If you are an animation student on summer vacation and are good at Flash and you need some work and experience for a few weeks, here's what I need you to be able to do:
Flash: You need to be good at the technical aspects of Flash - know symbols, know all the menus and timelines. I will be doing the drawings.
Also some boring office work
Scanning
Driving
Keeping stuff organized
Making it easy for me to just draw and animate.
You need a car and to live near Burbank area.
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Our favorite Rapper
My buddy Joe Horn produces Jorge's favorite cartoon show with Andre 6,000. Last year he asked Katie Rice and I to design some concepts for one of the music videos. We did a big stack of drawings. Here are a few.
We tried different styles. To warm up, I did the characters in a Hanna Barbera style. These are kinda bland.
Katie, as usual did some super cute drawings of the girl characters.
I would look at her drawings, then realize mine were too conservative, so I would copy what she was doing.
Here, I'm just starting to warm up. The drawings got weirder as we kept at it.
Here's a Katie girl...
and my caricature of her.
Wanna see more? There are a ton of them.
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Chicago Report
I reuploaded these images for those folks whose browsers couldn't see them...
The Chicago show was fun.
Lots of people showed up for my show Friday night and Bill's on Saturday night.
FRIDAY NIGHT - my crap
I showed a bunch of my rarer cartoons. Naked Beach Frenzy as usual won over the laps of all the men in the audience. I ended the show with 'WHAT PEE BONERS ARE FOR" for the girls, and then " THE CHILDREN'S CRUSADE" which always gets huge laughs and groans of horror.
BILL PLYMPTON
Bill showed Hair High and a new film that killed me, called Shuteye Hotel.
It was brilliant and a new style for him. It was film noir and filled with amazing drawings, animation, angles, cutting and atmosphere. He made me promise not to show clips because it's up for an academy award. I hope it wins!SATURDAY MATINEE
The Saturday Matinee had less kids than adults! But I showed a lot of classic cartoons and a 3 Stooges on the big screen and they all looked amazing! That is the way to see cartoons. They take on a whole new dimension.
After the show I asked the kids what cartoons they liked most, and one tiny little girl said "I like the one....with... the Bugs Bunny and the turtle."
That was my favorite too. Holy crap! Seeing Tortoise Wins By A Hair on the big screen was a revelation.
This cartoon is a complete phenomenon of humans at the height of their abilities and magic. The direction is masterful. There are so many things happening sat lightning speed and they are all totally controlled and choreographed. Scribner and McKimson seem to be having a contest to see who is the greatest genius in animation history. This is absolutely one of the best cartoons made in history-certainly the best Bugs Bunny film.I'm gonna do a post later about the scene where Bugs runs into the stone wall and the other rabbits attach him.
"ORIGINAL" REN AND STIMPY
On a sobering note, I watched "Nurse Stimpy" on the huge screen too. Yikes!!! No wonder I didn't put my name on it. 
It's so ugly! My Lord.... I can't believe this show ever caught on. (I remember being so shocked by how primitive the film looked that we spent extra time on the soundtrack to try to tell the story through the music.)Luckily we improved a few months later and made Space Madness and Stimpy's Invention which looked quite a bit better in Chicago, but still suffered by comparison with the lush and wonderful fully animated classic cartoons in the show.
After each show, Bill and I did drawings for fans. Here are some. If you were at the show too and have a drawing, put a link in the comments!
UPA VS Wally 5 UPA bred worse imitations, amateurism and killed actual animation
UPA THEATRICAL CARTOONS AREN'T ANIMATED
I don't blame classic animators for wanting to try to animate different styles. It would get boring to do the same drawing style all the time. But I think it's odd that when they did get the chance to animate something new, they didn't actually animate it. They just inbetweened the stiff key poses. There is no more timing either. Everything just floats at the same rate. No contrasts. The cartoons move in a machine-like automaton sort of way.
WATCH THE RISE OF DUTON LANG HERE
http://www.bcdb.com/cartoon_video/665-Rise_Of_Duton_Lang.html
BUT YOU HAVE TO REGISTER
This led to the 60s,
when new animators got into the business that weren't classically trained and they animated simplistic designs with no timing or animation. The Cheerios kid had at least a happy though clunky design appeal and some of the commercials had good animation, but many had stiff, evenly inbetweened movements. Ironically, they still had more life in them than UPA cartoons. The characters at least seemed alive.
As the 60s dragged on, the cartoons drifted further and further away from both good design and good animation-in other words against both UPA and Disney.
It just got worse and worse after that.
It got to the point in the 1970s, that if you knew anything at all about animating (or design appeal!) you would get yelled at by your bosses. I remember working at Duck Soup animating on commercials, and if I even used squash and stretch or called for uneven inbetweens they told me to stop doing that " Tex Avery stuff." General classic animation principles were considered radical by the 1980s. 50s Friz cartoons would have been extreme exaggeration.
Here's one of my favorite UPA cartoons by Bobe Cannon. At least I remember it standing out when I first saw a string of UPA cartoons. This seemed less amateurish than many of them to me. I think maybe because it has some simple design balance, whereas there are so many UPA cartoons that have no balance at all. However...and here was the big danger of UPA. Look at the drawings. To the average person, these drawings look like stick figures. They look like anyone could do them. Could an executive tell the difference between this drawing style and your Dad's?
It's drawn by Tee Hee - purposely in a childlike primitive style, to look as if a professional artist didn't do it. Bobe Cannon directed, but I can't figure out what that means. He was a great animator, but there is no animation in it. How could this have been fun for him? This kind of cartoon is anti-animation. All the skills the classic animators developed and polished from 1930 to 1950 have been totally abandoned. Animated cartoons had taken cartoon skills to a new level. Now that UPA subtracted animation principles, it brought animation back down near the level of comic strips and lost the advantages animated cartoons had over still cartoons.
I have to wonder, did Cannon and his cohorts sabotage their own usefulness? Here is a cartoon by Cannon that anyone in the world could have done.
The revolution these great animators started opened the door to non-skilled amateur artists to compete with them and doomed quality animation.
No overlapping action,
no squash and stretch,
no line of action,
no contrasts in timing,
no construction,
no nothing.
Just ugliness.
I don't even know what this thing is below, but you can thank the wave of non-animated, merely inbetweened UPA cartoons for it. It's someone obviously trying to bring back general animation principles, but either doesn't fully know what they are, or is not being allowed to use them. I think the animator probably likes old cartoons though. It seems to be a superficial attempt to mimic them. But in the 80s, it really was like trying to revive Greek knowledge in the dark ages from scraps of surviving manuscripts. There was no one to teach the lost techniques to the young animators. And no studio to learn it on the job.
The first time I saw squash and stretch and overlap again (besides some highly degraded nasty looking Disney movies) in the 1980s was in Brad Bird's "Family Dog". It seemed amazing at the time, because no one had seen or done it since classic cartoons. It was a lost art. It had some timing too, but constructed, appealing and fun drawings took longer to make a reappearance in animation - and they didn't stay around long.
I don't blame classic animators for wanting to try to animate different styles. It would get boring to do the same drawing style all the time. But I think it's odd that when they did get the chance to animate something new, they didn't actually animate it. They just inbetweened the stiff key poses. There is no more timing either. Everything just floats at the same rate. No contrasts. The cartoons move in a machine-like automaton sort of way.
WATCH THE RISE OF DUTON LANG HERE
http://www.bcdb.com/cartoon_video/665-Rise_Of_Duton_Lang.html
BUT YOU HAVE TO REGISTER
This led to the 60s,
when new animators got into the business that weren't classically trained and they animated simplistic designs with no timing or animation. The Cheerios kid had at least a happy though clunky design appeal and some of the commercials had good animation, but many had stiff, evenly inbetweened movements. Ironically, they still had more life in them than UPA cartoons. The characters at least seemed alive.
As the 60s dragged on, the cartoons drifted further and further away from both good design and good animation-in other words against both UPA and Disney.
It just got worse and worse after that.
It got to the point in the 1970s, that if you knew anything at all about animating (or design appeal!) you would get yelled at by your bosses. I remember working at Duck Soup animating on commercials, and if I even used squash and stretch or called for uneven inbetweens they told me to stop doing that " Tex Avery stuff." General classic animation principles were considered radical by the 1980s. 50s Friz cartoons would have been extreme exaggeration.
Here's one of my favorite UPA cartoons by Bobe Cannon. At least I remember it standing out when I first saw a string of UPA cartoons. This seemed less amateurish than many of them to me. I think maybe because it has some simple design balance, whereas there are so many UPA cartoons that have no balance at all. However...and here was the big danger of UPA. Look at the drawings. To the average person, these drawings look like stick figures. They look like anyone could do them. Could an executive tell the difference between this drawing style and your Dad's?
It's drawn by Tee Hee - purposely in a childlike primitive style, to look as if a professional artist didn't do it. Bobe Cannon directed, but I can't figure out what that means. He was a great animator, but there is no animation in it. How could this have been fun for him? This kind of cartoon is anti-animation. All the skills the classic animators developed and polished from 1930 to 1950 have been totally abandoned. Animated cartoons had taken cartoon skills to a new level. Now that UPA subtracted animation principles, it brought animation back down near the level of comic strips and lost the advantages animated cartoons had over still cartoons.
WHAT UPA LED TO
I have to wonder, did Cannon and his cohorts sabotage their own usefulness? Here is a cartoon by Cannon that anyone in the world could have done.
The revolution these great animators started opened the door to non-skilled amateur artists to compete with them and doomed quality animation.
THE AGE OF TRACE-BACKS
Animation was replaced by stiff cardboard poses, and "trace-backs" …Which are inbetweens that are just tracings of the keys gradually floating into the position of the next key.No overlapping action,
no squash and stretch,
no line of action,
no contrasts in timing,
no construction,
no nothing.
Just ugliness.
I don't even know what this thing is below, but you can thank the wave of non-animated, merely inbetweened UPA cartoons for it. It's someone obviously trying to bring back general animation principles, but either doesn't fully know what they are, or is not being allowed to use them. I think the animator probably likes old cartoons though. It seems to be a superficial attempt to mimic them. But in the 80s, it really was like trying to revive Greek knowledge in the dark ages from scraps of surviving manuscripts. There was no one to teach the lost techniques to the young animators. And no studio to learn it on the job.
The first time I saw squash and stretch and overlap again (besides some highly degraded nasty looking Disney movies) in the 1980s was in Brad Bird's "Family Dog". It seemed amazing at the time, because no one had seen or done it since classic cartoons. It was a lost art. It had some timing too, but constructed, appealing and fun drawings took longer to make a reappearance in animation - and they didn't stay around long.
Monday, May 28, 2007
Wanna be an assistant?
Wanna be an assistant?
Hiya folks, here's an important message from my assistant Marc.
-John
Hi,
My name is Marc. Even though I eat McDonalds, listen to 50 Cent and watch "Lost", John continues to keep me on as his production manager.
There is a new project coming up, and I am going to need some help. Wanna be my assistant?
We are looking for someone to help out for the next one or two months. If you are familiar with Photoshop, Flash and/or Illustrator, that's a big plus!
Can you draw? I don't care. That might impress John, but these are the types of duties that are important to me:
1. scanning
2. digital clean-up with Photoshop
3. importing and preparing images in Flash
4. understanding how symbols and libraries and layers work in Flash
5. working with Illustrator
6. using ftp's
If you're interested in assisting on this project, please send me an e-mail at:
marcdeckter(at)yahoo.com
Oh, and please don't apply unless you live in or around L.A.!
Thanks,
Marc
-John
NEED PRODUCTION ASSISTANT FOR A MONTH, MAYBE 2
Hi,
My name is Marc. Even though I eat McDonalds, listen to 50 Cent and watch "Lost", John continues to keep me on as his production manager.
There is a new project coming up, and I am going to need some help. Wanna be my assistant?
We are looking for someone to help out for the next one or two months. If you are familiar with Photoshop, Flash and/or Illustrator, that's a big plus!
Can you draw? I don't care. That might impress John, but these are the types of duties that are important to me:
1. scanning
2. digital clean-up with Photoshop
3. importing and preparing images in Flash
4. understanding how symbols and libraries and layers work in Flash
5. working with Illustrator
6. using ftp's
If you're interested in assisting on this project, please send me an e-mail at:
Oh, and please don't apply unless you live in or around L.A.!
