NEED A FLASH ASSISTANT FOR 4-6 WEEKS

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.

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.

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.



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.

Wanna be an assistant? Wanna be an assistant?

Hiya folks, here's an important message from my assistant 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:

marcdeckter(at)yahoo.com

Oh, and please don't apply unless you live in or around L.A.!

Thanks,
Marc

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.

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 FOR TEX AVERY

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)

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

http://www.cartoonretro.com/

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.

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...

Chicago Press - John and Bill Show

Bill and John Show Myspace Page

http://www.thejohnandbillshow.com/tix.htmlHere's more. Hope to see you there!
http://www.thejohnandbillshow.com/press.html

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!

The McKimson commandments

Thou Shalt covet thy rival asshole’s women
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.

Coming up: UPA - when Milquetoasts rebel!

See what happens when pantywaists rebel against the public and make cartoons for other pantywaists...

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!

Here's another great American animator at work:
Walt Disney's Favorite People

The Amazing Asifa Archive - Holy Crap! - look at everything you get!

THE GREAT CARTOON MUSEUM

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.

Here's just a tiny sample of the great stuff you can find at the archive.

RARE CLASSIC CARTOONS AND WHO DID THEM
THE CRAZIEST ANIMATOR IN HISTORY

REDISCOVER GENIUS CARTOONISTS FROM THE PAST

BEAUTIFUL NAKEDS

LOST TV CARTOONS

LEARN TO ANIMATE WITH THE ORIGINAL PRESTON BLAIR BOOK!

INTERVIEWS WITH ANIMATION GREATS
GRIM NATWICK ON UB IWERKS

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!

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...