Live Action Blands

I googled for some live action counterparts to the animation bland lead boy character type.The theory of these characters is probably the same as the theory of normal in animation. They are the "identity characters" we project our personalities onto their blank slates and experience the stories through them. I don't agree with this theory at all, but nonetheless I just want to make a point.

Note that they are actually all a little different.Not only do they look different, if you watch their movies and TV shows they actually do have personalities that differ from each other. They can't help it. They are alive. Actors bring their own natural quirks to their roles.
Each boy has his own set of unique expressions and gestures and timings. It would take a super bland and mean director to beat the human nature out of them.

Many of these boys actually had some considerable talent and showmanship.
Some are just plain weird-even though they are supposed to be "normal".

Opie was actually really funny in the first couple seasons of Andy Griffith. He has all kinds of unique and funny reactions. Lots of natural charm.


So far, all these boys are supposed to be your regular every day average "normal" boy next door, but like I said, they are all quite different despite what the writers and producers might want. It's impossible to be the exact middle of anything in nature.

More Specific Boys

Now these boys are very definitely unique. They also appear in movies as the character we are supposed to "identify with". The fact that they are distinct personalities with unique looks and mannerisms did nothing to dull their considerable popularity.

This kid is still quite an entertaining character! Charisma and personality is not a thing to be avoided. It's GOLD if you are lucky enough to recognize and capture it.

Who doesn't love Alfalfa? Do you see yourself as him? Do you aspire to be Alfalfa? probably not too many do. But most people love him.

Except when he gets "undertured" in animation of course. The bland tradition of animation kills even the most charismatic of iconic characters! Who said animation is caricature and exaggeration? Not the folks who argue for blandness on this blog!

Millions of kids must have aspired to be a fatty at one time.

This little fellow is famous everywhere but America for some reason.




Note that in live action, girls have different features than boys.
Not in cartoons though

ANIMATION LOVES BLANDNESS

It's sort of impossible in live action to find a real live human that's exactly in the middle of all boys in the world - hard though some try... Only animation with its limitless imagination can achieve Plato and Walt's ideal of full averageness.


Add glasses to the stock design of a bland and you get the bookish bland.

A tan bland.

Angular bland
Crotch reveal bland

Weiner? meet candle

Here's what happens when live action "Normal" boys grow up.

Howie Post, the cartoony Harvey artist

Harveytoons had a very appealing house style. It's generic but cute. Almost all their kid stars were the same design.I'm not sure who did this really cute cover...Warren Kremer?

Casper is Elmer Fudd without ears. He is a living dead construction model- the ultimate bland!
Spooky is Casper with a dognose and freckles. And he's a smartass bully.
Audrey is Casper with a dress and hair.
So is Dot.
Hot Stuff has pointy ears and horns.

Richie has cashWhich character doesn't belong?

HOWIE POST

When I was a kid there was one Harvey artist I loved. I thought of him as "the fun one".Jerry Beck later told me it was Howie Post. He did the 1950s Spooky and Little Audrey comics. He continued in the 60s but someone else started to take over.
Howie not only drew the most likable versions of the characters, he did the nicest backgrounds too. His haunted forests were great!
These examples are actually a little later than the most cartoony stuff he did. I found these online, but I have a stack of 50s Harvey comics somewhere and as soon as I find them I'll post some.

I always thought the comics were drawn better than most of the animated cartoons.

Just for comparison sake, here are the same characters drawn by Ernie Colon. Not so cute. Kinda serious looking. (This is also a bit later)

Colon is obviously a good draftsman and he must have been fast, because he did tons of titles all through the 60s, and I read 'em all.
He's not as appealing and not at all cartoony though. He also has a tendency to draw the characters mean.Colon did this weird thing that confused me when I was little. He would combine regular bighead Harvey kids with little head incidental characters. Tiny close set eyes even on the kids.

The adults had heads that were a quarter the size of the kids' heads! Check out your collection of Richie Rich comics and get creeped out! The adults are a different species than the kids!

Sometimes he made the kids positively demonic.Audrey could use an exorcism!

Howie Post's cute Audrey.

Compare the proportions of her features in Post's design to the Colon one.
Her eyes are bigger, wider apart and set on angles.

Howie's caveboy Melvin




Here are some more great covers from the 50s. Kremer?



The earliest comics looked more like the cartoons:

So you might be wondering, "Why do you like these characters if they are generic and bland?"

Well Casper is very bland indeed and I didn't like him as much as the other characters. But the stories were about magical impossible stuff happening and that was good enough for a reading or 2. The other characters have a bit of personality and much appeal when in the hands of appealing artists.

These are for kids and have simple stories with simple personalities and I'm completely fine with that - as long as they look fun! And they aren't pretending to be anything more than that. I never heard the artists (or writers!) telling us about the great acting and storylines - although I'd say they were still ahead of animated features on both scores. They were silly and sincere. Fun throwaway entertainment. A classic American tradition.

They also were done very cheap. You could buy a fist full of these comics for a buck and still have money left over for smokes and cokes. Generic and silly for 10 cents makes more sense to me than generic and hard on the eyes for $100,000,000 or more. Plus the Harvey style didn't squeeze every other style out of business. There was a lot of variety in comics and cartoons back then.



If you're gonna do simple and soft for kids, an appealing visual style can do a lot for a lack of "deep" content.

These look like they are drawn by someone who never grew up and is still immature, silly and playful. He'd let you stay up past your bedtime and eat big helpings of ice cream.

Howie Post's really cute and lively drawing style gave the comics a light hearted and imaginative personality.

I liked the early cartoony Harvey comics but didn't care too much for the late 60s comics when they started looking too serious and the style got dreary and less cartoony.
These look like they are drawn by an intelligent mature man who always balances his checkbook. He'd be sure you got to bed on time and finished your cauliflower.

It's amazing how different artists can bring such different feelings to the same designs and material.

Harvey comics is a naturally cute style.

I'm saddened by the realization that the concept of cute and appeal may be lost forever.

Look what happens to a once cute style today when really serious people get a hold of it.

These folks would make you go to church every day of the week!

Did you know that there is a huge difference between "Design" and "Style"?

I was thinking about doing a post on that, but it'll take some work.

Comcast video - SOUND FX VERSION IS UP

CLICK HERE FOR A SOUND TEASER

We kept the sound effects sparse because the cartoon is cut so tight. There isn't much space left over for sound effects, but we added a bit of fun.

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE NEW SOUND FX VERSION!

Speaking Of Animation Critics...

Rebecca Sugar sent me this intellectual nugget...

Does that mean that the Disney style movies are ironically written?


I like how our language keeps changing.

Sanjaya is an ironic singer...

"Mom, I hope you don't mind, I got an ironic report card today."







go check out Rebecca's sites, she's very talented...and doesn't draw poorly on purpose
http://www.sugarboukas.com/PD

http://berkolounger.livejournal.com


SUNDAY: Howie Post, my favorite Harvey Comics Cartoonist

Good Animation Blogs - Mark Mayerson

Good Info on Animation Used To Be Hard To Find

Boy, there was a time when finding out any information on classic cartoons was almost impossible.

At One Time, Only Disney Received Critical Attention

There was a small handful of books - mostly Disney propaganda that just repeated time-worn opinions about what you should like while not giving you any real meat about who did what, how they did it, who their influences were, who set what trends, who followed and why it doesn't happen anymore. We knew the 9 Old Men after The Illusion Of Life came out and they basically discounted all the the other studios and many of their own animators. I used to inbetween for an old Disney animator (not one of the 9) who ranted constantly about that!

3 Good Books (and 2 mags) On Classic Cartoons That Don't Follow The Established Opinions

There were a few good books with alternate views of cartoon history that were great starting points: Joe Adamson's Tex Avery King Of Cartoons (this even had pictures to back up the opinions!) Those pictures alone radically changed my mind about animation and made me start to question the Disney-centric books.



Leonard Maltin's Of Mice and Magic - an excellent overview of each classic studio



Funnyworld had a few great interviews with animators, but was hard to find.

http://www.michaelbarrier.com/funnyworld_revisited.htm

Leslie Cabarga wrote a good primer book on the Fleischers.



Animation Blast was the first animation magazine that gave people who were interested in animation what they really wanted - interviews with animators, lots of art and a wider variety of views on classic cartoons - and some new ones.

http://www.animationblast.com/inprint/backissues/



http://www.amazon.com/Looney-Tunes-Merrie-Melodies-Illustrated/dp/0805008942/ref=pd_sim_b_2/104-6734802-7467132

Warner Bros. Receives Cautious Corporate-Lawyer-Approved Praise

In the 80s we started seeing some Warner Bros. books that had some information on the other great studio and that was encouraging.

It was all lawyer-approved history though; you had to take the views and history with a grain of salt but at least these super talents were finally being acknowledged.

Most Other Studios Deemed Worthless

Finding information on lesser known or respected studios- Terrytoons, Columbia, Walter Lantz, Van Beuren, Ub Iwerks, Famous, well forget it. The many creative ideas and contributions of these studios were written off by historians and critics, because they didn't measure up to their Disney-biased opinions of what makes a good "story".

Animation Critics Weren't Artists

A big problem with critical looks at classic cartoons, was that most critics judged the cartoons using wrong criteria, the criteria of other mediums. This is natural when the critics are not cartoonists, let alone animators. They can't dissect the medium on its own terms, so instead they've made up an arbitrary list of criteria that can be more easily expressed in words - a medium familiar to all:

Story
Acting
Heart
Moral Content
Character Arcs

Unfortunately, if you bother to compare these secondary aspects of animation to their counterparts in other mediums, you see quickly how very weak most cartoons have been in these areas - especially the ones that are hailed for them.

Cartoons have other wonderful attributes that are unique to the medium - that nothing else can compete with. These qualities are exciting, imaginative, magical, sophisticated, artistic and generally beyond the critical faculties of people who don't practice the medium - people who can't draw.

Blogs End The Dark Ages

But now, we have the Blog revolution.

All kinds of animators and animation fanatics who love the old stuff have started up blogs and they offer tons of lost artwork, story notes, old articles and uncensored views and insights from the artists' and fans' points of view on classic cartoons.

Every day I find more amazing lost information and art, and new ideas to mull around. Of course some bloggers are still married to the pre-approved by lawyers versions of cartoon history and commentary, but they are being overwhelmed by the weight of all the evidence from the past that is turning up, the analysis of experienced animators views...and the views of sincere fans.

Just a few years ago if you read an animation book, you wouldn't be familiar with 75% of the films the author was talking about, so you would just have to take his word for what he thought was good or bad and who were the top talents and why they were.