Thanks,
Marc
Sunday, May 27, 2007
Oswald: Snow Use, The Beat Your Girlfriend Dance
Oswald Knows what women really want.
Snow Use, 1929 (Walter Lantz Productions)
Beat her, and she'll come back for more.
Beat her, and she'll come back for more.
Saturday, May 26, 2007
Wally VS UPA 4 - WHEN MILQUETOASTS REBEL
UPA TRIES A NEW WAY TO GET RESPECT
The animators who founded UPA tried a different tact than Disney. Most of them were highly accomplished animators who could do the rounded fully constructed flowing Disney style animation.
Bobe Cannon was a fantastically gifted full animator who did animation for Clampett, Jones and Avery before he went to UPA.
bobe cannon
For some unknown reason, he decided to totally abandon what he was a genius at.
He and John Hubley (a layout man and BG painter)
He and John Hubley (a layout man and BG painter)
http://www.pbs.org/itvs/independentspirits/john.html
and the other UPA guys decided to abandon animation, fun and lush movement and instead focus on "design". 
And not always good design either. They just wanted to do something that rebelled against the look and more important, the attitudes of both Disney and Warners.
UPA DESIGN NOT NEW –IT EXISTED IN STILL CARTOONS FOR DECADES
It's funny when we talk about UPA and flat styles, that we refer to it as "design" at all. No one did before UPA. It was just called "cartooning".
The "design" that UPA did was nothing new to cartoons in general, just sort of new to animation. Chuck Jones had experimented with it in animation (with Bobe Cannon) in 1942 with The Dover Boys.
Magazine cartoons though and comic strips, had been done in similar flat styles and many other non-animation styles for decades.
http://www.animationarchive.org/2006/04/media-cliff-sterretts-polly-and-her.html
Magazine cartoons though and comic strips, had been done in similar flat styles and many other non-animation styles for decades.
http://www.animationarchive.org/2006/04/media-cliff-sterretts-polly-and-her.html
MILT GROSS SIMILAR TO GERALD MCBOINGBOING
To me,
Gerald McBoingBoing and Milt Gross' comics are very similar graphically.
Milt Gross had been doing highly stylized comics and strips for a long time-only his stuff wasn't meant to be high-class, it was meant to be fun.
So what's the difference between "design" and "cartoon"? I guess if it's fun, it's a cartoon.
If it's bland and sterile, it's design.
That was UPA's revolution. They took the life out of animation.
So what's the difference between "design" and "cartoon"? I guess if it's fun, it's a cartoon.
If it's bland and sterile, it's design.
That was UPA's revolution. They took the life out of animation.THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSUMPTIONS OF FLAT UPA STYLE
If you don't know cartoon history and you just grew up watching Cartoon Network, you might think that this flat stuff is something new and "hip". It's not. It's much older than UPA and the more graphic styles in cartoons before UPA didn't come with the wimpy trappings.
Because of our association with UPA's beginnings, we assume that when we do something in a graphic style, we have to also carry over all the other attributes that came with UPA's particular cartoon vision-the blandness, the wimpy world view, the snootiness.
People usually don't analyze or break apart the elements that make up something they like. If we like it we assume that every ingredient in it is equally good.
Then when we develop our own styles, we copy the bad with the good.
That's what we need ANALYSIS for!
Like many artists, I have tons of influences. There are lots of things that inspire me. I try to figure out why they do and I break them down into their separate ingredients.
I then decide which ingredients are the ones that are useful and discard the others that might have just come along with it, but don't actually add anything. There are good things about UPA and Disney-Tex Avery combined them and added his own worldview to them and made cartoons more entertaining than either style.
Avery was the exception. Most artists copied the bad part of UPA, the lack of animation, simplistic drawings' slow even timing and lifelessness.
What I dislike about trends and imitators is that usually when people copy existing styles, new or classic, they copy the faults, rather than the positive attributes of the styles they love. They copy surface elements and decoration and don't copy the underlying principles.
People do it with Disney all the time.
Animators who love Disney, copy all the worst elements of Disney, his faults-the sappy stories, the simplistic personalities, the terrible "animation-acting". The formulaic character design.
They can't draw and animate the difficult anatomy, perspective and construction, nor control elaborately composed crowd scenes-no one was better at that than Disney. But anyone can do fake pathos and memorize the arm flailing that we've seen in a hundred features.
This happens with everything that makes a splash. Everyone imitates the superficial aspects of the trend, without adding any personal observations or humanity to it.
There are Simpsons imitations, Ren and Stimpy imitations, Warner Bros. imitations and on an on...all without personal points of view, just shallow imitations.
In the 50s, that happened with UPA. And it happened again in the 90s. (My fault that time)
Why do young artists say they like UPA? Because it makes 'em cool. Hipster Emo time. (It's also easy to fake) It's like when teenagers discover communism. They think it's real cool to go against common sense and experience. But then when they meet the real world head on later, they realize it was youthful folly. You're supposed to grow out of it.
I too fell under the UPA spell for the 3 weeks I wanted to be cool. Then I realized I kept falling asleep during the cartoons. Don't wait till you're 30, still drawing flat and it's too late to learn anything else.
Personally I think it's way cooler to have an open mind and lots of drawing skill, so that you can actually make cartoons with your own point of view.
But I still like a lot of the UPA style commercials!
By the way, it's possible to have construction and design at the same time.
to be continued...
Because of our association with UPA's beginnings, we assume that when we do something in a graphic style, we have to also carry over all the other attributes that came with UPA's particular cartoon vision-the blandness, the wimpy world view, the snootiness.
People usually don't analyze or break apart the elements that make up something they like. If we like it we assume that every ingredient in it is equally good.
Then when we develop our own styles, we copy the bad with the good.
That's what we need ANALYSIS for!
Like many artists, I have tons of influences. There are lots of things that inspire me. I try to figure out why they do and I break them down into their separate ingredients.
I then decide which ingredients are the ones that are useful and discard the others that might have just come along with it, but don't actually add anything. There are good things about UPA and Disney-Tex Avery combined them and added his own worldview to them and made cartoons more entertaining than either style.
Avery was the exception. Most artists copied the bad part of UPA, the lack of animation, simplistic drawings' slow even timing and lifelessness.What I dislike about trends and imitators is that usually when people copy existing styles, new or classic, they copy the faults, rather than the positive attributes of the styles they love. They copy surface elements and decoration and don't copy the underlying principles.
People do it with Disney all the time.
Animators who love Disney, copy all the worst elements of Disney, his faults-the sappy stories, the simplistic personalities, the terrible "animation-acting". The formulaic character design.
They can't draw and animate the difficult anatomy, perspective and construction, nor control elaborately composed crowd scenes-no one was better at that than Disney. But anyone can do fake pathos and memorize the arm flailing that we've seen in a hundred features.
This happens with everything that makes a splash. Everyone imitates the superficial aspects of the trend, without adding any personal observations or humanity to it.
There are Simpsons imitations, Ren and Stimpy imitations, Warner Bros. imitations and on an on...all without personal points of view, just shallow imitations.
In the 50s, that happened with UPA. And it happened again in the 90s. (My fault that time)
Why do young artists say they like UPA? Because it makes 'em cool. Hipster Emo time. (It's also easy to fake) It's like when teenagers discover communism. They think it's real cool to go against common sense and experience. But then when they meet the real world head on later, they realize it was youthful folly. You're supposed to grow out of it.
I too fell under the UPA spell for the 3 weeks I wanted to be cool. Then I realized I kept falling asleep during the cartoons. Don't wait till you're 30, still drawing flat and it's too late to learn anything else.
Personally I think it's way cooler to have an open mind and lots of drawing skill, so that you can actually make cartoons with your own point of view.
But I still like a lot of the UPA style commercials!
By the way, it's possible to have construction and design at the same time.
to be continued...
Friday, May 25, 2007
Chicago Press - John and Bill Show
Bill and John Show Myspace Page
http://www.thejohnandbillshow.com/tix.html
Here's more. Hope to see you there!
http://www.thejohnandbillshow.com/press.html
http://www.thejohnandbillshow.com/tix.html
Here's more. Hope to see you there!http://www.thejohnandbillshow.com/press.html
Thursday, May 24, 2007
Foghorn Leghorn - McKimson's realistic world view
Disney aimed his cartoons at Moms, but thank God someone thought of Dads too. That was Bob McKimson.
Mckimson had a funny worldview.
To him, all men are assholes. They are all dumpy, middle aged, loudmouthed schnooks and they all take advantage of each other.
He treated all his characters that way, Bugs Daffy, Elmer, it doesn't matter. Everyone is a sarcastic reality-bitten bully-even Porky Pig!
I find that hilarious because it's so true.
"Walky Talky Hawky" (1946)
Bob Clampett told me all about McKimson. He referred to him as his top animator. He said he was a timid little British guy - mild mannered and soft spoken, very conservative. The opposite of his characters!
That instantly explained his worldview to me. To a mild mannered little British guy, American cartoonists (at least the WB ones) must have seemed like the brashest, vulgarest, most boorish loud mouthed louts on the planet.
Being of a practical nature, when he got his chance to make cartoons, he gave the audience what he thought they wanted - characters who were just like how his cohorts appeared to him. His idea of what a Warner Bros. cartoon was a lot of yelling, brute punishment and slapstick. Some historians fault him for that, but I can tell you that his view was right.
Most guys love Foghorn Leghorn because he represents what we all want to be. Foghorn is a typical Dad type character. A guy who wants to be in charge and uses force when possible and guile when necessary to get his way.
My Dad used to laugh his ass off at "that big chicken". Pepe Le Pew did nothing for him.
By the way, look at the great drawings and poses!
McKimson used difficult angles and perspective more than the other directors.
His sense of scale and hugeness is amazing too!
CLICK HERE TO SEE A CHICKEN ACT LIKE A HORSE!
Thou shalt covet thy rival’s property
Thou shalt smack thy neighbor’s buttocks
Thou shalt trade punishment for greater punishment
Shove and thy neighbor as thou might be shoved
Thou shalt play vulgar practical jokes
Thou shalt make the rules that only thee don’t have to obey
Thou shall not ever speak the truth
Thou shalt take advantage of the stupidity of others
Thou shalt sneer and disdain thy fellow assholes
McKimson might have been a miquetoast sort of guy himself, but he had good enough business sense to make cartoons for regular folks. He knew his duty and dood it.
Mckimson had a funny worldview.
To him, all men are assholes. They are all dumpy, middle aged, loudmouthed schnooks and they all take advantage of each other.
He treated all his characters that way, Bugs Daffy, Elmer, it doesn't matter. Everyone is a sarcastic reality-bitten bully-even Porky Pig!
I find that hilarious because it's so true.
Bob Clampett told me all about McKimson. He referred to him as his top animator. He said he was a timid little British guy - mild mannered and soft spoken, very conservative. The opposite of his characters!That instantly explained his worldview to me. To a mild mannered little British guy, American cartoonists (at least the WB ones) must have seemed like the brashest, vulgarest, most boorish loud mouthed louts on the planet.
Being of a practical nature, when he got his chance to make cartoons, he gave the audience what he thought they wanted - characters who were just like how his cohorts appeared to him. His idea of what a Warner Bros. cartoon was a lot of yelling, brute punishment and slapstick. Some historians fault him for that, but I can tell you that his view was right.
Most guys love Foghorn Leghorn because he represents what we all want to be. Foghorn is a typical Dad type character. A guy who wants to be in charge and uses force when possible and guile when necessary to get his way.
My Dad used to laugh his ass off at "that big chicken". Pepe Le Pew did nothing for him.
By the way, look at the great drawings and poses!
McKimson used difficult angles and perspective more than the other directors.
His sense of scale and hugeness is amazing too!
CLICK HERE TO SEE A CHICKEN ACT LIKE A HORSE!
The McKimson commandments
Thou Shalt covet thy rival asshole’s womenThou shalt covet thy rival’s property
Thou shalt smack thy neighbor’s buttocks
Thou shalt trade punishment for greater punishment
Shove and thy neighbor as thou might be shoved
Thou shalt play vulgar practical jokes
Thou shalt make the rules that only thee don’t have to obey
Thou shall not ever speak the truth
Thou shalt take advantage of the stupidity of others
Thou shalt sneer and disdain thy fellow assholes
McKimson might have been a miquetoast sort of guy himself, but he had good enough business sense to make cartoons for regular folks. He knew his duty and dood it.
Coming up: UPA - when Milquetoasts rebel!
