

FUN and CLEAN are two important elements of cartoon character paintings. If you get over rendered and muddy or too realistic, it defeats the purpose.

Golden books are full of great character paintings and so are the covers of old coloring books.
http://inspiration-grab-bag.blogspot.com/2006/01/mel-crawford-magilla-gorilla-big.html


I'm always on the lookout for painters who can do this sort of thing, so if you are planning to be a cartoon illustrator/painter, it would be good to copy these and glean the techniques.

You can find all kinds of cool old cartoon packaging art at this great site:

http://theimaginaryworld.com/disp.html

Kali has some treats for those who like cartoon paintings

Who owns these handsome eyes?

Kali has been studying up on painting-particularly characters. She has been copying old kid book paintings and amassing techniques. I told her that copying is good, but for every painting you copy, you should make a painting from scratch and apply some of the techniques. That way you get value from your copies. Otherwise you just get good at copying but aren't able to function on a job when they ask you to do something tailor-made.

I gave her a drawing of one of my favorite presidential candidates and said here, paint this stately fellow. And she did it here:
http://kalikazoo.blogspot.com/2007/04/most-handsome-candidate.html

Now if you want to be good at painting backgrounds and characters ( I will do a post about character paintings later) you should collect old illustrated kids' books, because you can find a myriad of great techniques and fun styles.


http://kalikazoo.blogspot.com/2007/04/are-you-longing-for-happiness.html

Look at some really cute fuzzy pictures she put up:

http://kalikazoo.blogspot.com/2007/03/some-beautiful-bba-paintings.html

A new exciting shade of purple is awaiting at Kali's world of painting cartoony type pictures.

Writing For Cartoons 8 - Writing Gruntspeak

CLICK HERE TO WATCH GRUNTING CLIP!

How would you write a scene like this? Not with a script obviously.

That was my problem. I acted this scene out for everyone during the pitches, but then had to figure out how to translate it to film.


I knew every exact emotion Boo Boo was feeling as he rooted through the picnic basket. I had a grunt for seeing a sandwich, one for pulling the sandwich up, one for waving the sandwich, etc...
There was a different grunt for a chicken leg of course because chicken legs cause different emotional responses than sandwiches.

I didn't have to worry about the exec not understanding the scene. I had already pitched it to Mike Lazzo, who laughed and shook his head and said "Go do it." So there was no need for a script for executive reading purposes. If I had just sent this whole cartoon story as a script to anyone, they would have not been able to make any sense of it.



But I'd still need something to follow along in the recording session. Usually we use a dialogue script that is written from the storyboard. But an actor can't read "mwaaaaa" or "Grrrrrrroan" on a script page and know what myriad of inflections to act aloud.

Then there was the problem of what to call each feral grunt after we recorded it so we could put it on the exposure sheet.

Add to that, that the animator would need to know how to animate to the grunts. He'd have to know what they meant and where the wave patterns were in the sounds, so he could move Boo Boo at the appropriate moments. This was a real bugger of a problem to solve.

Words are a primitive medium.

I started by writing Boo Boo's emotions and continuity on a storyboard with drawings. This way I could see exactly what he was feeling at every moment.
I scribbled out, not only each key emotion, but the transitions between them. The transitions make the character seem real and alive. You can't just jump from one emotion to another contrasting one...unless you're Bela Lugosi, but he's allowed because he's a genius.
The written grunts on the board don't begin to describe all the inflections in the actual track that was recorded. I wrote those on after the recording just to give me some idea of which was which.
Luckily I was the one who was doing Boo Boo's voice. I don't know how I would have communicated my grunt language to another actor without just giving him line readings. But then he wouldn't have felt all the deep underlying meanings as I did. I knew the story intimately because I wrote it and performed it many times to live people and had been grunting to frightened audiences since I was a tot. (This was the language we used to speak in at the school cafeteria when we were kids. It was inspired by the great grunter in Roger Ramjet.)
http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2007/03/roger-ramjet-woodsman-clip-3-grunting.html


I took the storyboard into the recording and spent a few minutes grunting and groaning. Then the engineer had a hell of a time keeping track of the grunts.

We wrote up notes like this:
This was just the beginning of my problems.

I still had to figure out how to get the right pictures to match the right sounds.

I had an animatic that we made in Premiere and I had been cutting all the action to the music from the APM stock library. This was the first time I had ever tried this, and it was kinda clunky to edit back then.

I input all the grunts and then cut the appropriate ones to the right drawings. As I listened to the grunts I heard more inflections that carried meaning that hadn't been drawn yet, so I added more poses in the layouts.

Then I had to give this mess in some form to the animators. I made a quicktime movie so that the animators could see and more importantly, feel what Boo Boo was going through. If I has sent this to Korea, or even Canada, it probably would never come out the way I wanted it to. They would never have looked at the animatic. They would have simply taken the poses I drew and inbetweened them.

I was working with an animator in town- a Korean who thought I was crazy, because I didn't do anything the formula way, but he worked with me, and I acted it all out and everything fell into place.

The moral of the story:

Animation is a performance medium. A script is not the artform. The cartoon is.

Any words we write up are basically just transcriptions of scenes we either drew or performed live to each other in gag sessions.

The words on paper only carry the most basic germs of what the performance is going to be. It's just a guide to remind us of what happens when.

A writer who doesn't draw, act, play a guitar, sing, dance or ride a unicycle cannot take advantage of all the creative tools that are at the disposal of a cartoon director. It's a blind man choosing colors for Rembrandt.

The cartoon director is an animator that has many other creative skills, and he is the real writer of the cartoon. He decides all the fun that is going to take place and he works with specialists and coordinates all their efforts, so that everyone involved can be proud of the resulting work of entertainment.

http://klangley.blogspot.com/2007/02/walter-lantz-cartoon-director.html

You can't sit in a room somewhere all by yourself and write a cartoon. You need to be with the performers and get their input. In animation, the main performers are the artists and director. They are the ones who can tell you whether any of your words are gonna work. That's why you need to be one so you can converse in our language.

Roger Ramjet - "Woodsman" - clip 2 acting-reacting poses

CLICK HERE TO WATCH ROGER RAMJET CLIP!
Here's a great example of funny opposing poses from Roger Ramjet:Here's what I mean by opposing poses:
http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2006/11/composition-7-compose-your-poses.html
The animator added a lot to the already funny dialogue track by drawing funny poses of the characters.

The poses aren't funny arbitrarily either. They are in context of the scene.

Roger Ramjet proves that having a severely low budget doesn't mean you have to have boring unfunny drawings. It just means you can't afford inbetweens. Many producers today believe that whoever can afford the most inbetweens has the best cartoon. So they'll have a lot of boring bland drawings moving smoothly into the next boring bland drawings. When I watch a cartoon, or even an animated feature, instead of marveling at how smooth some animation is, I ask whether the actual expressions and poses are actually original or entertaining. (I actually don't ask anything...I just twitch around in my seat when I see the same old expressions and unnatural "animation gestures" for the thousandth time)

If the acting is entertaining and smooth as in an old Warner's cartoon, then that's the best of both worlds! But we can't always afford that. I'd settle at least for some funny expressive drawings in TV cartoons. That would be a start!

Smoothness costs money. Talent is rarer but cheaper if you allow the talent to do what they are capable of.


If you had to choose between smooth motion of stiff drawings and funny drawings with character, which would you choose? I'm sure some will choose fully animated in any case, right?


I love animation, but I want drawings that would be worth the trouble of moving them.