I used to hear people's "opinions" about classic cartoons paraphrased out of an old animation book. I would show old cartoons that disputed common opinion to people and they would be shocked to have their prejudices shattered. ... once they actually saw what was being written about.

Links Make A Huge Cross-Referenced Encyclopedia Of Cartoon Info

The internet makes a new kind of 4 dimensional library possible. Everyone can combine their resources and knowledge and cross link to everyone else, so it's easy to find more info on any little aspect of an article you find interesting.

2 of the best sites:

http://klangley.blogspot.com/

Clips from classic cartoons and lots of inside info on the making of them. Model sheets, storyboards, layouts, animation drawings give you a great insight into how the best cartoons were made. What true cartoon fanatics have wanted from books all along.

http://www.animationarchive.org/

A very wide all-inclusive library of info, art and interviews about not only classic cartoons, but the other arts that influenced them: comic strips, illustration, music and tons more.

Cartoons are a much wider world than you ever imagined.

--------------------------------

Anyway I'm going to periodically post about some of the other animation blogs that have unique and interesting information, art, video or views.

Mark Mayerson

http://mayersononanimation.blogspot.com/

If you love classic Disney and basic cartoon acting, animator and instructor Mark Mayerson has a great blog for you. He also puts up many interesting posts about other cartoons and the animators' plight against the system.

Here's one that has an article written by Chuck Jones in the early 60s. He tells you what he thinks UPA did to the animation industry.

It's interesting that 2 of the people most responsible for the UPA style, Chuck Jones and Bobe Cannon, both started out animating together in similar styles. This article suggests that their philosophies of cartoon-making ended up at odds with each other.

(The editor of the mag is from UPA and he tells you what he thinks of Chuck Jones too!)

WHAT CHUCK JONES THINKS OF UPA

Here's the whole article:
http://mayersononanimation.blogspot.com/2007/03/jones-against-tide.html

WOW. MILT GROSS. style, observation, sincerity, humanity

...all in one cartoonist.



Milt Gross is a designer in the best sense of the word. He loves shapes and balance in their relations to each other.



But he's more than a designer. He's a cartoonist.

FUNNY SHAPES ARE A CARTOONIST'S MEDIUM OF COMMUNICATION

He particularly loves funny shapes and that's what makes him a cartoonist, rather than say - a fashion designer or a Dreamworks employee.

Funny shapes are we cartoonists' most basic tool. Let us never forget this!

Milt communicates all his ideas, his every unique view of the human condition through the medium of funny shapes.
Each moment in his stories are funny even out of context, funny and beautiful.

Milt has talents over and above the average merely brilliant cartoonist. He sees the world through eyes unfogged by the dark spectacles of style and habit. He is able to see the world clearly with acute observation. He translates what he sees with his mastery of the uniqueness of every interesting detail.

Tangent: Mastering Yourself In Your Art

To elaborate a difficult concept: It is hard to be yourself when you are on stage, right? Is it hard for you to make a speech - even about a subject you talk about naturally every day? Why?

Because you think there is a formal "correct" way to make a speech and it inhibits you. You can't be you. You imitate (badly) how you think newscasters or professional speech makers speak. Your unique personality - your humanity is lost to the audience and you are a robotic speech imitator. Stiff and unnatural.


You might know someone who has very charismatic or funny personalities. Maybe the life of the party. Maybe he or she has unique gestures and expressions that are really funny.

If you put this person on the spot and told him to "do that funny thing you do" to some new friends he can't do it. All of a sudden he tries to "act" and is no longer himself.


Many cartoonists have this problem with their pencils. We are so conditioned by the system to draw in whatever style we are brought up in or were trained in, that when we get the chance to express ourselves in drawings and animation we can't do it.

The style you draw in doesn't allow for the expressions you actually do in real life. Your pencil won't allow you to be yourself and thus the world is deprived of your unique take on the world. You draw "animation expressions" instead. The ones you have absorbed from years of watching your favorite cartoons. You make your characters move and flail their arms like animated characters do, very similar to the way motion capture actors act. Like how they think cartoons are supposed to move.

But not like true people move or act. And especially not like YOU move and act.

It takes a very special type of talent to be able to connect his humanity, his personality and his observations to his poor pencil. Especially these days.

I know this from direct experience of working with hundreds of artists.

I've had artists that were personally really funny and had unique gestures expressions and ways of moving. I'd tell one-put that in your drawings...and I'd get back a Nelvana or an 80s Disney drawing instead. He couldn't break out of how he had been conditioned, how he is supposed to draw things.

A small few uninhibited cartoonists are able to draw naturally and convey what amuses them about the world and from their pure imaginations. These are the cartoonists that generally, in today's environment, suffer the worst persecution from executives, bland directors, producers and model sheets.

Yet these are the people who can move the whole art forward and inspire everyone else. When they do get the chance they influence the next couple of generations.


Milt Gross is one of the most natural and unfettered cartoonists in history. He has no problem at all expressing himself, free of what is supposed to be the standard cartoon-style of the times.


While some less confident but hugely talented artists stop looking at the world and eventually get trapped in their own stylistic habits, Gross kept growing and evolving right till the end of his life.

End of important tangent.


now...Milt Gross knows that

Each head is Funny

He loves how funny different people are. He doesn't draw the same person over and over again with different hair styles. He doesn't even resort to a small handful of stock types. He constantly invents new designs-most likely because of how interested he is in how unique people are all around him.

ALL KINDS OF HUMANS ARE FUNNY -Master of crowds
The upper crust is always good material for comedy. Milt draws many unique examples of the general snooty type.

The Elemental Sausage
All real cartoonists know that the sausage is a perfect funny shape. Milt made a whole strip that takes place in a sausage shop. He fills it with every human type and countless individual variations of each. He balances their designs with the ultimate cartoon shape, the sausage.Look at the beautiful cat and fish shapes.

I could talk forever about many aspects of his work: the compositions, his encyclopedic knowledge of how things look, his background designs, his dialects and much more, but the most important thing we can get from Gross is his honest and sincere ability to connect his pencil with his outlook on life.


The moral of Milt Gross' cartoon style.
Be Inspired By Outlooks Rather Than Stealing Styles

Milt Gross has a strong style obviously and I'm sure he has many artistic influences, but he is no slave to them!

His style doesn't obscure his keen view of humanity and life.

What he sees in the world is his biggest influence, and that is the inspiration for his style.

He uses his style to convey not how he thinks a cartoon should be, but to make us see life in the unique and entertaining way he does.


GO SEE MORE GREAT MILT GROSS AT THE ASIFA ARCHIVE

http://www.animationarchive.org/2007/07/comics-milt-gross-daves-delicatessen.html

special thanks to Marc Deckter for spending hard earned cash to unearth these babies!

Stock Disney Characters - The Gay Arabic Villain

Animated features are way behind the best cartoon shorts and Television sitcoms when it comes to character. Features have formula plots and a handful of antiquated stock characters that plug into the contrived story lines. The instant you see a feature character, you know which stock personality he or she is- the bland lead character, the sassy smartmouth girl, the short obnoxious sidekick...who am I forgetting?

These kinds of simplistic stereotypes can't exist in other mediums, not even comedy anymore. They are just too outdated. Super expensive animated features keep them alive long after their relevance to human life.



Here is the stock animated feature villain and how he came to be:

Disney animators have shrewdly deduced that the average Joe thinks homosexuals and people of middle-eastern descent are the most evil people in the world. So when an animated feature needs a villain, they automatically create a stereotype combination of a hooked nose man with fruity gestures. For some reason, these characters are always lanky, so tall skinny people I assume must also be evil.



Ancestry of the Disney Villain:


1) Melodrama from a century and a half ago This kind of stock stereotype probably started in the 1800s. Simon Legree is typical (although in the book, he is more shaded than in his theatrical and silent movie performances).

This character was used so often in melodramas that he eventually became stale and "cartoonish". Soon entertainers only used it for comedy, because no one could take a character like this seriously anymore. It can't scare you when it's such a cardboard stereotyped representation.



2) Dracula - Gothic Horror Villain


Here's another genre with characters you couldn't take seriously except in the context of the horror film and even then you really have to suspend your disbelief to enjoy the drama.
Cartoonists quickly jumped on the inherent silliness of living dead people and the stereotype became stock comedy cartoon material.
3) Homosexual Caricature
There are many funny homosexuals in entertainment, as long as they live up to their stereotype.

4) Goth Merges With Gay

The wacky gay stereotype approaches the walking dead eager to conceive the next Disney Villain.

They eventually mated a goth character with a zany homosexual and came up with this:


A transvestite goth villain.

And eventually gay, goth, Arab and Simon Legree all together.



Animated feature characters need more than an obvious design to define their character. In the best features, each main character usually has a certain gesture or expression assigned to him, that the other characters don't have. We instantly recognize this symbolic key to the character because we have grown up seeing it so many times.

INSTANT EVIL: The sniffing of the turd

I'm not sure if Disney invented it, but animators know that the quickest way to turn the audience against someone is to have them sniff the ceremonial turd. Decent people instinctively know you shouldn't be poking your nose around that area and won't root for the turd sniffer.

This fellow is all the villain stereotypes in one. The most turd sniffingest of all.
Hey, he's copyrighted! I guess no one else can ever use this character again.

I'm confused as to why we need villains in every animated story in the first place. Merely "evil" ones. And the same version of evil.

Will features ever surpass Terrytoons in characterization? (Let alone catch up in fun)

I bet the animators would love to try characters with more meat on 'em if they were allowed.

Mel Crawford - cartoon painting genius

I can't even imagine how someone can be this talented and skilled.
Awesome!

Here's a guy who doesn't cheat at all. He just knows how to draw and paint for real.


Mel Crawford is a genius children's illustrator. The guy can do all kinds of different styles!



I'm not positive that every one of the rest of these are his but they sure look like it to me.
Anyway, they are really beautiful...and fun at the same time.

Isn't this one great? Now these are some cute rodents!



Mel is the best Hanna Barbera painter for sure.

http://inspiration-grab-bag.blogspot.com/2006/03/mel-crawford-pebbles-flintstone-1963.html

http://inspiration-grab-bag.blogspot.com/2006/01/mel-crawford-magilla-gorilla-big.html


http://fun-all-around.blogspot.com/2006/04/yogi-bear-and-cranky-magician.html



http://fun-all-around.blogspot.com/2005/12/mel-crawford-rootie-kazootie.html


To young cartoonists: Here's why I keep saying, don't learn a style. Learn to draw well! Then you can work in many different styles without cheating!

Styles come and go. Skill is always useful and will keep you in demand.