See what happens when pantywaists rebel against the public and make cartoons for other pantywaists...
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Oswald: Going To Blazes, Cartoons Make The Best Stereotypes
Here's a post for Jorge, the last of a dying breed.
Witness an innocent babe, who doesn't yet know the facts of life.
All of life seems happy and clean and full of God's beauty.
All of a sudden, the sweet babe sees what goes on in the world.
At the wholesome community firehouse yet!
The unspeakable act of swishy dancing!
Every natural instinct spills up from the guts of this unspoiled youth and retribution grasps his quivering revulsed soul.
Baby grows up fast and knows exactly what to do.
This is the way of intolerance since time began. If it's different, cut it to pieces!
Luckily, Oswald is a modern hero with modern ideas and he comes to the rescue.
No crime, however instinctively motivated goes unpunished in an Oswald cartoon!
Watch The Dance Of The Firehouse Fruit
Animation is just great for stereotypes. In real life, stereotypes create themselves and are then caricatured in stand up comedy, rap videos and live action media. Then liberal white women and Keith Olberman cry about it.
But cartoons add another level to stereotypes.
You would never actually see a gay guy dance like this in real life, but it would be great if you did!
That's what cartoons are for, to make up stuff that's surreal but just feels right.
Don Rickles was on NPR last night talking about making his 50 year career out of making fun of stereotypes and it was hilarious. He made fun of every group equally, which is totally American and democratic.
I wish everyone would lighten up and enjoy how weird and different everyone is and make fun of it! We should enjoy how weird and varied human life is, rather than deny it and be ashamed.
Oh, for the good old un-politically correct days!
Witness an innocent babe, who doesn't yet know the facts of life.
All of life seems happy and clean and full of God's beauty.
All of a sudden, the sweet babe sees what goes on in the world.
At the wholesome community firehouse yet!
The unspeakable act of swishy dancing!
Every natural instinct spills up from the guts of this unspoiled youth and retribution grasps his quivering revulsed soul.
Baby grows up fast and knows exactly what to do.
This is the way of intolerance since time began. If it's different, cut it to pieces!
Luckily, Oswald is a modern hero with modern ideas and he comes to the rescue.
No crime, however instinctively motivated goes unpunished in an Oswald cartoon!
Watch The Dance Of The Firehouse Fruit
Animation is just great for stereotypes. In real life, stereotypes create themselves and are then caricatured in stand up comedy, rap videos and live action media. Then liberal white women and Keith Olberman cry about it.
But cartoons add another level to stereotypes.
You would never actually see a gay guy dance like this in real life, but it would be great if you did!
That's what cartoons are for, to make up stuff that's surreal but just feels right.
Don Rickles was on NPR last night talking about making his 50 year career out of making fun of stereotypes and it was hilarious. He made fun of every group equally, which is totally American and democratic.
I wish everyone would lighten up and enjoy how weird and different everyone is and make fun of it! We should enjoy how weird and varied human life is, rather than deny it and be ashamed.
Oh, for the good old un-politically correct days!
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
The Amazing Asifa Archive - Holy Crap! - look at everything you get!
It wasn't very long ago that you couldn't find much information on classic cartoons and the comic strips and illustrations that inspired them. There were very few books on animation and the books tended to cover the same finite material. Whole cartoon studios were ignored in favor of Disney and in the last few years, a bit about Warner Bros...and then mostly about Chuck Jones and just a few of his films.
Our cartoon heritage is huge, much larger than any books can cover. In fact, most of the cartoons made from the 1920s to the 1950s are not available anywhere to see. They don't run them on TV, and there are very few home videos available-the few that exist have been tampered with, cut up, recolored and changed.
There are tons more great old cartoons that were made and until a year ago, no way for the public to find them. Now there is.
Steve's Asifa Animation Archive is the greatest resource for anyone who loves old cartoons, comics and illustrations. It's open to the public and it's really easy to find not only tons of the classic animated films, but the illustrations and comic strips that inspired the classic animators. And in turn you can find comics and illustrations that the animators themselves did.
The archive is constantly growing thanks to Steve Worth and the volunteers that work on it every week.
The Asifa Archive is a museum of great cartoon art, films and books and it's available for free.
If all the information and cartoons themselves existed in books and dvds, it would cost you thousands of dollars to collect them.
So why don't you help out the archive by donating a bit of change now and then? If every couple of months you donated 5 or 10 bucks-or whatever, you would still be getting a fantastic bargain, and you will be preserving our great cartoon heritage-which will get you straight into Heaven ahead of everyone else.
Our cartoon heritage is huge, much larger than any books can cover. In fact, most of the cartoons made from the 1920s to the 1950s are not available anywhere to see. They don't run them on TV, and there are very few home videos available-the few that exist have been tampered with, cut up, recolored and changed.
There are tons more great old cartoons that were made and until a year ago, no way for the public to find them. Now there is.
Steve's Asifa Animation Archive is the greatest resource for anyone who loves old cartoons, comics and illustrations. It's open to the public and it's really easy to find not only tons of the classic animated films, but the illustrations and comic strips that inspired the classic animators. And in turn you can find comics and illustrations that the animators themselves did.
The archive is constantly growing thanks to Steve Worth and the volunteers that work on it every week.
The Asifa Archive is a museum of great cartoon art, films and books and it's available for free.
If all the information and cartoons themselves existed in books and dvds, it would cost you thousands of dollars to collect them.
So why don't you help out the archive by donating a bit of change now and then? If every couple of months you donated 5 or 10 bucks-or whatever, you would still be getting a fantastic bargain, and you will be preserving our great cartoon heritage-which will get you straight into Heaven ahead of everyone else.
Here's just a tiny sample of the great stuff you can find at the archive.
ILLUSTRATORS THAT INSPIRED ANIMATORS
http://www.animationarchive.org/2006/03/media-dulacs-hans-christian-andersen.html
ANIMATION PEOPLE WHO BECAME ILLUSTRATORS
http://www.animationarchive.org/2006/03/media-mary-blairs-babys-house.html
ANIMATORS THAT BECAME COMIC ARTISTS
http://www.animationarchive.org/2007/04/comics-walt-kellys-pogo.html
and tons more great stuff!
SEND A FEW MEASLY BUCKS HERE AND KEEP OUR CARTOON HERITAGE ALIVE!
CLICK HERE TO DONATE TO THE ARCHIVE
Every week Steve posts a whole pile of rare stuff from our glorious past. Help insure that he is able to keep doing it!
BE A VOLUNTEER
If you live in the LA area and are obsessed with old cartoons, you can come help Steve organize old films, comics and illustrations. You will see tons of great stuff every day!
Monday, May 21, 2007
Bill Plympton and me in Chicago May 25 and 26
hey if you live in Chicago (or are visiting) this weekend, come and meet me and the amazing Bill Plympton for some cartoon fun!
Bill's gonna run his hilarious feature, Hair High on Saturday night - 8 PM.
http://www.hairhigh.com/index_flash.html
and I will run a bunch of rare short stuff Friday night - 8 PM...
and a kiddie Matinee on Saturday afternoon at 1 PM. (Those cartoons are kid-safe!)
Bill and John Show Myspace Page
http://www.thejohnandbillshow.com/tix.html
It's playing at the historic and beautiful high class fancy-pants Portage:
http://www.portagetheater.org/
There's a kiddie matinee on Saturday too!
If you want an idea of how much fun this will be, read the comments from the San Francisco show last year:
http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2006/07/john-k-saves-san-francisco.html#comments
http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2006/07/fans-look-what-happened-in-san.html
Bill's gonna run his hilarious feature, Hair High on Saturday night - 8 PM.http://www.hairhigh.com/index_flash.html
and I will run a bunch of rare short stuff Friday night - 8 PM...
and a kiddie Matinee on Saturday afternoon at 1 PM. (Those cartoons are kid-safe!)
Bill and John Show Myspace Page
http://www.thejohnandbillshow.com/tix.html
It's playing at the historic and beautiful high class fancy-pants Portage:
http://www.portagetheater.org/
There's a kiddie matinee on Saturday too!
If you want an idea of how much fun this will be, read the comments from the San Francisco show last year:
http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2006/07/john-k-saves-san-francisco.html#comments
http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2006/07/fans-look-what-happened-in-san.html
Sunday, May 20, 2007
Bill Tytla - Terrytoons - ear flaps
Here's what Tytla can do with no direction and not much money. Pretty cute!
He's probably remembering some stuff from Country Cousin that his pal, Art Babbitt did a few years earlier, but it's a little more mid-40s style and less loose.
CLICK HERE TO WATCH CLIP! (4.56mb)
He's probably remembering some stuff from Country Cousin that his pal, Art Babbitt did a few years earlier, but it's a little more mid-40s style and less loose.
CLICK HERE TO WATCH CLIP! (4.56mb)
Saturday, May 19, 2007
UPA - flat stylized cartoons I like
This Wally VS UPA stuff was all supposed to be the subject of 1 post, but I'm finding that to make my point is taking a lot more work than I originally thought it would. And some commenters are misinterpreting what I've been getting at.
I'm interrupting the thread to make something clear:
Probably many of you folks think I hate all stylized animation. Nope. I actually love the idea of it and love to see many styles of cartoon animation.
The best stylized cartoon animation was not in the UPA entertainment shorts for theatres, but in commercials and even TV for some reason.
Tom Terrific was a low budget TV cartoon that still used real animation, and didn't merely inbetween from pose to pose.
Just in case anyone forgot, I even brought back the "UPA style" or as it's known now "Retro Cartoons". So obviously I like it and think there is a place for stylization.
I'm interrupting the thread to make something clear:
Probably many of you folks think I hate all stylized animation. Nope. I actually love the idea of it and love to see many styles of cartoon animation.
The best stylized cartoon animation was not in the UPA entertainment shorts for theatres, but in commercials and even TV for some reason.
Tom Terrific was a low budget TV cartoon that still used real animation, and didn't merely inbetween from pose to pose.
Just in case anyone forgot, I even brought back the "UPA style" or as it's known now "Retro Cartoons". So obviously I like it and think there is a place for stylization.
Dave Sheldon - one of my favorite cartoonists designed many retro tribute fake commercials for me.http://www.dksheldon.com/detected.php?page=&pass=
I added these little shorts just to bookend and offer a contrast to the style of the Ren and Stimpy cartoons, never knowing what influence they would have on the next 15 years.After we did these fake commercials in Ren and Stimpy, this became the dominant style of kiddie TV cartoons.
I remember all through the 80s trying to get my bosses at Filmation, Hanna Barbera and the like to let me do flatter more designy characters and styles. I would always come up against this argument: "John, these characters are too flat and cold. Nobody wants this old fashioned (old-school) stuff anymore. Kids won't be able to identify with the characters. They want round 3 dimensional characters like we draw here":
Anyway I like stylized stuff that's fun and animated, that isn't bland and stuffy. The UPA entertainment cartoons were to me, the least entertaining form of stylized cartoons because they were designed blandly and didn't animate very well. Meanwhile their industrial films were great and lots of animated commercials were done by classic full-animation animators who did very creative stylized ads.
Here's a real irony. Rod Scribner-who I think was the most talented and versatile animator in history did some stuff for UPA, but not for the entertainment shorts.
He did the title sequence for some of the shorts, and that animation and design was way more fun and interesting than the shorts themselves.
ROD SCRIBNER WAS THE BEST "UPA STYLE" ANIMATOR
He also animated some shorts for the UPA TV show- which would have been much lower budget than their theatrical shorts. His TV shorts are full of amazing design and animation- he figured out stylized ways to move the characters. He didn't just do keys and then evenly inbetween - them like in the award winning theatricals. Does this make any sense to you?
If this had become the trend for stylized animation, UPA might never have killed cartoon animation. It would have invigorated the medium and given us lots more variety and directions to go in.
Scribner also animated lots of stylized commercials:
http://cartoonmodern.blogsome.com/category/r0d-scribner/
NEXT: WHAT DID UPA DO THAT WAS NEW?
Friday, May 18, 2007
Funny pathos vs cheap trick pathos- Ralph has remorse
If there's one thing I can't tolerate in movies and TV it's fake forced contrived pathos.Animation features and some live action directors use the cheapest methods to make you cry. Sad music, gloomy staging, a certain cutting technique and contrived story points. ET for Christs's sake.
Disney had the best method: shoot or torture your Mom. What kid won't cry if they see the main character's Mother get gunned down? What a dirty trick to play on kids!
Using cheap tricks like these gets you critical acclaim: "Wow that cartoon made me cry! It must be brilliant! Much better than those shitty little funny cartoons that make you feel good."
I purposely made a cartoon that used some filmic tricks to make people cry just to show that it's not hard to do it.
And I didn't have to shoot anyone's Mom either. I made people cry over the fact that Stimpy couldn't fart for a second time. I went out of my way to make the story have the most preposterous plot events in it-everything to undermine the seriousness of Stimpy's depression.
Besides the mood tricks, I relied heavily on Stimpy and Ren's acting-the drawings of their expressions and their interactions. A lot of films will ignore this part of the pathos recipe. They rely on the filmic tricks and contrived story points.
I'm all for funny pathos. Jackie Gleason was a master at funny pathos. He would soften his character by showing Kramden in remorse after he spent the rest of the show being a complete asshole-like every real guy!
Remorse is the funniest man emotion. All men do bad things, even good men. But the sign of a good man is that he feels guilty about it afterwards and that's when man is at his most vulnerable and funniest.
Jackie Gleason doesn't need sleazy films tricks to get his pathos across. He does it all with his great acting. He makes you laugh at the same time you have a lump in your throat.
"Pardon My Glove" (1956)
Thursday, May 17, 2007
Wally VS UPA 3 - Walt Craves Respect
Does this look like a wacky cartoonist?Walt’s Bid For Respect
In the 30s, Walt Disney caught the respect bug. He wanted to be up there with the bigshot Hollywood celebrities, not down here with the lowly cartoonists.That's why Walt Disney kept trying to imitate live action and why he continually toned down the cartoony impossible stuff. The real magic. By the way, I didn't make this up. Lots of people thought that even at the time.
Realistic water is more respectable than cartoon water.
(wouldn't it inevitably follow that a camera is more respectable than a pencil?)
It backfired. He couldn't stop himself from inserting naked babies’ butts, cutesy pie fish with sexpot girl eyes and hippos in tutus into the classics.
This outraged serious music critics, which is OK with me. But it also bored the general audience who wanted cartoons to be funny - and that's the real shame.Fantasia's Reviews
Alas, Walt's method of gaining artistic respect didn't really work.
Now, I have to say that I like a lot of stuff in Walt Disney pictures.
I even like Fantasia, despite the extreme kitschiness. I mean I'm as kitschy as can be. I love pop culture and entertainment. I'm a cartoonist with no pretensions of trying to be a serious artist.
But I admit it and am proud of my cheesiness.
The thing that really helps Fantasia - for me - is the great music. I love Stokowski's highly caricatured emotions. I love his rendition of the Nutcracker Suite. Combine that with the Disney artists' design and color styling and I'm completely swept away.
If I actually stop and think about what the ideas are behind the art, it's pretty damn embarrasing...
Mushrooms with Chinese faces, little naked imps that change the seasons, fish with human girl eyes, Russian Cossacks made of weeds...I mean now, that's just brutally DUMB, isn't it - content-wise?
Funny cartoons can be dumb too, but they're not trying to have you take them seriously. Dumb is funny, it's not high-class. It's hard to take low brow stuff seriously.
I DARE YOU TO SAY OUT LOUD WHAT IS HAPPENING IN THIS CLIP
Can you imagine anyone could possibly take this seriously and call it art? I just like all the techniques and the way everything moves to the fantastic music. It's superficially pretty.
But it's neither a cartoon nor art...and that's the best part of Fantasia.
The rest of the movie is even more kitschy and less appealing at least to me. Like I said I like kitsch- but there are two kinds of low brow taste: Fun, unpretentious kitsch and then there's gay kitsch- the kind of stuff you might see in a man-couple's love nest.
Much of Disney to me is gay kitsch, surely not very highbrow. What a strange style and what fruity content to force straight grown men to animate! I'll never figure it out. It's weird enough that one single cartoonist would want to animate babies' butts turning into hearts and that kind of stuff, but what's unfathomable is how many others copied him!
Whole studios abandoned what they were good at to blindly follow the gay kitsch cartoon parade - just because Walt was doing it!
That's the ungodly power of trend-thinking, which is not thinking for yourself, but rather following what everyone else is doing unquestioningly. (Look at how many animated features today are all the same formula! And still gay-kitsch!)
By contrast, Ub Iwerks' cartoons of the 30s, though influenced by Disney are more imaginative, fun, earthy and cartoony:
Other resources...
http://www.filmreference.com/Films-Ey-Fo/Fantasia.html
... In the Bach Toccata and Fugue portion, for example, Disney artists were encouraged to experiment visually and boldly, in ways never before imagined. This sequence, early in the film, signals its experimentalism, departing from the usual Disney style and moving in abstract directions, imitating the techniques of Oscar Fischinger, who was originally to direct that sequence but left the project before completing it, after discovering the studio had altered his original designs. Other experiments are elsewhere in evidence, as when the sound track is visualized through animation midway through the film, recalling the abstract experiments of Len Lye and anticipating those of Norman McLaren. More conventional Disney whimsy is elsewhere in evidence, however, and there is perhaps the danger of vulgarizing the music through the imposed visual patterns. In fact, the sequences are diverse and uneven.
The film has been criticized for its "ponderous didacticism" (the visualization of the "paleontological cataclysm" in the Stravinsky Rite of Spring sequence, for example, and the simplistic contrasts of the final sequences—Moussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain against Schubert's Ave Maria, with Good triumphing over Evil in a finale of Christian tranquility) and praised for those sequences in which Disney contented himself with being Disney and avoided self-conscious attempts at being "artistic."
...For the first time, moreover, Disney became his own distributor with Fantasia, since, as Variety reported, the film was so different as to require a different sales approach. It premiered on 13 November 1940, at the Broadway Theatre in New York, and was not an immediate success. Its original running time, with an intermission, was about 130 minutes, later cut to 81 minutes. It was reissued in 1946, but it would only build its audience strength over time. By 1968, for example, it had earned $4.8 million in North American markets, more than doubling its original investment, and finally taking its place among the top 200 grossing films.
In musical terminology, a fantasia is "a free development of a given theme." Disney's achievement, though often impressive and no doubt ahead of its time, has nonetheless had its detractors. Stravinsky was not pleased that his music had been restructured and that the instrumentation had been changed. "I will say nothing about the visual complement," Stravinsky remarked, "as I do not wish to criticize an unresisting imbecility . . . "The film succeeds best when it is at its most playful—the hippopotamus ballerinas in the "Dance of the Hours" sequence, for example, which Richard Schickel has described as "a broad satirical comment on the absurdities of high culture." The visuals for Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony strain contrivedly for a mythic charm in an Arcadian setting populated by fabulous creatures. Far more interesting are the animated dances from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite, and the whimsical treatment of Ponchielli's "Dance of the Hours" or Mickey's struggle with the dancing brooms in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," the conceptual core of the picture. John Tibbetts has written that the results of Mickey's "union with high art were questionable for some, just as Walt's collision with the likes of Stravinsky, Beethoven, and Moussorgsky raised (or lowered) many a brow."
Disney's undertaking Fantasia brings to mind an artisan who has only a superficial knowledge of religion undertaking to sculpt a monumental pieta out of sand as the tide moves in, threatening to erode it. Some passers-by will no doubt pause to watch out of curiosity, but the spectacle will not for most of them constitute a conversion. If anything, Fantasia does not teach a musical lesson, but it often fascinates and delights the eye.
Reviewing Fantasia in 1940, Otis Ferguson called it "a film for everybody to see and enjoy," despite its "main weakness—an absence of story, of motion, of interest." Bosley Crowther was less harsh, remarking that the images often tended to overwhelm the music, but praising the film for its "imaginative excursion" and concluding that it was a milestone in motion picture history. Despite its sometimes elaborate pretensions and its many innovations, the boldness of its concept quite overrides the "disturbing jumble" of its achievement. It is, indeed, a "milestone" in the history of animated film.
—James Michael Welsh
DISCLAIMER: WHAT WALT IS GOOD AT
This post isn't really about Walt Disney. I'm just using him as an example of cartoonists abandoning their roots in search of something higher.I don't even blame him for doing it. Maybe he sincerely loves his fruity content. That's just fine. If I had to be mad at someone, it would be at the cartoonists who actually liked funny stuff who followed what Walt did just because Walt did it. I wish more artists would follow their natural instincts and be more personally observant, rather than blindly doing what someone else is doing.
Every time a new trend comes along it sweeps away the good things that existed before, rather than absorbing some of the new things and combining them with the best traditions.
OK, just to go off on a tangent, I will tell you that I have seen every Disney feature at least 20 times, studied them all on many levels. I have almost all the short cartoons in my collection. I have watched the shorts in order year by year while watching the films of the other studios during the same years to compare them.
Walt was definitely good at some stuff, a genius at some. He just didn't seem to like cartoons.
MARKETING-PACKAGING
Walt probably invented the whole concept of marketing. He marketed his characters, marketed himself and made everyone think his stuff was better than everyone else's. Everything he did came in a shiny package and promised that it would be the greatest thing ever-his cartoons, his TV Show, Disneyland, they all promised magic. Sometimes they would deliver a bit, but his marketing and packaging was his true creative genius. I don't think anyone was ever better.
HE SOLD US SPACE
His space series from the Disneyland Show in the 50s convinced regular folks that we could actually go to the moon, and explore Mars and beyond. Before these shows appeared, space travel was strictly science fiction. I think his marketing of space travel did more than anything to get us to the moon.
To me, that's his greatest achievement.
DRAMATIC ANIMATION
He had one creative storytelling ability that beat everyone else. The dramatic scenes in his movies- the ones he didn't water down with comedy relief really do approach and sometimes surpass the drama even in the best live action pictures.
The witch in Snow White.
Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty. (although they lessened the dramatic effect whenever they surrounded her with the wacky Ward Kimball style demons.)
ORGANIZATION
He built an amazing studio and production system specifically geared to his own very finite tastes. Everyone in the studio was a specific tool to put on film what he couldn't himself.
The system had a lot of waste built in and was extremely expensive, but that's inevitable if you yourself can't put your specific ideas down on paper.
All the animation movie execs copy this system today but have exaggerated all the excesses, having less vision than Walt.
HYPNOSIS
He was able to convince millions of people of anything he felt like convincing them of. Even of things that the evidence did not at all support. That an animator is an actor with a pencil. That his characters had rich personalities. That animation is magic, even conservative animation. That no other studio did anything good.
This is such an interesting topic that I'm going to devote some posts to it: The difference between taking someone's word for something and using your own physical senses to observe and analyze to see if you come to the same conclusion that someone else's words did.
Most people believe words more than physical evidence. Especially words in books. That's why I post so much art and clips to let you decide for yourself what you think and like. My words just offer you another view than the traditional "non-artists writing about art" one.
TECHNICAL ACHIEVEMENTS
Obviously, his best films have amazing camera moves, fantastic background layouts and paintings. The scene planning and music is intricate. All that flash and intricacy does a lot to convince you that everything about the films is equally as good.
REALISTIC ANIMAL BODIES WITH CARTOON HEADS
The animation Disney's artists do of deer, horses and dogs walking and running is amazing and otherwordly. Is it entertaining? I don't know, but it's impressive that anyone can animate difficult complex problems like that.
Is it a bit weird that they plop cartoon heads on top of realistic anatomically correct hindquarters?
It's kind of on the furry side of life, isn't it?
HEWWWOOOOO!
"MAY I PWEASE HAVE YOUR WESPECT, MR. DISNEY"
This post isn't about whether Walt's Cartoons are good or bad, it's just pointing out the sad need for respect that makes cartoonists ashamed of what their real abilities are.
NEXT: UPA HAS A DIFFERENT WAY TO GET RESPECT
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
WALLY VS UPA PART 2 - Skilled Cartoonists Take Their Skills For Granted
OK, here are my theories as to why UPA happened, and why animators abandoned what they were good at. They might not be right, but at least it's a stab at an explanation for something so crazy to have happened. Maybe you have some theories too.
1) SOME SKILLED ANIMATORS TAKE SKILLED ANIMATION FOR GRANTED
By 1948 there were many many brilliant animators who could do totally sophisticated rich cartoon movement. Their animation and drawings had level upon level of intelligent artistic principles, ideas and planning in every scene. To the audience it would be magic.