Learn your old fashioned principles!

Thanks to Trevour for this contribution:

Popeye Sure Is Fun

If you like imaginative funny cartoons, better order these great Fleischer cartoon classics! I hope you have kids to introduce them to some real magic.


I stole these funny pictures from this informative and fun Popeye site:

http://www.fleischerpopeye.com/stills.php?stills=01&current=stills




Go see Jerry Beck at the San Diego Comic Con

Tell him thanks for helping get these cartoons back to the public after so long

4:00-5:00 Popeye: Well Blow Me Down! Discussing the new Warner Bros. DVD collection, Popeye The Sailor 1933–1938 Volume 1. Panelists include King Features exec Frank Caruso, cartoonist Stephen DeStefano, cartoon historian Jerry Beck, and others. Room 6B

Also, tomorrow I'll tell you about a couple more special cartoonists you can meet there and maybe get a drawing from them!....

What is a Cartoon?

Last night I did a show all about what the primal elements that make up a cartoon are. No one seems to use them anymore.

There is more animation being done today than ever in history, yet where are the cartoons? I could understand maybe 5 or 10 percent of entertainment-oriented animation being not cartoons, but I can't for the life of me figure out why there are practically no cartoons at all anymore.

No one wants to do what cartoons actually are and what they do better than any other medium. At least no one in charge. The cartoonists certainly want to make cartoons and the audience would love to watch them if they existed.

I figure it's my duty to remind everyone of what cartoons are and to come up with some defining characteristics. Now remember, I don't care if people make animation that isn't cartoony for those who like that sort of thing. But SOMEONE should be making cartoons. Let's go back to our roots.

People who couldn't make it to the show last night have been asking me for these primal elements.

They are:

1) The Funny Drawing
What good is a cartoon without funny drawings? To me, that's the number 1 most important element in a cartoon. Anything else is merely a drawing.


http://www.animationarchive.org/2006/08/media-milt-gross-sunday-pages.html




2) Funny Motion
Animation that doesn't move funny should be called "animation". "Cartoon" is a very specific type of animated motion.



3) Impossible Gags
You can draw things that can't happen. Not in real life, or in CG animation or any other medium. So why don't we anymore?






4) Musical Timing
All classic cartoons were timed to musical rhythms or tempos. That's why they automatically feel good when you watch them. Most modern animation is timed straight ahead and actions fall haphazardly with no definite or structural relationship to each other. They feel jerky and not as fun as old cartoons.

A real cartoon is like music. It should feel good, no matter what the content or subject matter is about. It should make you bounce to it.

Genndy Tartakovsky times his cartoons to tempos and so do I. We are among the last holdouts to this tradition.






5) Butt Stabs

Even Walt Disney, who is mostly anti-cartoon loves a good old butt violation. All real cartoonists think the butt is the funniest part of the anatomy and tend to do an inordinate amount of butt poking and crack exposure in their cartoons. If you are ashamed of buttcracks, you are probably ashamed to be drawing cartoons and shame on you for doing it.









Here's a cartoon that has all these defining elements on purpose:


Another:


Here's Steve Worth's kind review of how the Cartoony Cartoons Show went over last night:
The show last night was amazing. I've seen all the cartoons in John's program, but when he put them in context with his comments and showed them in order, the progression and development was blatantly obvious. Everyone is talking here about what they want to see on the cartoon DVDs. John just nailed *exactly* what they should be... a collection that illuminates, not just shoveling titles onto disks by character. The bonus treat at the end was a sneak peek at John's videos for Weird Al and Tenacious D.

After the program, John sat at a table with his pals and signed and drew for everyone in the room. He was joined by Marlo Meekins and Eddie Fitzgerald who tag-teamed doing caricatures of the most interesting faces in the crowd. Marlo posted a few examples on her blog this morning... http://marlomeekins.blogspot.com/ Check it out. The surprise guest of the evening was the lengendary voice actor, Gary Owens. Yes, Powdered Toast Man was there! His stories (did you know that the Rat Pack did voices in Roger Ramjet?!) were golden!

John was incredibly generous to put this program together to help out ASIFA's Archive. Without him, we wouldn't have accomplished anywhere near as much as we have. Thanks, John!

This show needs to go on tour. The whole world needs cartoony cartoons, and this group of films are the cartooniest!

See ya
Steve
http://www.animationarchive.org/2006/08/meta-john-k-event-august-10th-report.html

Is it a cartoon? Chapter 1

Here is a picture made by someone who understands the particular secrets of what makes a cartoon have cartoon appeal.

Yogi by Mel Crawford


Now here is a cynical horror made by scum:

That last post about the pretenders sneaking into the cartoon world and bringing their tiny heads and beady eyes with them gave me an idea.

I think I'll start a series of posts to see how many people think there is a distinct difference between what is a cartoon drawing and what is pretend.

The line between cartoons and lies is really obvious to me and has been since I was a small tot with a big head and eyes myself.

I'll start it off with some of my picks.

CARTOON

All these artists are cartoonists. They understand that their pictures are supposed to be fun to look at and instantly appealing. Cartoonists like you.

Now here's...

LIE

These pictures are made by inhuman monsters who hate you and your kids.

Warning: don't steal Vicki's one of a kind design. It's copyrighted!



Little tiny snake eyes on fat mammals are so cute!





If it says "'TOON" in front of it, it's a guarantee it's not a cartoon.
It's amazing that Bugs Bunny survived this line-up! Although cut to shreds...

The worst was when it became vogue to make pretend "classic-style" cartoons and they got the same old Saturday Morning cartoon writers who wrote Scooby Doo and Superfriends to watch a couple of old Bugs Bunnies and then try to write like that in script form. The writers didn't understand cartoon jokes, so they would copy the old ones and then explain them to the audience. And the actual cartoonists on the shows that really did love the old cartoons had no say in the making of them.

And then they ship all the art and animation to Korea where they really have no idea what makes American cartoon drawings and animation work...and don't care.


Well these were all easy.

I'll try to find some that are trickier next time and you can vote on them.


Kali just pointed this out to me:
A real sign of fake cartoons. Cartoons that teach you something that the creators themselves don't believe. Like-just because you are crippled, doesn't mean you can't be a great athlete just like all the other kids.
And just because you are retarded and evil, doesn't mean you can't make up cartoons.

Real cartoons can easily do this:

Howdy Doody and Sonny The Bunny by Art Seiden

Art Seiden -Man artist invades Kid's World

When I was a kid, I wasn't crazy about Art Seiden. He fit into the "Serious artists who occasionally try to draw cartoons" category. I hated all things serious!

C'mon kids! Let's take the MAN Train to REALISTIC-VILLE!

HOWDY DOODY AND THE SLUG FREAK

Like you know when your parents would buy you coloring books that didn't have cartoon characters in them? "Jack and Jill playtime at the Beach"...realistic drawings of kids doing boring things. Outrage!

Well I thought of certain artists as being from that group, and now and then they would infiltrate happy-cartoon-world and try to trick us. But I was never fooled. I know real cartoons when I see them!
Art Seiden did the weirdest damn Hanna Barbera Golden Books you ever saw! You wanna know a dead giveaway of how to spot a realistic artist masquerading as a cartoonist?






They draw the heads too small. Tiny head cartoons made me furious as a fun loving youngster. I remember when Filmation started and everything they did was from small head world.
Small heads with half drawn flesh colored eyes!
Hanna Barbera started copying the Filmation small head flesh-eyes hate-kids cartoons with Scooby Doo in 1969 and that was the end of the world for me. I'll never forgive Filmation for ending fun in cartoons.


I've since forgiven Art Seiden though for intruding into the cartoon world with his tiny heads. He has a lot of nice painting techniques and color combinations that we could absorb into the world of real cartoons.

I've come to accept Art Seiden now and it's a huge load off my soul.

How Art Seiden actually draws when not forced to draw cartoons.

REAL COLORING BOOKS FOR GOOD CHILDREN

COLORING BOOKS MADE BY GRINCHES

"SUZY, YOU DIDN'T EAT YOUR CAULIFLOWER SO YOU HAVE TO COLOR JESUS"
AND OTHER HORRIBLE SMALL HEAD BORING PEOPLE WHO TEACH YOU MORALSUnderwear-God says: "Who's responsible for tiny flesh colored eyes?"

Thanks to Kali for inspiring this post!

follow up to last post

Holy Crap!

The comments are getting ugly again.

Hmmm...I think I might have sent the wrong message in that convoluted post, so let me try to clarify what I was getting at.


Pt 2.

I'm not advocating that everyone run out and develop their own personal styles - exactly the opposite! The slavish obedience to decadent styles are our biggest handicap to creativity.

I want people to be able to draw REAL solid universal principles

LIST OF PRINCIPLES

and to be able to tell the difference between modern inbred stylistic habits and real human art

we should go back to our roots and start over

Most artists don't have strong styles and never will, but they do have personalities that could be translated through their drawings

The ones that do have natural style will inspire the new movements

But if everyone draws better and doesn't copy bad stylistic tricks each artist will still be able to put some of himself into the art - naturally - and all can contribute to growth and fun again

good drawing is the most powerful tool we have to create with, it gives you the control with which you can have a lot more to say

having a cheesy restrictive style based on tricks really limits what you can say with your art

you can only say what your crippled fingers can scrawl out, and you have to abandon all the thoughts you might have that are too hard to draw

If we recognize the decadence we are drowning in and decide to improve our ability to draw and observe life for real and with control,

then we can move ahead and make honest and sincere cartoons again, not just degraded copies of non-human formula cartoons



NEED some FEEDBACK TONIGHT ON BLANDNESS
I may put up my bland test post for a couple hours tonight to get some more comments and then I may revise it when I see if the message gets through clearly or not

Animation School 7 - When Generic is a Good Thing

Remember when I talked about the two different types of cartoonists?
One conservative, the other wild and crazy?
http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2006/04/2-types-of-cartoonists-origin-of.html
These two types worked together all through the 30s and came up with a blended style-the 40s style of pears and spheres and sausages style which is my favorite type of animation.

If you are a young cartoonist (or a geezer who wants to improve his skills) who wants to learn the best way to draw and animate, you should study this approach in its most generic form.

GENERIC 40S CARTOONS

When is "generic" good?
When it is highly skilled as in these Tom and Jerry model sheets below.Generic is good for study.
If you are trying to teach yourself the principles of good cartoon drawing for example, it's best to study bland cartoons that don't have individual style. Strong style will distract your attention away from the underlying principles that are more important.

Disney helped popularize a style in the late 30s that most other studios adopted-the pear shaped, squash and stretch style.


It's not really a "style" though.

It's a drawing method that makes animation fluid and sensible.

It's a collection of principles that everyone in animation used in the 1940s.
It developed out of the rubber-hose style but added some techniques to help smooth out the animation and give it weight.


3-dimensional but cartoony construction:
The characters are rounded and turn in space like real objects.
But unlike real anatomy, the characters are built out of simple shapes-mostly pear-shaped bodies and round or oval heads with sausages for limbs.
In a strange way, they are real because they are 3-dimensional, but they are also cartoony, because they are made up of forms that aren't anatomical.
All the details of the characters wrap around the major forms that the characters are built from.
The eyes obey the perspective and direction of the position of the head, etc. They don't exist on their own planes.


Squash and Stretch:
These 40s characters bend and stretch and squash like soft rubber.


Line of Action:
The poses are usually strong and simple and all the details of the characters flow along the line of action.

Clear Silhouettes:
The poses usually have strong silhouettes-which helps them read, especially when the actions can be so fast.

Organic Forms:
Unlike rubber-hose cartoons which have very simple curves that have the bends right in the middle of the curve, these 40s style characters have more complex flowing curves which makes them feel more organic like skin and guts-although no bones.

The 7 Dwarfs are perfect examples of this style of animation. They are completely generic designs-meaning they really have no design at all-but they do have all the principles that make up the classic cartoon style.


Here's a frame from Chuck Jones' Barbary Coast Bunny, one of my favorite cartoons. The design and style is a more modern 50s approach, yet it still retains all the principles of 40s style cartoons. This type of cartoon is not good for beginning cartoonists and animators to study from, because the shapes are more specific, and they have angles and more complex design elements.

This is much harder to study and grasp than a Tom and Jerry or earlier Disney or Warner Bros. cartoon. It's more interesting graphically for sure, but the more complex design elements will distract you from learning the principles underneath.

Here are some frames from Bob Clampett's Gruesome Twosome. This is a scene by Rod Scribner. It's much more exaggerated than a Tom and Jerry cartoon and has slightly more complex design elements in it.

It's still based on all the same principles though, so once you understand the principles you will be able to then start exploring your own style and variations of designs.

I always recommend to animation students to draw Elmer Fudd, Porky Pig and Tom and Jerry when learning.

Why?
They are fairly simple and very rounded.
When you are animating you have to turn out a lot of drawings.
The more complicated the drawing, the longer it will take you to make the animation work.
NEVER use your own character designs when you are learning to animate.
It will slow your progress.

Use characters that were designed by top Hollywood professionals that already work in 3 dimensions and are simple. You will progress much faster that way.

This frame is from Chuck Jones' Elmers' Candid Camera. Jones hasn't developed his strong personal style yet and is just trying to make the characters look solid and move well. This cartoon is a great one to study for rounded smoothly moving characters.

This is from a later Chuck Jones cartoon and is much more complex, but again it still is based on the same principles. It has angles and more complex forms-but the angles are all in sensible places - unlike today's angular cartoons that have arbitrary and inconsistent designs that don't work well for animation. -think MULAN.

That's why the best cartoons to study are the cartoons from the early to mid forties.
They are all very rounded and do not have really distracting angular styles. Study Jones, Clampett, Avery, Disney, Tom and Jerry.
Avoid Freleng and other 40s styles. They are all trying to imitate what the stars were doing but the drawings and animation are much sloppier in the rest of the cartoons being done at the time.

(By "avoid" them I mean, avoid copying them if you are trying to learn to draw good principles. Watch them, because they are all fun, but study from the best!)

Beware of 50s cartoons!
I'm not saying I don't like 50s cartoons-I do, but in order to do those styles well, you need to understand how they came to be.
If you start by drawing angular characters before you understand your principles, you will put the angles all in the wrong places and not have any control over your designs and animation-like most modern cartoons.

Principles are the most important thing!

Individuality VS Standardization

There used to be more than 3 cartoon styles.


Here's where ours started...


When we say "design" in cartoons, nowadays we automatically think of the 50s - or maybe some people think Disney.

I'd like to challenge both those notions . I think the Golden Age of Cartoon design didn't happen in animation. Certainly not in the fifties.

It happened in comic strips somewhere around the 20s and 30s.

Why do I think that?

Because:

1) There was a huge variety of styles.

An age of design would mean lots of designs, not a single school of design.

2) There was more individuality in the styles- certain artists were masters of their own styles.

They didn't belong to a school of style like "The UPA style" or "The Cal Arts Style".

It was expected of popular cartoonists to each have their own unique takes on the world.

Of course, the most successful cartoonists had their imitators, but who remembers them?

Originality was expected in comic strips.

3) Comics reflected humanity.

Comics were about things humans think about and do or dream of. All sorts of humans. Animation characters and stories act and play like, not human feelings, but artificial animation feelings. We animators get our view of life from previous animated cartoons instead of from the world.


Polly and Her Pals, for instance is absolutely great design, but it's still about humans that act and feel like humans we ourselves consort with.

ANIMATION IS A HOUSE STYLE - all derived from one original style

Otto Messmer is probably the founder of "animation style". Everything being done even today can be traced back to him.
His design sense was partially aesthetic and partially motivated by practicality. He was a cartoonist who became an animator and then later became a strip cartoonist.

His designs are simple on purpose. Animation takes longer to produce than comics - for the simple reason that you have to do many more drawings in order to make things move.

But simple doesn't have to mean even or bland. It just means fewer details and easy-to-move proportions.

Messmer's drawing method is simple but the result is stylish and full of quirks. A variety of curves against straights, lots of uneven twists and turns. No simple math.

In the 20s and 30s, cartoonists were learning to animate by trial and error, so it made perfect sense to use characters that you could draw fast. This logic produced the fastest evolution in animation history.

From Steamboat Willie to Snow White in 9 years. Amazing, right?

But it came with a price....

THE LOSS OF INDIVIDUALITY and HUMANITY

Conformity and model sheets

Someone in the 30s decided that it would be a good idea to have every artist draw the characters the exact same way in the cartoon. This produced an averaging of the artists' styles and the "Rubber Hose style" came into being - a generalized version of Otto Messmer. (And Bill Nolan probably)

Otto's crowds have more varied characters than Disney.
The rubber hose style evolved slightly into the pear and sphere style in the late 30s and this was a bit more sophisticated but still based on the principles of "animation drawing" and still generic. The motion got smoother and more layered but this nagging idea of conformity held back individual creativity.

It didn't have to be that way and it didn't start out that way. At the New York studios in the early 30s, the animators pretty much drew each scene the way they felt it. The overall style was "rubber hose"- Messmer inspired but you could really tell the difference between different animators scene by scene.

Grim Natwick had a unique style that looked a lot more like comic illustration than animated cartoons and when it moves it really stands out as something special.

It's also very human. It's not a mere imitation of someone else's abstract principles. He's drawing life as he sees it and then creating impossibilities using the magic part of animation.

This Bimbo model sheets shows a bit of conformity to Disney starting to take effect.

Here is Disney's take on Otto Messmer's style. All the edges have been smoothed out. Every shape is mathematical and even now. Every character is the same design. Circles and ovals. Only one kind of bend and curve. Expressions are dead and mechanical.

Compare to the source.All the other animation studios stopped being human and started to imitate Disney. Part of what they imitated was this conformity and evenness and averaging of each individual's style into one all encompassing "animation style".

This style as a whole has gone through some changes-from rubber hose to Preston Blair to UPA but the changes were slow and changes that happened as a group to the whole animation community-even against the wills of many studios and artists.


This small animation group later lost the idea of quality and good principles and degenerated into some sub groups -

Saturday Morning Cartoons,

Disney Imitators (Cal-Arts) and

Anime.

BAD THINKING HABITS OF THE ANIMATION WORLD

From the 30s on we have been stuck with the corrupt and creatively crippling ideas of


"On-Model"

"Animation Style"

'Only Disney Style Is Quality"

"Animation should be believable" (meaning bland, without magic)

10 years of combining good animation with individuality

There was a second flowering of creativity in animation when Bob Clampett and Tex Avery reintroduced the notion of individuality in not only their stories and direction, but in the animation itself. They took the good things that evolved in 30s animation and put back the humanity that was being lost.

Clampett encouraged his artists each to draw in their own way and bring their own creative ideas to the design, personality and movement of the cartoons. Avery started doing that in the mid 40s and for a decade or so we had some very individualistic cartoons that didn't follow the "rules" and "style" of animated cartoons.

Collaborative or Herd?

Unlike the constant variety of individual styles in old time comic strips, in general throughout animation history, animation has made its small changes step by step as a group.

A mass of animators no longer influenced by other artists or by the outside world, but only by slightly varied versions of itself.

Pixar imitates Bluth and Burton, who imitate 60s Disney, who imitated 50s Disney who imitated 40s Disney and all the way back to Otto Messmer.

Dreamworks imitates Dic who imitated Filmation who imitated Hanna Barbera who imitated Disney and Warner Bros who imitated Otto Messmer, who probably himself had a wide variety of influences when he he started out.

Anime is extremely inbred.

Modern anime imitates Osamu Tezuka who imitated Disney who imitated Otto Messmer.

ANIMATORS THINK DIFFERENTLY THAN CARTOONISTS

Animation has always had a huge philosophical difference than comic strips. At least comic strips before 1960 or so. Comics didn't have a preconceived house-style. Every artist developed his own style out of being influenced by an assortment of other artists and by life.

We need this in animation. It's always been our blind spot. We are so used to animation-thought that we get angry when our dogma is challenged.

Animation brings a whole new level of creative possibilities with it, but we have to shed our terribly stifling habit of imitating decadent versions of ourselves.

We should collaborate rather than move like herds.

Put all our styles together (those of us that have them) and add them up for a greater total experience instead of shaving off all our unique human quirks to become an average multitude of sameness.

A SUM OF GOOD IDEAS IS BETTER THAN AN AVERAGE OF THEM.

We need an end to model sheet slavery, to animation schools that encourage decadence and to by-rote habits of thought.

Let's share good drawing principles but hang on to our own individual details and takes on life. And look around us.


Here's a time period when cartoonists did just that. What skill and variety it produced!

http://www.digitalfunnies.com/

Otto Messmer Cartoon Genius

There were some animators before Otto Messmer, but I can't think of one person who had more influence on the rest of animation history.

Messmer is the founding father of the American style of animation - which in turn influenced the rest of the world.

He created the basic shapes and spongy substance that animated cartoon characters are made of.

Cartoon characters to this day don't have skeletons stuffed with guts and stringy muscles hanging off them. They are instead, made of tight skin wrapped around shell like membranes filled with soft sponge.