Maybe by the 40s this brilliant stuff was so easy for them that they started to take it all for granted. It was second nature to them, so they were no longer impressed by their own sophistication.I know that in the 80s, I brought some tapes of Clampett cartoons to Bill Melendez to show him.
He had previously told me how proud he was of his UPA work and how revolutionary it was. I seem to remember that when he saw the Clampett stuff, he had forgotten how amazing and sophisticated the animation was.
In 1985 (as now), any animation from the 40s would look like superhumans from space did it, because everything had become so primitive by then.
We told Melendez how much we loved the 40s stuff and he then agreed that it was the best animation ever done. The UPA stuff was more about the design and just doing something different and he was still very proud of that.
He said it cost as much to do a limited animation UPA cartoon as it did to do a fully animated funny cartoon. I still can't figure that out, but of course I believe him.
Maybe some of the animators who could do such amazing feats of cartoon magic just got bored with their own skills and wanted to do something different.
2) SOME ANIMATORS CRAVE SERIOUS RESPECT
Real cartoon animation-the full stuff of the 30s and 40s is very sophisticated, but only animators would know that. The audience and the critics just thought of it as cheap throwaway entertainment, and as history teaches over and over again, entertainment and fun doesn't get serious critical attention no matter how obviously skilled it is. It sure doesn't win awards.
Some animators and directors needed to know they were doing something that was above cheap mass entertainment, something that had a higher meaning.
Something that could get respect. Some cartoonists wanted to be "artists", not realizing that they had previously invented a whole new artform that could do what no other was capable of.Pleasing hundreds of millions of people around the world with obvious astounding skill and talent is not good enough to get you respect.
NEXT...2 DIFFERENT WAYS FOR ANIMATORS TO BEG RESPECT - DISNEY'S AND UPA'S
Wally Walrus VS UPA part 2
OK, here's my theories as to why UPA happened, and why animators abandoned what they were good at. They might not be right, but at least it's a stab at an explanation for something so crazy to have happened. Maybe you have some theories too.
I know that in the 80s, I brought some tapes of Clampett cartoons to Bill Melendez to show him. He had previously told me how proud he was of his UPA work and how revolutionary it was. I seem to remember that when he saw the Clampett stuff, he had forgotten how amazing and sophisticated the animation was. In 1985, any animation from the 40s would look like superhumans from space did it, because everything had become so primitive by then.
We told him how much we loved the 40s stuff and he then agreed that it was the best animation ever done. The UPA stuff was more about the design and just doing something different and he was still very proud of that. He said it cost as much to do a limited animation UPA cartoon as it did to do a fully animated funny cartoon. I still can't figure that out, but of course I believe him.
So maybe some of the animators who could do such amazing feats of cartoon magic, just got bored with their own skills and wanted to do something different.
SOME ANIMATORS CRAVE SERIOUS RESPECT
Some animators and directors needed to know they were doing something that was above cheap mass entertainment, something that had a higher meaning. Something that could get respect. Some cartoonists wanted to be "artists", not realizing that they had previously invented a whole new artform that could do what no other was capable of.
In the 30s, Walt Disney had the respect disease. He wanted to be up there with the bigshot Hollywood celebrities.
That's why Walt Disney kept imitating live action. He did Fantasia to try to get high brow critical respect. He figured if he did classical music in cartoons, real critics would consider him high class and hoity toity. It backfired. He couldn't stop himself from adding naked baby's butts, cutesy pie fish with sexpot girl eyes and hippos in tutus to the classics. This outraged serious music critics. It also bored the general audience who wanted cartoons to be funny.
So his method of gaining artistic respect didn't really work.
The animators who founded UPA tried a different tact. Most of them were highly accomplished animators. Bobe Cannon was a fantastic full-animation style cartoonist who had a really unique and fun way to move his characters. For some unknown reason, he decided to totally abandon what he was a genius at.
He and Hubley (a layout man and BG painter) and the other UPA guys decided to abandon animation, fun and lush movement and instead focus on "design". And not always good design either. They just wanted to do something that rebelled against both Disney and Warners.
UPA ANIMATED MAGAZINE CARTOON STYLES
The design that they did was nothing new to cartoons in general, just sort of new to animation. Magazine cartoons had been done in similar flat snooty styles for decades. Milt Gross had been doing highly stylized comics and strips for a long time-only is stuff wasn't meant to be high-class, it was meant to be fun.
UPA ARTISTS GOT THEIR RESPECT FROM CRITICS, NOT FROM THE AUDIENCE
In the 30s Disney tried to destroy funny cartoons and everyone copied him and abandoned what they were doing earlier to follow his wake of destruction. Luckily Clampett and Avery chose to resist the trend and made their own funny cartoons and in turn influenced the next generation of followers who mostly did bad imitations of Warner Bros. cartoons.
In the 50s we didn't have a Clampett or Avery to provide an antidote for the UPA wave of cartoon poison, so all the great traditions of fun cartoons just died with a whimper. No one even bothered to put up a fight!
UPA and flat simple cartoons are easy to imitate. Classic cartoon style is not.
This means that the amateurs can sneak in to the business and fool the execs and the ad agencies.
The worst effect of UPA was to kill the art of movement. The flat drawing style itself is not inherently evil. A lot of traditional animators made beautiful fully animated and clever commercials in the "UPA style".
They write about everything except what makes the animation good or bad or fun.
The UPA "revolution" was designed for critics. They could talk about the abstractness of the films and the obvious departure from the traditional look. Because the cartoons are not meant to be entertaining, they must have some higher purpose and critics love to find higher purpose in everything. They love to talk around the subject rather than address the subject directly with clarity.
Instead they look for meaning, or "acting" or "story". Anything but the actual skill, entertainment and craft of the cartoon drawings and movement-the things that set cartoons apart from say, novels or stage acting.
The best book about classic cartoons is Leonard Maltin's "Of Mice and Magic". It gives a quick overview to all the studios in New York and LA and you can tell Maltin is a real fan of the good stuff. When he judges the cartoons, he judges them for their entertainment value and he is a much more open-minded and common sense kind of guy than most animation critics. I recommend it to everyone who loves classic cartoons.
But there is no book I'm aware of that discusses really what cartoons do that no other medium can do. That would take a cartoon animator. You may suggest Frank Thomas' books would fit that requirement. Frank and Ollie's books are basically Disney propaganda and they look down their noses at cartoony animation ...and the work of every other studio.
Now, with all the blogs and animators and artists discussing the work they've done and the work of the past that influenced them you can get a much broader view of cartoon animation.
It's very hard to describe artistic concepts in words. You need pictures, and in our case, animation clips to drive the idea and concepts home. The age of the non-artist critical theories of animation is over.
CHUCK JONES EXPLAINS HOW UPA KILLED ANIMATION
Summary of main points:
1) It's important to have studios like Walter Lantz with no strong creative control to allow the animators to create great animation without someone boxing them in to a style or a restrictive story.
2) UPA killed the idea that cartoon animation was about well drawn, funny moving cartoon animation. Flat simplified drawings allowed amateur artists to get into the business and that's a blow we have never recovered from.
3) Animation critics discuss everything except the quality of the cartoon animation and drawings and make people think that other add-on things are more important. Things that animation is not traditionally good at-acting, story, social statements, pathos, you name it - anything rather than the art itself.
SOME SKILLED ANIMATORS TAKE SKILLED ANIMATION FOR GRANTED
By 1948 there were many many brilliant animators who could do totally sophisticated rich cartoon movement. Their animation and drawings had level upon level of intelligent artistic principles, ideas and planning in every scene. Maybe this brilliant stuff was so easy for them that they started to take it all for granted. It was second nature to them, so they were no longer impressed by their own sophistication.I know that in the 80s, I brought some tapes of Clampett cartoons to Bill Melendez to show him. He had previously told me how proud he was of his UPA work and how revolutionary it was. I seem to remember that when he saw the Clampett stuff, he had forgotten how amazing and sophisticated the animation was. In 1985, any animation from the 40s would look like superhumans from space did it, because everything had become so primitive by then.
We told him how much we loved the 40s stuff and he then agreed that it was the best animation ever done. The UPA stuff was more about the design and just doing something different and he was still very proud of that. He said it cost as much to do a limited animation UPA cartoon as it did to do a fully animated funny cartoon. I still can't figure that out, but of course I believe him.
So maybe some of the animators who could do such amazing feats of cartoon magic, just got bored with their own skills and wanted to do something different.
SOME ANIMATORS CRAVE SERIOUS RESPECT
Real cartoon animation-the full stuff of the 30s and 40s is very sophisticated, but only animators would know that. The audience and the critics just thought of it as cheap throwaway fun entertainment, and as history teaches over and over again, entertainment and fun doesn't get serious critical attention. Or awards.
In the 30s, Walt Disney had the respect disease. He wanted to be up there with the bigshot Hollywood celebrities.
That's why Walt Disney kept imitating live action. He did Fantasia to try to get high brow critical respect. He figured if he did classical music in cartoons, real critics would consider him high class and hoity toity. It backfired. He couldn't stop himself from adding naked baby's butts, cutesy pie fish with sexpot girl eyes and hippos in tutus to the classics. This outraged serious music critics. It also bored the general audience who wanted cartoons to be funny.
So his method of gaining artistic respect didn't really work.
UPA TRIES A NEW WAY TO GET RESPECT
The animators who founded UPA tried a different tact. Most of them were highly accomplished animators. Bobe Cannon was a fantastic full-animation style cartoonist who had a really unique and fun way to move his characters. For some unknown reason, he decided to totally abandon what he was a genius at.
He and Hubley (a layout man and BG painter) and the other UPA guys decided to abandon animation, fun and lush movement and instead focus on "design". And not always good design either. They just wanted to do something that rebelled against both Disney and Warners.
UPA ANIMATED MAGAZINE CARTOON STYLES
UPA CARTOONS HAVE A DEPRESSING ATMOSPHERE
They not only rebelled visually. They also rebelled against the happy aspect of cartoon stories, music and timing. They replaced the fun atmosphere of cartoons with a new kind of mood, super depressing, slow and bleak. The lead characters are wimpy bland people, rather than funny lively animals.UPA ARTISTS GOT THEIR RESPECT FROM CRITICS, NOT FROM THE AUDIENCE
VARIETY IS GREAT BUT LET'S NOT KILL THE GOOD STUFF
I agree that there should be room in all walks of life for experiments, variety and "different" styles but unfortunately people are slaves to trends. There isn't that much variety. When something new comes along, good OR bad that gets notice, too many others blindly imitate the bad with the good and abandon the good that already exists to follow the new trend.In the 30s Disney tried to destroy funny cartoons and everyone copied him and abandoned what they were doing earlier to follow his wake of destruction. Luckily Clampett and Avery chose to resist the trend and made their own funny cartoons and in turn influenced the next generation of followers who mostly did bad imitations of Warner Bros. cartoons.
In the 50s we didn't have a Clampett or Avery to provide an antidote for the UPA wave of cartoon poison, so all the great traditions of fun cartoons just died with a whimper. No one even bothered to put up a fight!
WE ARE PAYING FOR UPA'S SINS TO THIS DAY
UPA and flat simple cartoons are easy to imitate. Classic cartoon style is not.
This means that the amateurs can sneak in to the business and fool the execs and the ad agencies.
The worst effect of UPA was to kill the art of movement. The flat drawing style itself is not inherently evil. A lot of traditional animators made beautiful fully animated and clever commercials in the "UPA style".
ANIMATION CRITICS DO A LOT OF DAMAGE
Critics, being writers, not animators (let alone skilled ones) can only write about things they can put into words.They write about everything except what makes the animation good or bad or fun.
The UPA "revolution" was designed for critics. They could talk about the abstractness of the films and the obvious departure from the traditional look. Because the cartoons are not meant to be entertaining, they must have some higher purpose and critics love to find higher purpose in everything. They love to talk around the subject rather than address the subject directly with clarity.
Instead they look for meaning, or "acting" or "story". Anything but the actual skill, entertainment and craft of the cartoon drawings and movement-the things that set cartoons apart from say, novels or stage acting.
The best book about classic cartoons is Leonard Maltin's "Of Mice and Magic". It gives a quick overview to all the studios in New York and LA and you can tell Maltin is a real fan of the good stuff. When he judges the cartoons, he judges them for their entertainment value and he is a much more open-minded and common sense kind of guy than most animation critics. I recommend it to everyone who loves classic cartoons.