I'm willing to bet Messmer also created and developed much of our cartoon film language.

The Disney animators spent years trying to excise the abstract physics and cartoon logic that Messmer innovated, but they hung on to the sponginess and construction ideas even as they tried to make their cartoons more "realistic".

Snow White is not made from observation of a real girl. It's an evolved design made up of Messmer type animation shapes and forms -with all the quirks and fun taken out. Taking out the fun and the style is what many animators call "realism".

Messmer's style is the ultimate in simple and pure appealing cartooniness.
Look how much more stylish this is than the general rubber hose style of cartoons that imitated him.

Steve has put up a bunch of pages of Messmer's classic 30s Felix comic strip.

COMICS: OTTO MESSMER'S FELIX THE CAT 1932

Take a look at some other great strips from early days of our history.

DIGITAL FUNNIES

Buy a compilation of the Felix strips:




For more history, John Canemaker wrote a gripping book detailing the turgid story of Felix, Messmer, Sullivan and the rest:

My Comcast Commercial is Up and Meet The Crew

Click this to see my latest commercial

http://www.comcast.com/nintendo/


I dedicate it to AMID AMIDI
whose book I liberally stole from.

Here's some development art and production art.

The Crew

Goodby Silverstein and Associates:
These are the ad execs that found me on Myspace and asked me to animate the zany commercial they wrote.

Mike Coyne - Art Director
Amy Maloof - Account Management
Kelsie Van Deman- Interactive Producer
Kelly Schutz- Account Management

Ian Hart - Copywriter

The Artists and Cartoon Crew:

REX HACKELBERG

Rex designed the characters.
Look how suave he is, girls!



CLICK HERE TO VISIT REX'S BLOG!

BRIAN ROMERO

Brian is an illustrator and designer. He inked most of the cartoon and helped figure out the production system we used to get good inks in Flash.




CLICK HERE TO VISIT THE BRIAN ROMERO BLOG!

CORBETT VANONI

Corbett, also a cartoonist/designer kicked in some much needed help and inked a few scenes himself.





CLICK HERE FOR CORBETT'S ARTSY FARTSY BLOG!

KALI FONTECCHIO

Kali has a multidude of talents, it seems. This time out, she painted a pile of candy like color cards for the backgrounds.

I'm forcing her to learn to animate this summer by copying Bosko and Oswald cartoons. She's gonna kick the asses of all you young animators who don't do the same thing. Want me to put up the scenes that she is studying so you can learn fast too? What'll you give me for it?

CLICK HERE TO VISIT THE KALI KAZOO BLOG!

WILL FINN

Holy crap! I got a top Disney animator to do hand drawn animation for a whole scene in a flash cartoon! Will animated many of the cartoonier characters in your favorite modern Disney 2d pictures!





CLICK HERE TO VISIT WILL FINN'S BLOG!

PRINGLE

All you young Flash wannabes, grovel respectfully in the giant shadow of this monument of the Flash animation world.

Pringle learned to animate in Flash on the historical WEEKEND PUSSY HUNT and then quickly clawed his way to the top of the Flash heap! He is now the directing Flash animator on Foster's and has written a book on his masterful Flash techniques.

CLICK HERE TO VISIT SENOR CHIPS!

KRISTEN McCORMICK

Kristen is one of my all time favorite artists to work with. She's a wonderful Flash animator and has the patience of a saint. She'll just sit and smile during my infamous screaming tirades as I smash computers and toss handfuls of detoothed kittens at the wall. She can actually figure out what I want in each scene even though I can't put it into words or show her myself. Kristen, you always make me look good!

GREG FRANKLIN

Greg, when he is not out crushing skulls and piledriving anyone who challenges his wrestling prowess takes breaks to get in touch with his more sensitive side, animating happy children of all races for me.

LEO RILEY

Leo, the dashing Latin lover is also a top Flash animator and programmer. We would have died without him.

THE KING OF KOREA

It was a real coup to capture the emperor of Korea and get him to supervise the production on the Comcast Triple Play commercial with free Nintendo DS.

Seriously, King Marc took time away from aiming nuclear warheads at all the major cities in North America just because he loves to dabble with cartoons now and then.

King Marco also has concocted a revolutionary theory of blandness. Look forward to real revelations of animated personalities later this week!

He's heading back to his nuclear arsenal in a couple days, so install your computer in your bomb shelter so you won't miss what makes America so great and bland, before he wipes us off the map.


CLICK HERE FOR A DUCK WALK

JOE HENDERSON

MMA Badass, don't cross this guy. He's another born killer. (why are so many animators so violent?) Only doing production work on crass cartoon commercials can keep him from mounting you, choking you out and having his way with you.

ENTER THE SON OF HENDER!

STEVE WORTH

Steve supervised the recordings. He is an all around cartoon player.

CLICK HERE TO VISIT STEVE AND THE ASIFA ARCHIVE

ERIC BAUZA

Ye Gods, did we really have the man of 1,000 voices do his famous announcer for us? How the Hell did we swing that? Listen folks, I have PULL.

Ask Eric to do his impression of Filipino girls jazz dancing. You will die.


CLICK HERE TO VISIT THE BAUZILLA BLOG!!!

GARY OWENS

We also got the other great hero of voice over, the stunningly handsome, talented, funny and charming Gary Owens!

ROGER RAMJET, POWDERED TOASTMAN, SPACE GHOST, BIRDMAN AND LAUGH IN are just a few of his credits. This man is walking Hollywood history!

DINEO HARRIS

Deneo is my latest find. He is the sprightly son of my trainer, Irin Harris. He made his screen debut voicing "Timmy". Now we can't talk to him without wading through an army of agents, managers, PR men and his posse.

COLD HARD FLASH INTERVIEWS

Aaron Simpson has a nice behind the scenes article at Cold Hard Flash, with interviews and production stuff.

COLD HARD FLASH: COMCAST AND JOHN K GOT GAME

Direct Sponsorship 1

There was a time when entertainment and sponsorship made a lot of sense.


The Huckleberry Hound Show title sequence:
The mascot for Kellogg's Corn Flakes is a character named Cornelius Rooster - he's the star of Huck's title sequence!

Huckleberry Hound Show
Uploaded by DwightFrye -

Right after the title sequence, Cornelius Rooster (the Kellogg's Corn Flakes mascot) would fall into the first bumper of the show, to introduce Huck...












Sponsors and entertainers were partners and they made great radio and TV shows and the networks had no input-they just put the shows on that the sponsors paid for and the entertainers were free to do what the public wanted them to do..entertain.


Rocky and his Friends title sequence:



"The most delicious ready-to-eat cereal in the world!" - Bullwinkle







The Flintstones title sequence:





So all the old cartoon characters used to plug the sponsor's commercials in their own shows.


Huckleberry Hound and friends do a commercial for Kellogg's Corn Flakes cereal...















Rocky and Bullwinkle do a commercial for General Mills' Cheerios cereal...










Fred and Barney do a commercial for Winston cigarettes...












Yogi Bear does a commercial for Kellogg's OKs cereal...








I always loved it when cartoon characters told me what to eat and what toys to play with. I obeyed. My breakfast diet was planned by Bugs Bunny and Yogi Bear and Rocky Squirrel.

Then when I grew up I wanted to have my own cartoon characters sell products in their own shows. This was not allowed anymore on TV so I made up my own products just to spite the FCC and make my show seem more legit and special. Good commercials add fun to the entertainment experience.

Log Commercial










Powdered Toast









These fake commercials were so effective that kids went to the stores and asked for the products that didn't exist. People memorized the lines and the songs from the commercials and sang them whenever I did signings at stores and theaters.

Imagine what me and my artists could do for real products when some smart company takes advantage of my selling power. Tune in tomorrow for more hype!

CALLING ALL GIRLS-THE HEARTACHES

click this link to see the Old Navy kids in action.
There are 4 clips. Each says Old Navy in front of them:
Flares, Big Pocket Jeans, Curly Fleece, Sled
http://www.hoytyboy.com/directors/Director_John_K/Director_Page_John_K.htm

Hi girls! Below are Roxy, Tia, Red and the Curly Fuzz Poodle.I've posted the story for the pilot episode of the Heartaches
and want you to tell me how you like it!

Now all you middle aged men reading it, this ain't for you!!
I have other cartoons with your needs in mind; this is for the girls, ok? Save your comments for the George Liquor posts.
-the management-

Curly Fuzz Trauma (outline)

Mom wants to throw out doll
It’s Spring cleaning and Mom and Dad are throwing stuff out. They enter Roxy’s room, and mother shakes her head in disgust. ‘Look at that girl’s mess. She has way too much stuff! Why Daddy, you just spoil her!!
She picks up the Curly Fleece Poodle. ‘Just look at this ragged old thing! Where the heck did you find this dirty beast anyways?’
“I got it at a swap meet. It’s from Roxy’s favorite cartoon show from the ‘60’s. The Curly Crew!”
Mom says, ‘Well, I think we should throw it out. It’s filthy, and besides, she’s getting to be way too old for that sort of thing.’
Dad says, ‘Oh, we can’t throw out the Curly Fuzz Poodle! That’s her favorite doll!’
Dad takes her out of Roxy’s room, ‘C’mon let’s go downstairs and clean out the basement.’
‘Mom says, ‘OK, but I don’t care what you say, I’m coming back to clean out Roxy’s room and that Poodle is out of here!’
The Note
The Curly Fuzz Poodle is devastated but prepared for his fate. ‘It was only a matter of time.’ He writes a farewell note to Roxy, knowing that his end is near.
He opens the window and hurls himself into the trash can outside.

Roxy comes home from school
She had a bad day and needs a hug and a heart to heart talk with her best friend who isn’t flesh and blood.
She goes in her room and sees an empty spot between her other newer dolls and yelps. ‘CFP! Where are you?’
She finds his pitiful note surrounded by clumps of multi colored poodle fluff.
‘Dear Roxy,
You have been my best friend in the whole world, but there comes a time in every old toy’s life when he needs to be recycled. Your Mom has decided that it is my time to be thrown out with the trash.
Goodbye forever,
love,
CFP’

Trash Collector
Roxy runs outside and sees that the trash is gone and she faints.
Mom’s in the dog house
That night at dinner, Roxy’s parents wonder why she’s looking so down.
‘As if you don’t know!’ she blurts.
Mom and Dad are perplexed.
‘You threw out my Curly Fuzz Poodle!’ she accuses Mom.
Mom says, ‘No I didn’t! I wanted to but your father convinced me to let you keep the dirty old thing, didn’t you Daddy?’
Father looks at Mom disappointed.
So now both Roxy and Father think Mom’s a meanie and the household enters an era of strife.
Ext. shot of colorful house as the whole scene turns dim.