But there is no book I'm aware of that discusses really what cartoons do that no other medium can do. That would take a cartoon animator. You may suggest Frank Thomas' books would fit that requirement. Frank and Ollie's books are basically Disney propaganda and they look down their noses at cartoony animation ...and the work of every other studio.
Now, with all the blogs and animators and artists discussing the work they've done and the work of the past that influenced them you can get a much broader view of cartoon animation.
It's very hard to describe artistic concepts in words. You need pictures, and in our case, animation clips to drive the idea and concepts home. The age of the non-artist critical theories of animation is over.
CHUCK JONES EXPLAINS HOW UPA KILLED ANIMATION
Summary of main points:
1) It's important to have studios like Walter Lantz with no strong creative control to allow the animators to create great animation without someone boxing them in to a style or a restrictive story.
2) UPA killed the idea that cartoon animation was about well drawn, funny moving cartoon animation. Flat simplified drawings allowed amateur artists to get into the business and that's a blow we have never recovered from.
3) Animation critics discuss everything except the quality of the cartoon animation and drawings and make people think that other add-on things are more important. Things that animation is not traditionally good at-acting, story, social statements, pathos, you name it - anything rather than the art itself.
Wally Walrus VS UPA part 1.
WALTER LANTZ PRESERVED PURE ANIMATED CARTOONS LONGEST
I've been watching a lot of Lantz cartoons lately, particularly the late 40s films. These cartoons sort of represent full animation's last gasp before the 50s when flatter, stiffer, less animated cartoons became the style.
At Warner's in the late 40s, Jones was making his funniest films, but his animation style had already become less fully animated. His animators were mainly traveling from one Chuck Jones pose to another, but the stories Jones was directing were less geared towards allowing the animators to be the stars of the show, as they were just a few years earlier.
IS CREATIVE CONTROL A GOOD THING OR BAD THING?
It depends.Lantz had a really interesting studio. It didn't have a central style or any major creative force directing the overall studio philosophy or style. Having no strong central control I think in his case was a really good thing.
Disney on the other hand, was a studio completely controlled by his personal taste - his naive ultra-Christian bumpkin point of view.
There wasn't much room for his animators to do their thing. They had to second guess or follow Walt's every kitschy tasteless whim.
Warner Bros. was also a "control" studio, but the control was split up between very different directors. Each director had free reign (as long as he made funny films) to do his cartoons the way he wanted.
Total strict control can be good or bad, depending on who's doing the controlling.
DISNEY AND JONES BOTH WERE RESTRICTIVE WITH CREATIVE CONTROL
Chuck Jones and Walt Disney both exercised extreme control over their films. The difference between them is that Chuck had talent and Walt didn't. Chuck could actually do most of the things he was asking his artists to do. Walt couldn't. He had to talk them through it. He couldn't do the drawings or stage the scenes or time the cartoons. All he could do was restrict his artists from exercising what magic, personal abilities and surprises they might have had. Disney bent everyone to his will and poor artistic taste. 
His philosophy is he didn't want anyone or any idea to stand out:"We allow no geniuses around our Studio."
Walt Disney
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/w/waltdisney131635.html
Clampett had a very different type of control over his cartoons. He could draw and had a really strong personal style, but instead of forcing his crew to draw and think just like him, he inspired everyone to add their own personal inspirations and quirks to his cartoons. They combined their styles with his. Clampett gave people the context to work within and he creatively cast his artists and managed to get everyone to do the best work of their careers. McKimson did better animation in Clampett's cartoons than he did in his own! Clampett unleashed the amazing creative powers of Rod Scribner, while every other director tried to tone him down. Mel Blanc did his best voices for Clampett. Stalling did his best music.Walt Disney
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/w/waltdisney131635.html
Clampett's style of control, to me is the optimal way to make cartoons...BUT! We need another way too. The random uncontrolled studio way.
WE NEED UNCONTROLLED ARTISTIC EXPERIMENTATION TOO
There were so many extremely talented and skilled animators in the 30s and 40s that it would be a shame not to have ways to let them all explore what they themselves could invent if they were let loose and didn't have to be slaves to trends. Too much control over talent can lose a lot of great ideas and personal inspirations.
Luckily for history there were some studios that had great talent coming through them and no one putting the clamps on them. Terrytoons and Walter Lantz are 2 of those studios.
Jim Tyer could never have done his kind of animation at any other place but Terry's.
JIM TYER CRAZINESS
Even at Famous his stuff seems toned down, as if someone is really leaning on him to try to be normal. At Terry's, as long as you made your footage quota each week, you could do your own style and he sure did!
Walter Lantz himself, was probably not super talented, but he was a cartoonist and animator who obviously loved his profession and loved other cartoonists. Animators from all over the cartoon business would take breaks from other more controlled studios and work for awhile at Lantz. His directors were not strong visionaries or personalities and the cartoons that came out of Lantz' studio-especially in the 1940s are basically the products of the animators' personal styles. All kinds of different styled animators worked on the cartoons in various orders and the cartoons all look different.
The Lantz cartoons aren't really funny, not like Warner's or Tex Avery, they are basically fun stuff for kids. But some of the most fun cartoony full animation in history happened under this loose system.
Dick Lundy probably was the director with the most personal style or look of his own and you can see that he did a lot of the poses, but he still let the animators put their own personal stamps on the animation.
Stars like Grim Natwick, Freddie Moore, Ed Love, Pat Matthews and many more all had wildly different personal styles and they all obviously liked full animation for its own sake. They liked to make the movement itself shine. Under more restrictive directors, they didn't always do their best stuff, but at Lantz you can see these great full-animators doing beautiful, sometimes funny, but very lush and creative animation that just rejoices in the art of the animator. Not the art of the director, not the art of the writer, not even the art of the layout pose artist. The sheer joy of fun appealing character movement and cartoon magic. Which is what cartoon animation is primarily about.
Chuck Jones explains:
In 1948, Lantz made a whole pile of beautiful, fully animated cartoon classics, all featuring virtuoso performances by some of the all time great animators.
WATCH WALLY STRUGGLE
Now compare that scene to what happened to cartoons just 2 years later.
UPA DESTROYS THE WORLD
That's a UPA cartoon. Doesn't it make you wanna kill yourself? After a couple decades of really fun, upbeat cartoons that brought a new form of art into the world - complete magic designed to make you happy, now we have depressing downbeat dreary, creatively stifled drizzle. WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED? I have a new theory about it.
To be continued...
AND DON'T FORGET TO WATCH THE HILARIOUS SOUPY SALES CLIP UNDER THIS POST!
Soupy Sales - elephants come to visit
I've seen this bit about 20 times now and every time I see it I fall on the floor laughing.
This hand is Frank Nastasi. It's the best actor on TV.
The odd thing is that someone wrote a ton of dialogue for the bit, but none of it sinks in. It's just there to give Soupy something to say to instigate the trunk pee.
Soupy's reactions though are genius.
CLICK HERE FOR ELEPHANT FUN!
NEXT- WALLY WALRUS VS UPA
Sunday, May 13, 2007
Pinch and Outrage - Bob Clampett gift of perversion
Tex Avery used to make these cheater cartoons that made fun of live action travelogues that played in theatres in the 30s and 40s.
# Land of the Midnight Fun (1939) (as Fred Avery)
# Detouring America (1939) (as Fred Avery)
The cartoons usually weren't very funny, nor very animated, but the other directors all took their turns imitating them for some reason.
Even Clampett did, and they are his weakest cartoons. The cartoons are based on verbal jokes or literal illustrations of verbal slang. In the 30s Tex was basically satisfied if he had "jokes" in his cartoons. He didn't take advantage of the animators to plus the jokes very often-not until the mid 1940s at MGM.
This bit is from a Clampett cheater cartoon-also a satire of travelogues and it's mostly just a string of jokes. This particular joke has been done a million times in cartoons-a Doberman Pincer 'pincing' other dogs. Normally you would just yawn at such a corny joke, but this time it's animated so doggone funny that the joke becomes hilarious.WATCH THE PINCHING
This Pincer is so eager to pinch that it's completely perverted!
The animation is totally weird and out of place for 1941. Most animation at Warner's at the time is good, but fairly conservative. Clampett though, was always trying to find ways to make the animation be funny by itself, even outside of the actual jokes.
My favorite part of the scene is when the Doberman runs from dog to dog with such jerky glee.
He jumps from close to the screen to farther back and his head sways left and right like a maniac!
Look how eager he is as he approaches a victim!
He takes liberties with verve.
The other dogs' reactions of shock and outrage add to the weirdness of the scene.
These drawings are hilarious!
I wish I knew who animated it...
Look how gay and carefree this happy pervert is!
More offence...
Even the strange tilted angles of the dog's head are funny.
Gotcha!!
Gleee
AGAIN! BUT IN SLOW MOTION
Saturday, May 12, 2007
Follow Up To An Important Concept
Maximum Awesome is the winner of this little quiz.
He said:
"I'm guessing:
Neutral or Natural Colours
NEUTRAL COLORS FOR RICHNESS
Different answers might also be right, but I'd say the frames were non-garish BG heavy.
As for explaining the concept: keeping BGs mostly rich, warm, neutral earth tones and subtle mixes of colours so that spots of bright, intense colour "pop" more. Using colour schemes based on nature, not self-cannibalising cartoons and "video box covers"."
I was also pleased that lots of people noticed other good things about images in this post.
It's hard to write about artistic concepts, I'm never 100% sure whether I get what I'm trying to say across.
This is a follow up post to a series of articles I did a while back. These pics illustrate a concept I'm somewhat obsessed about.
I'd love to know whether anyone can tell just by looking at these what particular post and concept these frames help illustrate.
I'd also be curious to know if anyone could explain the concept back to me.
That way, I'd have some inkling whether I am able to explain in words the concepts I love and try to share with other folks who may no have thought about them before.
So do me a favor if you're interested and let me know what concept is shared by all these pics, and maybe what previous post went into it in detail...
Thursday, May 10, 2007
I Could Get A Job As A Digital Restoration Artist
Look how great these backgrounds are in Banquet Busters. By Fred Brunish. Very rich with natural colors, not bright flat primaries and secondaries.
My guess is that on the new dvds coming out, they will look more like this:
That's how many of the Warner's cartoons look like now that we have advanced digital restoration techniques. I ruined the frame with simple cheap Photoshop controls. They have much more expensive controls that do a better version of ruining classic films.
Original lush colors from 1948. Enjoy them while you can!
Actually I really hope I'm wrong, but all the DVDs I've bought in the last 10 years look and sound awful thanks to "Digitally Remastered" promises.
My guess is that on the new dvds coming out, they will look more like this:
That's how many of the Warner's cartoons look like now that we have advanced digital restoration techniques. I ruined the frame with simple cheap Photoshop controls. They have much more expensive controls that do a better version of ruining classic films.
Original lush colors from 1948. Enjoy them while you can!
Actually I really hope I'm wrong, but all the DVDs I've bought in the last 10 years look and sound awful thanks to "Digitally Remastered" promises.Soupy Sales - Pookie sings "I'd like to know"
HERE'S 5 BUCKS WORTH OF PRODUCTION VALUE.
POOKIE WANTS TO KNOW IF YOU HAVE A HEART
Now watch super expensive puppet "acting" - at the end of the clip below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxbruOoXfOA
Even with hundreds of millions of production dollars at our disposal, we still have trouble making animated characters act convincingly.It looks like the animators and renderers are so busy trying to make the stuff look expensive that they have no time left to think about making it entertaining. It's shiny filler. (By the way, you should see Eddie act out this style of "animation-acting". Now that IS entertainment!)
So why not be funny instead? It's easier, more natural to what we do and a lot more fun.(And doesn't cost as much!)
BTW, I know a lot of those animators and have worked with them. They have huge talent, but I think this kind of stuff is not taking advantage of their capabilities and it's a doggone shame.
Wednesday, May 09, 2007
What Cartoons Can Do
Cartoons can do things that no other medium can do. They used to do it all the time.
These are from Dick Lundy's "Banquet Busters" 1948.
You can float when you smell something heavenly.
You can change into abstract shapes to convey your mood.
You can propell yourself through the air by stretching and squashing.
You can penetrate the smallest crevice.
You can have perfectly composed beautiful poses.
You can smash people with anything handy.
You can zip out of scenes.
Cartoons can easily do all these magic things that live action can't. Of course it's not easy to draw and animate them this beautifully. You have to be really good to do it.
Watch it in motion.
WACKY WOODY
But why does so much animation not take advantage of its natural gifts?
Instead we have whole schools of animation that try to compete with live action on its own level, which is impossible. We get badly formulaic animation acting, contrived stories filled with pathos, horrible puns, lots of realistic hairs and pores and no visual magic or pure fun.
BTW, look how great this print looks! I don't think you will ever see these cartoons look as good as the Columbia House releases, so if you can find those anywhere, snap them up.
The last versions I saw of these cartoons were digitally "remastered" and destroyed, full of DVNR line-erased all kinds of sick digital compression. I think that all cartoons from now on are going to be tampered with.
DVNR AND REMASTERING RUINS CARTOONS
MORE REMASTERING TORTURE ON LOONEY TUNES DVDS
The Columbia House cartoons look just like the films they were made on. Probably because they were a low budget release, so they couldn't afford to spend any extra money ruining them.
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
WILLARD BOWSKY, Popeye, A Date To Skate
I used to notice a really unique drawing and animation style in the early Betty Boop cartoons. The way they drew ogres and tree monsters didn't look like typical "animation-style" cartoon drawings. They looked more like a comic strip artist who learned to animate. Think of the close ups of The Old Man Of The Mountain.
I think I've figured out who the artist is and it's Willard Bowsky. I see his name in the credits of almost all the cartoons that have this style in it. It's more detailed than the other animators. He would do those gruesome close ups of Bluto with all the wrinkles and crazy expressions-like in "Sinbad The Sailor".
I'm pretty sure this scene of Olive and Popeye in "A Date To Skate" 1938, is him too.
Look how cool these drawings are! They have a whole bunch of drawing skills happening at the same time.
Construction: All the features of the face wrap around the bigger forms of the faces and are in perspective.
Design: This is a really unique stylistic look. If you look at the other animators' Popeye cartoons from 1938, they are less stylish. Almost every 30s Popeye has great animation, but this style is like a throwback to an earlier more designy look. By the late 30s even the Fleischers were being influenced by the "west coast" animation style that Disney was doing. That style was more fluid, more organic but also more generic. When the Fleischers started doing this style, they lost their own more graphic gritty manly look.
The New York animators never quite understood the west coast style and when they tried to copy it, the couldn't figure out how to combine construction with organic timing and drawing, and their animation became kind of mushy-especially into the late 1940s.
They also were influenced by the cutesy look of Disney but couldn't draw cute themselves, because they were more manly street type guys.
Bowsky though seems to have retained a " cute-ugly" style.
Tightness: Nothing wobbles or melts in the animation. All the details and finish are really tightly controlled. Some of the other animation in cartoons of the same period have a sloppier finish, even if the animation itself is very good.Some of these screen grabs are inbetweens and they are just as tight as the keys. I don't know how the animator was able to control every drawing so well.
Thick and Thin inking: Other Popeyes at this time had abandoned the earlier Fleischer style of thick and thin inking. Here it is looking great.
Note that the less important lines are thinner. Wrinkles are thinner than the more important shapes they help describe. That's hierarchy of lines.
Hierarchy of forms, lines and shapes and animation:
In the animation, the main motion of walking to the beat of the music never falters. Within that basic motion the characters also have to act and talk.
Within each character's construction all the details have to follow where the forms are going and wrap around them.
No elements just go off in their own direction. Everything follows some higher authority.
Cartooniness: Hard to define but here it is, undiluted by cutesy-pie Disney influence.
Cute-Ugly: This is a really cute scene without being "cutesy". It's a cartoonist drawing characters that are supposed to be ugly, but his drawing style is so appealing and well balanced that it comes off as cute. Sincere-cute, rather than pandering-to-moms cute.
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Control: Bowsky controls all these different artistic elements and makes it all work together. The more creative skills you have to balance at one time, the harder it is to control any one of them.
This is a marvel of control and skill, but is really fun on top of it. It doesn't lose any spontaneity.
WATCH THE FUN FILLED CLIP!!!
Writing for Cartoons - Stimpy's Invention - Outline Hierarchy
How the heck would you plan a story like this?
In this outline you can see the whole structure of the story. The way the outline is formatted is designed to help you easily follow the story and the main events in the structure.
Not only the structure of the overall story, but the sub structures within.
The setup has a structure
the body has a structure
The climax has a structure
and the end has a structure
Each of those major sequences has its own hierarchy of scenes happening that define the larger purpose of the sequence.
Each scene that describes the sequence in turn has gags and events that define the purpose of the scene.
The headings that are numbered with a number and dot "- 1." are the main sequences.
Each main sequence has a number and a title heading that describes quickly what the scene is about.
eg. 3. Stimpy Works Hard
You can read all the numbered headings without the text underneath and follow the structure of the story.
Having headings for everything is really handy. It lets you see at a glance where every main point in your story is headed and how it fits into the larger picture.A script doesn't do that. You can't see the structure of a script at a glance (if it even has one!) It is unwieldy and hard to follow and can easily meander off course by getting lost in random details.
Scripts are a chore to read and really hard to work from.
Some of the sequence headings in an outline have more than one scene each helping define and adding details to the sequence. Each scene has its own heading.Seq. 6. REN DOES NICE THINGS
1) Irons BVDs
2) Cleans Litterbox
3) Cleans Stimpy
All 3 of those scenes help describe the idea of Ren doing nice things.
Under each scene heading is a simple description of what happens in the scene.After Stimpy's Invention I discovered that it's easier to read an outline in list form rather than in paragraphs.
One point at a time.
In this cartoon, I raced through the end, rather than to have a slow wind-down like most filmed stories do. 
I figured that I wanted to pack as much pure entertainment into the cartoon and not waste time with formula structure that usually includes formula filler. Why do movies and TV have filler? Because everyone in Hollywood is so used to seeing it in other movies and TV shows that they automatically assume it is needed. They even write books about it.We absorb bad Hollywood habits into our system, unless we constantly question every rule to see if it has any real basis in pleasure.
Over time, without radical sceptics to shake things up and ask why there are formula ways of thinking, the bad habits build up and get larger and more prevalent until they become the sole elements of a story. Filler movies.
I figured Stimpy's Invention was over after the song; there was a big climax with Ren exploding so let's just STOP and leave everyone with their mouths hangin' open. I didn't want the audience to settle down to calmness. I wanted them to crave more.
I eliminated the filler. Jackie Gleason did that too in the Honeymooners. He tagged his pathos onto the end of his shows but got it over with quick. He just put it there so the women in the audience wouldn't hate Ralph for being such a bully. Happy endings should be fast.
Here's another version of the outline. We always have to do a million nitpicky changes in every TV or movie story to make the execs feel like they have a reason to exist.
Actually, the one exec that was really great was Vanessa Coffey. The rest of her team wanted to kill this cartoon, but I begged her to trust me and she did. The rest of the band of no-goods were so mad! Until the cartoon aired and was a hit. Then they all took credit for it and asked me to make more just like it and to stop coming up with new ideas.
Note that every story detail and gag of the cartoon isn't in the outline. That's left to the director and the storyboard artist.
http://www.animationarchive.org/2006/03/media-john-ks-storyboard-for-stimpys.html
The storyboard artist will use this idea of hierarchical gag structure as well. All his details, and dialogue must help define the scenes, characters and sequences in the structure of the story.
He can't just veer off on tangents that have nothing to do with the structure.
In my cartoons, every detail helps define some larger point which in turn defines an even larger one.
It's like a studio system.
Leon Schlesinger is the boss.
He has 3 teams that work under him.
Each team has a boss or director.
Each director has 6 animators who answer to the director.
Each animator has an assistant.
The assisted animation has to be inked and painted.
This is a hierarchy.
The painter follows the assistant animation that follows the animator who answers to the director who answers to Leon who answers to the audience.
The people underneath have to follow what the person next up on the ladder commands. Everyone can't just go off and be creative on their own and draw whatever they want. That would be anarchy.
Stories are like that too.
Every detail answers to a larger point or gag which describes the point of a scene which describes the sequence which fits in an order in the overall story.
Hierarchy is better than anarchy.
Everything wraps around something larger.
The word "composition" applies to both art and story....and to music. It's the control of the rest of the creative elements.
All this should apply to shorts, half hour shows and feature films. There is no need for filler if you are an artist with lots of interesting and fun ideas and understand what makes characters fun to watch.
Now when you go to an animated feature, there are a hundred characters, none of which have a shred of real personality who act and move like every other animated feature character. This crowd of fake characters travels in a pack from place to place and learns to share and cooperate. There's a fake death scene to milk the pathos, heterosexual love interest between blank characters with no personality, a contrived complication that keeps the lovers in an obvious misunderstanding, non-melodic songs about hetero love by gay bands,... and on and on into endless formula and filler while you writhe in your seat waiting for something fresh and interesting to happen.
This wasn't in the Stimpy's Invention outline, we made it up later:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2573824466354193807&q=%22stimpy%27s&hl=en
Monday, May 07, 2007
Ralph and Norton hide outside window - no filler
You know, all these great Honeymooners scenes I've been posting are all from the same episode. They didn't believe in much filler on this show. Every scene is entertaining. And they did this every week!
"Pardon My Glove" (1956)
Sunday, May 06, 2007
Rex Learns To Storyboard
Rex is a young cartoonist in Canada (a dirty Canadian!) who doesn’t actually have the Canadian cartoon style. He has a blog that many of you folks probably frequent. His style is loose and really cartoony and appealing. He posts tons of fun doodles on his blog and must fill up a whole sketch book every day! I’ve sort of taken him under my stinky wing and he is progressing, so I asked him if I could share his learning curve with many of the young cartoonists who come here to learn how to make cartoons. He bravely assented.
http://rex-h.blogspot.com/
That’s very nice of him to share and maybe even be a little embarrased, so I hope you will tell him you appreciate him sharing.
Awhile ago I asked him if he had done any functional art yet in any cartoon department-
http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2007/01/functional-drawings1-draw-with-purpose.html
whether it was storyboards, layouts, animation, background painting etc. –Anything that has rules. He said no, not yet but wanted to. He admitted doing functional art was a lot harder than just free-styling neat cartoon drawings floating on sketch book pages and asked me for some tips.
I suggested he try storyboards, because you don’t need to draw tight on-model drawings on a storyboard, and I guessed his free wacky style would be great inspiration to do animation poses from. Rex asked if he could try boarding one of my George Liquor stories and I said sure.
http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2006/02/george-liquor-stories-1.html
He picked one out and started drawing straight ahead and filled pages full of fun doodles but no direction or continuity, so I suggested I could help him out step by step.
1) Get used to drawing the characters
Every function has a process and the first step of any cartoon job is to learn to draw the characters. Especially if you want to write for them.
Here are Rex’s first sketches of George.
2) Do Setups
I put up a manual on setups to help him out and told him to read it then draw his setups.http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2007/04/scene-planning-for-tv-setups-for.html
Here’s what he came up with:
I realized he didn’t quite get what the purpose of setups was so I explained it more carefully in an IM. These 3 drawings above are almost the same angles, not enough difference to make it worthwhile to do all the extra backgrounds. So he started over.
I asked Rex to draw a master shot of where the scene takes place.
And after that to draw the same scene from different angles and with the camera at different distances from the characters.
Not at random either. All these decisions are made by reading the story and deciding from what angles and distances the gags will best be presented.
3) Start the Continuity
Once you’ve got some working setups, you can start the continuity. Rex is about to now, and I hope he will let me share those with you too.
Here is my conversation with Rex today.
Rex Setups and tips from John
Rex (10:24:33 AM): Wussth up?
John (10:24:52 AM): hi
Rex (10:25:06 AM): did you see the stuff i sent you?
John (10:25:14 AM): new stuff?
Rex (10:25:17 AM): yeah
John (10:25:25 AM): hang on
Rex (10:25:27 AM): from a couple days ago
John (10:26:56 AM): downloading
Rex (10:27:27 AM): i hope it's not a let down
John (10:28:46 AM): much better
Setups are different angles and different camera distances
John (10:28:59 AM): but you might not need so many wide shots
Rex (10:29:00 AM): yiiiiipppeeeeeeee
Rex (10:29:28 AM): just one of the couch and the rest close ups?