Sad Roxy tapes Fuzz Clumps to her Person
We have a sad scene of Roxy sitting on her bed in her pajamas with the little mound of colored clumps on her lap.
She licks each clump and sticks it on her body somewhere-in her hair, on her shoulder, etc.
Next day at school she has the clumps taped to her and gets detention because clumps are forbidden by the dress code.

Bulldog
The next day, A bulldog is rooting through the trash at the county dump, looking for food.
He finds the Curly Fuzz Poodle and says, 'Hey! You’re cute. Lookit that fancy hair! You're one o' them big city dames, ain't ya? I’m gonna make you my wife!’
He takes the poodle home to his dog house and tries to make him happy.
The Curly Fuzz Poodle can’t get used to living in a dog house.
He’s used to the soft life.

At night he freezes.
He doesn’t like to go to the bathroom outside, even with his husband holding his hand.
Finally the Bulldog gets fed up and divorces him at dog court.

Beanie Baby
Mom sees Roxy getting more and more depressed and tries to cheer her up by buying her a lumpy ugly Beanie Baby type toy.
‘Roxy yells ‘Beanie Babies suck!’ She flings the beanie baby out the window and it hits Suzy Stuckup. ‘Wow! I’ve got Sammy Seal now! My collection is complete! I’m queen of the trends!’

Out on his ear
Curly Fuzz walks the streets alone, afraid and unwanted.

Roxy cries to Tia
She calls Tia and tells her that she’s lost her favorite doll.
Tia sympathizes.
Tia’s wall socket listens in on the conversation.
Tia hangs up the phone and leaves her bedroom to go to Roxy’s house.
The wall socket talks to the other inanimate objects in the room.
‘Hey Phone! Did you hear that?!’
Phone: Hear what? I wasn’t paying attention.”
Wall Socket: ‘Tia’s friend has lost her favorite inanimate object!’
A pair of Tia’s tights says, ‘How awful!’
The wall socket pulls itself out of the wall.
Wall socket: ‘C’mon gang, let’s have a conference! We need to help Roxy!’
The phone receiver jumps off the hook and rolls across the floor towards the wall socket.
The rest of the phone yells ‘Hey wait for me!’, jumps off the table and hops across the floor towards the others.
Fade out on the conference as Tia’s room decides what to do.
Puppet Show
Tia is trying to cheer Roxy up in her bedroom by putting on a puppet show.
She has a puppet on each hand and is doing silly voices and waving the pupets in front of Roxy’s face.
Roxy is wasting away, a shadow of her former bubbly self.
As the puppets come closer, she narrows her eyes and bursts out at Tia, “Stop talking. Those aren’t reaaall! They’re just puppets! Puppets! Puppets!!
Curly Fuzz Poodle Doll was real.”

Maynard the cat is sitting next to Tia. He looks up at her and says, “Tsk tsk tsk, she’s gone, man. She’s really gone. Too bad. She was a good master once.”

Skid Row
The Curly Fuzz Poodle ends up begging.
He begs people to pull his talking string; they do it, but his talk box is rusty and his speech is garbled. People feel sorry for him.

CFP is found
CFP decides it’s time to recycle himself, when a mailbox recognizes him.
The mailbox nudges a nearby telephone pole: ‘Hey! Doesn’t that guy match the description of that missing Fuzz character??
Telephone pole: ‘Yeah, that’s the way Tia’s phone described him to me.’
The telephone pole sends a message to Tia’s house: ‘We’ve spotted the Curly Fuzz Poodle, corner of 57th and 3rd, heading northeast, looking mighty ragged.’

Tia’s phone, wall socket, vestibule and tights wait around the corner for the Curly Fuzz Poodle to approach.
The tights jump on CFP and engulph him, tying himself up tight at the top. The tights walk home to Tia’s with CFP inside, and everyone is happy.

CFP gets fixed up
The socket observes CFP’s condition. ‘We can’t take him back like this. We gotta fix him up!’
A drawer in the vestibule opens and a needle and thread hop out. They begin to stitch up CFP’s holes.
The phone pulls his string to try and make him talk. We hear a rusty, garbled groan. ‘He’s all rusted up inside!’
A toothbrush volunteers to help. He sticks his brush into CFP’s ring hole and scrapes the rust off his talking mechanism.
CFP is sparkling and clean.

The objects take him to Roxy’s and shove him back in Roxy’s room through the window.

Mom and Dad argue
Back on Roxy’s bed, CFP just begins to settle in when he overhears an argument outside Roxy’s room.
Dad is accusing Mom of throwing out the Fuzz Poodle and Mom is flatly denying it.
Dad: ‘I can’t believe you threw out that poodle! Roxy hasn’t been the same since! How could you?’
Mom: ‘I’m telling you I never threw it out. You convinced me not to! I have no idea what happened to it.’
The Curly Fuzz Poodle gets an idea. He writes another note to Roxy.

Roxy comes home
She is completely depressed. She hurls her books on the bed and throws herself down for a good sob right smack on top of CFP. She starts crying but we see her back quivering from the agitation of the CFP as he is trying to wriggle out.
A little paw comes out under her belly pulling a talking string.
Roxy hears the string retracting as she has heard so many times before and stops crying.
She smiles as she realizes…she arches her back enough to look under her belly and we hear “Get off.”

She grabs the Fuzz Poodle and gives him a giant hug. She sees the note.
‘Dear Roxy, Your mom never threw me out, I threw myself out. She suggested getting rid of me, and I thought the end was near, so I took care of it myself. Your mom isn’t to blame. She even found me and fixed me up nice for you. So even though she thinks I’m a filthy, repulsive, immature pile of sawdust, she’s letting you have me anyways. That’s how much she loves you.
P.S. Please pull my string.’
She pulls the string. Fuzz Poodle says: ‘AND I LOVE YOU TOO.’

Happy Ending
Roxy runs out to the living room and yells, ‘Mom, thank you!’
Dad sees CFP. ‘Holy mackerel! Where’d he come from?’
Roxy beams, ‘Mom found him and fixed him all up for me!’
Dad looks guilty and gives mom a hug. Mom is dumbfounded.
Everyone hugs.
Hug hug hug love love.

The End

MORE HEARTACHES!

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/search/label/Heartaches

Lost Episodes are Out

http://dvd.ign.com/articles/719/719569p1.html

Click that link above to read an interview with me about the DVD.

http://www.dvdtimes.co.uk/content.php?contentid=62136

INSIDE:
3 Spike episodes
3 never been seen episodes
9 half hours total cartoon product.

Naked girls (by the # 1 cute girl artist-Katie Rice)
The 3 Things
Ralph Bakshi animated
First on screen live animated birth

Lots of supplemental material:
I introduce each cartoon and tell you the back story of how we came up with it. I even thrust my groin a couple times.
Meet the cartoonists-Eddie, Katie, Luke, Vincent, Annmarie, Steve (of Asifa Archives fame!) and Eric Goddamn Bauza himself!

A rare personal appearance by Dave Feiss (creator of Cow and Chicken)

Weird Al live justifies the existence of the set!

Animatics
background paintings
model sheets
storyboards



For a completely unbiased review read this article here:

CLICK HERE FOR UNCLE EDDIE'S COMPLETELY UNBIASED REVIEW!

Here's another!
CLICK HERE FOR THE L.A. ALTERNATIVE'S REVIEW!

RUN OUT TO THE VIDEO STORE TODAY AND GET SOME THRILLS!
and tell me about it

http://www.myspace.com/jkricfalusi

Or order it here:
Buy "REN & STIMPY: THE LOST EPISODES" from Amazon here!

WANNA SEE SOME PREVIEWS?
SNEAK PREVIEWS!
MORE SNEAK PREVIEWS!
ALTRUISTS TRAILER!
STIMPY'S PREGNANT TRAILER!
REN SEEKS HELP TRAILER!

SPONSOR THE GEORGE LIQUOR SHOW YOU EEDIOTS!!!

Hey folks-some potential sponsors will be looking at this post this week, so tell 'em how much you need these cartoons and that you will love their product even more if they put these cartoons on the web! I promise to summon Friz' ghost to time some of them for you!




























THE GEORGE LIQUOR PROGRAM

GEORGE LIQUOR STORIES 1

GEORGE LIQUOR STORIES 2

GEORGE LIQUOR STORIES 3 - FAST FOOD, LUST AND ATHEISTS

GEORGE LIQUOR STORIES 4 - HEAVEN AND MORE DIRTY TALES

THE GEORGE LIQUOR PROGRAM SPINOFFS: 2 DIRTY PUSSIES

GEORGE LIQUOR STORIES - KATIE PRESENTATIONS




CLICK ME TO SEE A GEORGE LIQUOR CARTOON!

Song in case you missed it

Here listen to this song. It's a real Jim Dandy. I defy you to concentrate on the lyrics.

LISTEN TO THIS!

The girl sings the same verse twice in a row and makes it mean 2 completely different things. 2 different emotional messages.
Then the guy comes in and scats it and creates a whole new feeling. Genius!

How The Web Will Topple Television, Raketu takes the first step

Many of you know how I have been pitching this whole direct sponsorship thing as far back as 1990 in The Ren and Stimpy Show and then on the web in 1997 with the first online cartoon series, The Goddamn George Liquor Show.

It's an idea that should have clicked long ago, but the business world has been slow to embrace this idea, even though the technology has been here for at least 8 years to completely change the way entertainment and advertising works.

It looks like the time may have come for it to finally happen.

The whole advertising business is trying to figure out what to do now that no one is watching ads on TV anymore. Sponsors know that the web is where they need to go, but no one yet has figured out how to best take advantage of it...even though I've been telling everyone for so long!
In 1997 till about 2000 I marketed the whole concept by calling every magazine I could think of and pitching the idea to Wired, Yahoo, Millimeter and tons of others.

Unfortunately, I was too early. The Internet boom crashed around 2,000.

So I shook my head, went back to TV and waited until the business caught up with the idea.

When I discovered the blog model last year, I thought, "Hmmm.... maybe I should just write up all my ideas and put them online myself and see if anyone notices." I figured it would be a good way to do some underground marketing.

When the blog caught on, Mark Frauenfelder from Boing Boing called me to interview me, and he told me about Federated Media who was buying him ads. FM, founded by John Batelle (who also was a founder of Wired Magazine) met with me and I pitched him my idea of online direct sponsorship and he got it and said he would get his team to help pitch the idea to his sponsors.

You know all those Google Ads on the sides of websites? I've never understood those. Why is there so much money being spent on them? No one reads them. We automatically just tune them out when we visit websites. We don't even see them.

It seems like a huge waste of money to me. I also don't understand popups. Popup ads just piss everyone off! Like TV and movies. Modern corporate thinking has a strange habit of doing things to make the audience mad:

Commercials in movie theaters.
Network bugs crawling all over the TV screen when you are trying to watch your favorite shows.
Commercials that are obnoxious.

It used to be that big companies would compete with each other by making their products more appealing and attractive.
Movie theatres ran short cartoons before the movies.
TV Networks tried making shows better than other TV networks.

I pitched my idea to John and the FM shows. It's so simple:

Make an attractive animated banner ad that the sponsor places on various websites.
If it is fun and attractive, people will notice it and click on it.

The banner then takes you to another site where there is full blown animated content.

The content can be pure entertainment, or entertainment coupled with ads.
BUT!!! The ad has to be entertaining too, or no one will want to watch it!


Joe Kressaty at FM called me last November or so and told me he found a sponsor who was interested in the idea. They wanted to do some more adventurous type of internet ad that matched their adventurous internet product: Raketu.

I began working with Raketu's iconoclastic Irish marketing director Oliver McIntyre. I pitched him my general concept of making advertising entertaining online and he was already thinking along the same lines, so it was a perfect match.

Here are his own words:

Hollywood and the Cartoonist that changed my life:

Four months ago we embarked on the task of reinventing the Raketu world. We needed to differentiate the brand and transform it from one that merely offered a great service to one that had a personality. It had to entertain, be engaging and communicate the raft of different services to the very broad 15-75 year old target group. The brand had to be truly global.

In the ad agency world where I had spent all my life we always started by defining a brand’s USPS before drafting a strategy/positioning. However, Raketu had multiple usp’s and all appealed to different elements of the target audience. Every member of the family has different communication needs and I had to figure out how to show which aspects of Raketu would appeal to each.

My want was to create a Simpsons type cartoon family online, a family that could show off different elements of the brand/product.
The brief from my peers was to establish the Raketu family and drive downloads and users ASAP.

Then in mid November 2006 I talked on the phone to this cool guy called John K. The guy didn’t really say a lot during our initial telephone conversations but he was funny, talented and most importantly, he got it. I knew he was “the one” that would help me to develop the Raketu family.


Just before Christmas John came to NYC. Meeting in a café on the corner of 38&8th we started to discuss/develop the family. I didn’t give him a break all day and I remember the guy must have had 20 Diet Cokes throughout the day.


John suggested creating a mascot, along the lines of Tony The Tiger for Raketu. He came up with Raketeena the space imp. Raketeena lives in the far future and she visits our time to show today’s primitive humans about how this great brand called Raketu can make their lives better. She would explain to each member of the family in a funny way which aspects of Raketu could work for them.

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2006/12/raketu-roughs-and-pencils-cartoon.html

Raketu does so many things that it would take a lot of patience to read through pages of text, so having animated cartoons do the explanations in an entertaining way was the perfect solution for us. Who likes reading manuals? But everyone loves cartoons!
http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2006/12/raketu-universal-instant-messaging.html

The role of the blog campaign was two fold, first to get some brand understanding and awareness here in the US and secondly to test the Raketeena concept. When we first put up the banner, the click through rate went through the roof and so we knew we were on to something hot and we decided to then redesign our website and use John's characters to pitch our products and services.

http://www.raketu.com/en/index.php

The past two months have been awesome and have had the late night calls, the occasional drama, the constant explanations but I have to say I have really enjoyed working with John and his team. He’s a true pro, and I want to thank him and his team as I think they have done an amazing job.


Sincerely,

Oliver McIntyre,
VP Marketing, Raketu

http://voiptelephonyservice.blogspot.com/2007/03/raketus-sexy-new-look-multi-messenger.html

I thought it might be a good idea to do a post about all this history just for press purposes.
Oh and here are some more of my predictions about the web from way back in 1997!

If you wanna know more about the history of direct sponsorship and how all this stuff works, here are some links to previous posts:
http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2006/12/direct-sponsorship-1.html

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2006/12/direct-sponsorship-2.html

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2006/12/direct-sponsorship-3-end-credits-leave.html

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2006/12/direct-sponsorship-sell-toys-of.html

Brik Blastoff Of The Outback

Here's a project I have been dying to do for a long time. I designed it. Tom Minton helped write it. Lynne Naylor did presentation art. Jeff John put the story bible together. Chris Peterson did the inks.

THE WORLD OF BRIK BLASTOFF

Four hundred billion years in the future, long after every single one of you will be dead, the universe as we know it shall no longer be. Planet Earth, destroyed in a nuclear holocaust is an ancient myth. The remnants of earth's particles have been fused into complex agar molecules. These molecules are buried deep in asteroids scattered throughout the Milky Way.

Agar is the most prized possession in the future, because it is the perfect food. People build colonies around the asteroid belts and mine the elusive material. Piracy and Agar Wars are constants in the future, and it is a world of chaos.

Piercing through this chaos stabs a shining bolt of order — Brik Blastoff of the Outback. Stationed on a lone outpost on Ganymede, Brik Blastoff and his noble Rocket Rangers keep a stern watch on the galaxy, ever ready to free the oppressed, right wrongs and enforce their prime directive: "To interfere with alien cultures, to bring freedom and democracy to places where they don't even want it, and above all, to make the galaxy a safe place in which to be Manly."

Brik Blastoff

Captain of the Rocket Rangers, paternal and extremely ethical, Brik is a role model's role model.

A send-up of masculine stereotypes, Brik never unclenches his virile teeth, not even while eating. He sucks food into his system by sheer will power. Every morning he irons his head, then prepares a pot of scalding black coffee, which he pours onto his face!

Jimi

Brik's teenaged (thirteen months) sidekick and first lieutenant of the Rocket Rangers.

Intolerant of lawbreakers and overly eager to please Brik, this wild teen must sometimes be restrained and disciplined by his more experienced crew members.

This bubbly youth is also the most talented member of the team. He entertains the crew with jokes, songs, mime, and some complex dog tricks.

Jimi can hardly wait to experience puberty.

Steve

Smartest of the Rocket Rangers. The only normal recruit.

Steve is the straight man in the series, although she is a woman. Her name was given to her by Brik, who thinks women are just funny-looking men.

Steve is the science engineer. She also is a liberated woman, a rare thing in the future, and this drives Brik crazy.

Nit Hoatzin

Psycho female recruit. Nearly as talented as Jimi.

Outwardly appearing similar to a beautiful earth woman, Nit Hoatzin (named by Brik himself in a rare fit of creativity) is actually of an ancient, dying alien race known simply as "Derek." While communicating telepathically with the only other survivor of her people, Nit exhibits some pretty weird behavior: idiosyncratic eye movements, numerous spasms, and a failure to bleed.

Nit’s duties include guiding young Jimi through puberty.

Comet the Wonder Cow

The cow's cow.

Comet is a real cow who floats through space who is occassionally encountered by our cast in their adventures. He eventually replaces the Buck Bronto character after Buck's rapid demise via her own spontaneous combustion.

Comet is Brik’s mascot. He is a male cow.

Dik Diskusting

Psychotic and brilliant scientist and inventor. Brik Blastoff's arch enemy.

The villain of the piece, Dik was once a revered super genius like Brik, but has since turned evil. Dik goes back to college days with Brik, when they were still friends. Brik always outclassed Dik in every department, a fact that still makes Dik's blood hop. Dik cracked long ago, swearing vengeance on all biological life forms — especially Brik Blastoff.

Brik's great pity towards his onetime friend sends Dik to maniacal levels.

If you can believe it, A,T and T once licensed Brik and the gang for this online ad...

Drawn by me, Jim Smith, Mike Fontanelli and inked by Shane Glines and his pal, whose name I don't recall...help me Shane!

Taking the cartooniness out of the cartoon does not make it realistic

It just makes it bland.

This my biggest complaint about modern animation and it goes back to Disney. If you are going to go to great lengths to take the cartooniness, magic and imagination out of your cartoon characters, then you better replace it with something else-like maybe good specific designs and and an understanding of human nature and individual layered characters.

Rich personalities derived from observation of real life humans interacting the way they really do in the actual world around you.
This doesn't happen.

Instead we dig into the file of "animated" personalities-characters from Disney films or Saturday Morning cartoons. Very inhuman simplistic characters from the archaic past or from the modern TV cliches. They don't look, or act like anyone you have ever met nor do they have normal human motivations and believable reactions to familiar and odd situations.

Try taking one-note animation characters out of a cartoon and shooting a live action story with them. You would see instantly how shallow these modern characterizations are. Wait a minute...they did do that! Ever see "Titanic"?


If you really have a talent for acute observation of human nature, characters and honest motivations and psychology, you would make characters that aren't cliches torn from previous Disney cartoons, Saturday Morning Cartoons or sitcoms.

You would make stories that come out of the characters' dynamics and chemistry with other characters.You wouldn't just take a stock animated feature story template and plug stock leads, villains and wacky sidekicks in and then beg everyone to take you seriously, like you are a real FILMMAKER, rather than a mere lowly cartoonist.

But then you'd have to have a way to SHOW the audience this depth of character.

With the drawings, expressions, design, gestures, vocal artistry, etc.

It's not enough to just have the character tell the other characters what their one personality trait is and why they have it. Am I the only one that notices that? "I'm a strong woman living in a man's world and I'm not gonna let a wimpy snot nosed kid like you stand in my way!" "Oh yeah! Well I'm the villain! A shallow no talent bum who has nothing better to do than make money critiquing those who do have talent!"

If you really understood character and story and didn't like imaginative exaggeration, you probably wouldn't make cartoons at all. You would write novels or make dramatic live action movies- which is really what everyone who runs animation wants to do anyway. They just aren't good enough to get into the real world of live action.





Bland formula cartoons to me, and to every cartoonist or animator with a mind of his/her own are just big boring lies. They aren't realistic, have nothing important to say (like the producers would have you believe) and are completely transparent. "This is not just a cartoon. It is an experience, a study of the nature of the family." That kind of stuff.

No matter what the marketing and press releases tell you about how everything is new and daring and has a message, this is really what it comes down to:


Conservative animators and definitely executives just don't like a too-big helping of imagination or fun. They want to poo in the ice cream.

They have a million theories as to why an audience couldn't bear to sit through non-stop entertainment, but the theories are just a mask to cover up the real reason: Bland people make bland entertainment.