John (10:29:49 AM): well they're all good
John (10:30:02 AM): so keep em handy if you need em
Rex (10:30:08 AM): ok
John (10:30:14 AM): but like when you stage the gags
John (10:30:43 AM): stage them so the gags read. Pick your angle and CAMERA DISTANCE where it best shows the gag
John (10:30:59 AM): like that spray can won't read from so far away
John (10:31:26 AM): but it's good you drew all those angles
John (10:31:42 AM): because now you know where everyone is
Rex (10:31:47 AM): couldn't i have a close up of george with the spray can and then go to a shot where he's spraying them on the couch?
John (10:31:53 AM): and it will be easier for you to do the continuity
John (10:32:05 AM): yes
Rex (10:32:08 AM): yeah, this set-up stuff helps a lot
John (10:32:12 AM): now....
John (10:32:20 AM): next thing to think about
Know your characters' motivations and personal quirks
John (10:32:26 AM): their personalities
John (10:32:33 AM): esp George
Rex (10:32:45 AM): uh huh
John (10:33:06 AM): you should watch all the clips and read all the stories so that you get a feel for his motivations and quirks
Rex (10:33:13 AM): ok
John (10:33:30 AM): look at the acting in the comics too
John (10:33:40 AM): you can really see how he thinks
Rex (10:33:42 AM): yeah
Rex (10:33:48 AM): i love the fishing one
John (10:33:49 AM): he's not mean
John (10:34:06 AM): but he explodes when he has no rational way to resolve something
John (10:34:18 AM): he likes to be in control and thinks he's doing you a favor
John (10:34:27 AM): he distrusts women
John (10:34:41 AM): he thinks they are satan's spawn, out to corrupt men
John (10:34:57 AM): he loves Jimmy and is very protective of him
John (10:35:06 AM): he talks slow to him, like he's talking to a baby
John (10:35:18 AM): except when he is
John (10:35:20 AM): hang on
John (10:36:27 AM): can i post your DRAWINGS AND THIS IM?
John (10:36:31 AM): whoops
Rex (10:36:46 AM): yeah, i guess
John (10:37:02 AM): no?
John (10:37:09 AM): it would be helpful to others
Rex (10:37:10 AM): yeah you can
John (10:37:14 AM): cool
Rex (10:38:09 AM): aren't the drawings a bit too shitty, though?
John (10:38:30 AM): no, they're fun
Rex (10:38:46 AM): ok
John (10:39:02 AM): they are perfect storyboard drawings
John (10:39:10 AM): loose and lively
Rex (10:39:16 AM): alright, cool
John (10:39:37 AM): back to George's personality...
John (10:40:00 AM): he wouldn't gleefully do anything to punish the kids
John (10:40:14 AM): he does it because he has to (in his mind)
John (10:40:47 AM): although he does like discipline and is proud of scaring people into good behavior
John (10:41:05 AM): he likes Sody, but thinks she is up to no good
John (10:41:35 AM): because she is inherently a seducer of innocents
John (10:41:38 AM): like all women
John (10:42:05 AM): when you draw Sody and Jimmy's reactions, treat them differently
Rex (10:42:20 AM): sure
John (10:42:26 AM): she is not an inactive particpant in the story
Rex (10:42:41 AM): i know
John (10:42:45 AM): she loves George and sort of plays with him
John (10:42:53 AM): she loves his discipline
John (10:43:14 AM): but when he explodes abruptly will definitely get scared
John (10:44:01 AM): she thinks his old fashioned ways are funny and sort of plays with him
John (10:44:33 AM): when he lectures her, there is great concern on his face
John (10:45:48 AM): like he's trying to hold back a full explosion because he likes her, but fornication is a very serious matter, so you have to see his face struggling with the emotions and seriousness
Rex (10:46:06 AM): haha, ok
John (10:46:07 AM): I hope I'm not putting you to sleep
Rex (10:46:15 AM): nope
John (10:46:17 AM): Jimmy is just an idiot
Rex (10:46:22 AM): does he lecture jimmy, too?
John (10:46:35 AM): who tries to have the right emotions and expressions but really doesn't know what's going on
John (10:48:06 AM): he is just basic urges and fears
Rex (10:49:33 AM): does he only lecture sody, or is jimmy there too? because in the outline i think it says he's thrown in his room.
John (10:49:44 AM): so yeah, look at how George acts and reacts with Jimmy in the comics
Rex (10:49:52 AM): ok
John (10:50:18 AM): maybe George packs him up and puts him in his box
Rex (10:50:33 AM): haha
Rex (10:50:33 AM): ok
John (10:50:42 AM): his sin-free protective box
John (10:50:54 AM): it has a little window for his eyes
Rex (10:51:22 AM): haha
Rex (10:51:29 AM): just a cardboard box?
John (10:52:11 AM): his eyes peer out now and then during the lecture
Rex (10:52:36 AM): ok, i guess I'll need to make a set-up for that
John (10:52:49 AM): if george says anything about dirty stuff, Jimmy's ear sticks out of the box
Rex (10:53:04 AM): haha
John (10:53:12 AM): and then an eye peeks out the earhole
John (10:53:21 AM): and sweats
Rex (10:53:29 AM): incredible
John (10:54:22 AM): make Sody pretend to be real concerned about everything George says
Rex (10:54:30 AM): alright
John (10:54:54 AM): like she understands the seriousness of remaining pure for at least 5 years after wedlock
John (10:55:19 AM): her normal behavior is like in the Raketu commercial
Rex (10:55:24 AM): she just wants to get through the lecture
John (10:55:30 AM): like a teenage girl, bubbly and wacky
Rex (10:55:50 AM): i get ya
John (10:56:03 AM): but she feigns maturity during the lecture
John (10:56:14 AM): maybe this is all too much information!
John (10:56:22 AM): so I'll shut up now
Rex (10:56:42 AM): no, it's great
Rex (10:57:51 AM): do you have any of the dialogue for the cartoon?
John (10:58:28 AM): there isn't any in the little outline?
Rex (10:58:39 AM): just about the 5 year thing
John (10:59:12 AM): why not get started and send me continuity as you do it and we'll build it up as we go
Rex (10:59:20 AM): sure thing
John (10:59:24 AM): cause there ain't no dirty script!
Rex (10:59:39 AM): ok
Rex (10:59:55 AM): it's better that way
John (11:00:00 AM): ok, let me prepare the post
Rex (11:00:07 AM): alright
John (11:00:08 AM): talk to ya later!
Rex (11:00:12 AM): seeya, john
John (11:00:13 AM): funny drawings!
Rex (11:00:15 AM): thanks
John (11:00:19 AM): you too
I sent Rex a little more detailed breakdown in the form of an outline of a couple scenes:
Sody in “Daughter Of Satan”
George In Stuffing Room
George is in his favorite room in the house-his stuffing room.
It’s a workshop for taxidermy.
There are tools on the walls.
Animals half stuffed.
George is stuffing an elephant seal head.
The head skin is on a steel stand on a thick wood table in front of him.
He’s standing on a stool, whistling happily.
He wipes his brow and greets the audience.
“There’s nothing like hangin’ out on a Sunday afternoon with good friends!
Meet Earl here! I bagged him up the arctic last week! (He pulls the seal’s limp face apart to make him smile at camera)
I’m taking out everything God put in there and replacin’ it with man-made innards!”
George points to a wheelbarrow filled with guts and looks up.
“There ya go, God! You can have all the wet stuff back!
God’s a recycler!”
Pheromones Stinking Up The House
A waft of hormones enters the room through the front door.
George’s nose scrinches up.
“Yegads!! I smell the fumes of filth!!”
He rushes out the door with guts in one hand and the face in the other.
He is facing the kids on the couch but we don’t see them yet.
He does a shocked take at what he sees and drops the guts.
George Catches Kids Making Out
George’s POV
We see Sody and Jimmy on the couch making out.
They are kissing and petting.
“FORNICATION!”
George hops up on the coffee table in front of them.
He smacks Jimmy with the seal face.
Sody looks scared.
Her chest is covered with red blotches-lust hives.
Spray Can
George whips out a can of
Lust Killer
Makes Your Crotch Smell Like a Moose Snout!
Jimmy’s boner inverts. Sody’s hives smooth out and fade.
George points an enraged shaking finger in Sody’s face.
“Daughter of Satan!”
Retard Box
George is about to lash out at Sody, but glances at Jimmy who is baffled and scared.
George packs him up and tosses him into his retard box.
The box has a small openeing in front where Jimmy’s eyes can watch in wonder at the workings of the world.
Lecture
You kids today have no morals!
“Him, he’s an idiot. He doesn’t know what’s right and watch’s wrong!
But yoooouuuu…
You spoiler of innocence!
You spawn of the Devil!
You know exactly what’s goin’ on!!
Shame!!!
You know, you kids today don’t know right from wrong!
You got no moral fiber!
In our day we didn’t partake in hanky panky until after we got married!...
George pauses a split second as he thinks about it.
“In fact, 5 years years after for me and Mable!”
And we always apologized to each other after!”
Sody promises to be good
Gosh, Mr. Liquor, you’re right!
I’m so ashamed of my needs!
(George nodding his head in agreement)
What would we do without you to guide us??
I don’t want you bringin’ him home all knocked up!
George: I’ll tell you what you’d do! You’d bring home that young lad all knocked up one night!
And then you’ll be doin’ a stretch in the big house! They’re comin’ down down hard on unwed mothers these days!
He’s a Minor! Sin Proof Suit
Friday, May 04, 2007
Honeymooners - "The Babysitter" - Ralph hits Norton
These are my best friends.
How many different expressions does it take before you finally beat your best friend?
Look at the pain Ralph feels as Norton drives him to violence.
Jackie Gleason has a million very specific expressions and gestures! He never seems to run out of them, and that's where most of the fun comes from good sitcoms-from the rich acting.
Cartoon expressions-even in really good cartoons are rarely specific. They usually are just simple symbols of happy, sad, mad, pain etc...just enough to get the general point across, but not enough to be entertaining by themselves. There are some exceptions of course-in Chuck Jones' work, Clampett's and even some of Avery's.
Captain Hook here is really well drawn and the expression is almost specific, at least for Disney, but not compared to live actors or real people in real life.
How many different expressions does it take before you finally beat your best friend?
Look at the pain Ralph feels as Norton drives him to violence.
Jackie Gleason has a million very specific expressions and gestures! He never seems to run out of them, and that's where most of the fun comes from good sitcoms-from the rich acting.Cartoon expressions-even in really good cartoons are rarely specific. They usually are just simple symbols of happy, sad, mad, pain etc...just enough to get the general point across, but not enough to be entertaining by themselves. There are some exceptions of course-in Chuck Jones' work, Clampett's and even some of Avery's.
Captain Hook here is really well drawn and the expression is almost specific, at least for Disney, but not compared to live actors or real people in real life.
Thursday, May 03, 2007
Wednesday, May 02, 2007
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
Foghorn Leghorn - McKimson - kicks and smacks dog
I think we should bring back some strong cartoon traditions-like beatings!
No one directed beatings better than Bob McKimson. His characters are big and heavy; his drawings so solid and animation so powerful that you can feel every whump, bang and stab.
No one directed beatings better than Bob McKimson. His characters are big and heavy; his drawings so solid and animation so powerful that you can feel every whump, bang and stab.
"Walky Talky Hawky" (1946)
It's kinda extra funny that the abuse in his cartoons is not very cartoony. Other cartoons use ridiculous things like bombs and dismemberment as visual metaphors for suffering. Crazy things that are hard for kids to emulate in real life. McKimson has loads of punishment that you could easily imitate and really hurt someone (or yourself) in the process! Thank God for McKimson, Popeye, UFC and the Three Stooges.McKimson helps you get a real view of the hard and painful world. He's lookin' out for us!
CLICK HERE FOR FUNNY BEATINGS!
Let's put violence back into the cartoons where it belongs and get it off the street.
Today we have morals in cartoons and more violence than ever in real life. I bet there is a correlation.
I bet the Ultimate Fighters all revere Foghorn Leghorn as their inspiration.
ANIMATION STUDENTS! WALK CYCLE AND RUN CYCLE
Hey if you are learning animation, there is a great walk cycle and a great run cycle in this clip.
The run cycle (after he smacks the dog's ass) has 3 frames for each step-a total of 6 drawings, shot on ones and repeated for a few steps until he runs toward camera and off screen.
The walk cycle (after he slaps the dog around at the end of the scene)
is slower and uses more drawings for each step. 12 frames for each step.
Freeze frame them and copy them and you will learn a lot!
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