Worse than than that, they see to it that talented people don't get to use their talents, whether their talents are observational or imaginative, or some combination.

How many artists have been told to tone down their stuff, even if it is not "wild" at all or "Tex Avery"?

"Trace those model sheets! More pathos! More contrived misunderstandings between the two bland characters who are obviously in love! More crowds! More camera angles! Let's have someone die! More Pop culture references than the competition! More pores! No soul! Our movie is QUALITY!"

You would think that with the billions (not an exaggeration!) of dollars being spent on formula cartoons every year, someone would be smart enough to carve a measly few million off to make imaginative cartoony cartoons that take advantage of the medium.

They'd clean up, because there would be no competition at all.

Detour on Character - Observation VS Imagination

Observation and Imagination can be used separately or together in varying proportions to create art. Or entertainment.

But I want to dissect them somewhat to see what's different about the 2 concepts. I think this will help to understand character better.

Some arts are pure Imagination:

Music

A musician doesn't try to make his music sound like the real world. You don't buy a cd to listen to fake ducks, dogs, people walking around, talking, quacking, brushing teeth or taking a bath.
(Unless it's a comedy album).You can occasionally evoke real things (Flight Of The Bumblebees) but you aren't trying to literally imitate them.

Music is meant almost purely to pleasure your ears. The sounds and all the technical mathematical rules and structures used have as their final purpose abstract auditory pleasure.

Talented musicians can make you feel emotions and moods that nothing in the real world can.

How many times have you listened to a symphony and said "Wow! I understand what he is saying!"...but you can't put it into words.

Music is probably the most purely imaginative and abstract art. No one has been able to achieve in the visual arts what musicians have. Cartoons have come the closest.

Yeah, you can add lyrics and tell a story about life to go with the music, but if the music sucks, who will listen? (Jorge excepted.)

Here listen to this song. It's a real Jim Dandy. I defy you to concentrate on the lyrics.

LISTEN TO THIS!

The girls sings the same verse twice in a row and makes it mean 2 completely different things. 2 different emotional messages.
Then the guy comes in and scats it and creates a whole new feeling. Genius!

Dance

Dance is similar to music. When someone gets on stage and tap dances, they are aren't imitating the motions of anything in real life. They don't try to fool you by masquerading as reality. They are just making stuff up-or building on dances that were made up long ago and adding their own ideas to it.

Dance relies on beauty, skill and style to make art.

Some Arts are Pure Observation.

Well, most people assume that all good art takes some imagination but I'm not yet sure of that. For now, I just want to make a point how some arts lean a lot more on observation than others.

Portrait Painting

A good portrait has to more than anything else, look like the subject. (Let's leave out Picasso and modern art for now.)

What makes one portrait artist better than another comes down to his skill in observation, and then his style.

I'm still trying to figure out what style actually is. Is it imagination? Maybe not. Let's wait for another post to think about it.


Landscape Painting

If you sit in front of a real scene, you have in mind that you want to paint something that resembles what
is in front of you.

You aren't going to just make something up. Hopefully.

Still Life
You have to see this painting in person. It's at the Getty. Your eyes will melt.

Caricaturehttp://marlomeekins.blogspot.com/

This is a combination of observation and imagination. A good caricature has to look like the subject, but that isn't enough. It has to be highly amusing and surprising and that takes leaps of imagination.

SAMMY DAVIS JUNIOR!

Here's a guy who has both observation and imagination in big dose. Watch him do celebrity impressions (observation) and then dance like a maniac (Abstract entertainment).

Realistic Characters (observation) VS Fantastic characters (Imagination)

These 2 artistic concepts relate directly to the creation of characters in stories and entertainment.

Realistic

These are characters and stories that could physically happen in real life. Of course, real life doesn't have as many coincidences as fictional stories, but the characters are usually recognizable and have believable emotions and motivations.

Detective Story-Psychological crime drama
Soap Opera - bland realisticgeneral human types
The Honeymooners - a brilliant insightful caricature of real human nauture in conflict

Fantastic

Superman

Whoever came up with the first superhero must have had a wild imagination.

A human who wears colorful long underwear, is above the law, has fantastic powers and doesn't use them to satiate his lusts for women, money and power.

It's not only fantastic that he has super powers and dresses indecently, but his humanity is completely unrealistic. He has no normal human motivations.

Everything about Superman is preposterous. Not just the physics.

No one acts like real humans do in old superhero comics and they don't need to because that's not what kids bought them for. You wanna see them kick everyone's ass and do impossible things with as much primary color as you can stand.

I think classic Superheroes are a great American tradition. Mike Fontanelli collects all of them.

There is no logic in any Superhero comics. Superman puts glasses on and then no one recognizes him.

Nobody reacts to bizarre situations that happen in a realistic way.

Batman

Batman is even more preposterous than Superman. He merely has the long underwear. No powers.

No criminal has good enough aim to shoot him dead. The police let him take the law into his own hands. No one recognizes his voice or jaw when he is Bruce Wayne.

He has a bare legged teenaged sidekick. He risks the kid's life every day and is not arrested for it.

Superhero comics are completely opposed to common observation of not only the physical world, but of how humans actually are.

Look at the gripping emotion in this so human comic:Many comic artists draw as if they have never actually witnessed human expressions. Observational skills are not really needed for purely fantastic characters. Wild imagination is.

Peter Pan (mildly fantastic)Peter Pan is less imaginative than Superman - or less preposterous, depending on how you wanna frame it. He can fly, so that's a bit fantastic, but his personality is non existent. He's slightly mischevious, but that's not enough to call a "realistic" personality, nor an "Imaginative" personality.

Combinations Of Fantastic and Observed

Dick Tracy
Dick Tracy takes place in realistic cities, but the villains are fantastic caricatures and they are named after what kind of ugly they have.

Dick himself is a simple character, but many of the villains have weird psychoses and quirks. The strip is highly imaginative even thought it supposedly is serious and realistic.

WHERE TO FIND FANTASTIC CHARACTERS

Fantastic characters with preposterous or simplistic personalities generally belong in:

Horror Movies
Comedy
Science Fiction
Musicals
Comics
Kiddie Fare

Because of the interesting fantasy settings we suspend our disbelief at the craziness of the characters.

Simple personalities usually don't work in bland settings, and they sure don't work in bland stories that beg you care about them.

To truly care about a character, it has to have more depth than Dracula, Wonder Woman or any mdoern feature animation character.

If you cry in one of those fake pathos scenes you are being tricked by the staging and the music, not the dialogue, story or character's charisma. Unsure Directors work the audience like puppets using cheap filmic tricks. Now they even have the characters tell you to care about them!


Spiderman and Marvel comics in general


After the first few Superheroes had mined every imaginable power, they ceased to be very imaginative. They just became endless clones and a whole formulaic mindset took over the industry. Artists and writers unquestioningly churned out mindless unimaginative fantasy with personality less characters. Superheroes had become cliches, just as Disney cartoons did.


Then in 1960, Stan Lee did what every kid who ever read a superhero comic did-questioned the preposterous nature of it. He and Kirby and Ditko started making costumed Superheroes that had the same powers that had already existed for 20 years, but now they gave their characters more normal-or realistic emotions and motivations.

This actually made the stories seem even more fantastic, because you believed the characters were like us. It invited the fans into the stories. Stan Lee is a huge influence on me (and I'm sure a million other artists). I took this idea and applied it to comedy cartoons. Realistic shaded characters in crazy situations. I also invited the audience into the fantastic stories and events in the same way Lee did. I used his homespun marketing style and made the fans feel like they were in on the gags and everyon else wasn't.

In the 60s, what Lee did was a revolution. We were so used to seeing nobody ever act like humans in comics that all of a sudden seeing these fantastic characters act like us..they were greedy, horny, torn between good and bad. The mere shock of semi realistic personalities wearing brightly colored underwear in public was a great novelty and it breathed new life into comics for about 10 years.
Unfortunately this led to the utter ruination of comic books. Lesser men than Lee and Kirby came along in the 70s and put too much emphasis on the psychological problems of the superheroes. They also added current events, like war protests, the drug problem and homosexuality!!

The Hulk had a friend that was gay who die of AIDS! Holy crap! In a comic about a big green guy who goes around crushing everything in sight and saying things like "HULK SMASH!"

The underwear boys had become too serious and all the fun was gone.

THE MEN OF UNDERPANTS HAVE MATURED
"TAKE ME SERIOUSLY OR I'LL RUB MY UTILITY PACKAGE ON YOU"

This is the same old affliction so many popular culture entertainers have- the need to be respected, to have their silly works be accepted on a higher level than just pure fun or sheer beauty.

Jerry Lewis syndrome.

This thinking leads to limbo art and limbo characters, characters who are neither fantastic nor realistic. They are simplistic cliches that beg to be compared to "real" fiction, like movies and novels. This is the kind of art that lesser talents with inferiority complexes make, or worse- executives.

To ME, and I know this an unpopular notion these days, is that you need to use observation, imagination or both and in heavy doses to make great art or entertainment.

At least if it's going to last.

Stay away from cliched blanded down versions of characters that have already been beaten to death a thousand times if you want to be remembered.

Character 2 - Crossover Characters - Chemistry

I hope I haven't given the impression that I think that characters have to be either/or abstract or realistic.

It's more important that they are specific and somewhat detailed characters, not just cliches. At least for the kinds of stories I like.

I still believe in the star system, whether we are talking about live action movies, television, short cartoons, feature animation, drama or comedy.

James Cagney is specific and chock full of charisma and talent; Tom Hanks is Mr. Normal.
Cary Grant VS Hugh Grant.
Foghorn Leghorn VS the Family Guy Dad.

Stars have to have more extravagant qualities than your next door neighbor, but that concept is out of fashion these days.

3) Crossover Characters

These are characters that are partly realistic and partly preposterous. Every degree of mix of the two categories is possible-as long as the characters are engaging and SEEM real in their contradictions and charisma.

Let me adjust this definition. Interesting isn't good enough. A star has to be magnetic and specific. You need to recognize their basic attributes but they can't be totally predictable!

Olive Oyl

Ren

Well there are lots more characters that are combinations of abstract and realistic traits, but I'm worn out from my last few posts and need a break.

Maybe you can do my job for me and describe which of Olive or Ren's traits are based on observed traits in human nature and which are preposterous or impossible.


Chemistry is also important.

The chemistry between characters is very important too. If you have a bland character and a cliche character together, there is no real chemistry. Or worse, 2 bland characters, like in a movie I saw lately.

You can have an underplayed character like Alice with an exaggerated character like Ralph, but they should both have specific and interesting characteristics if you are going to want to see them over and over again.

That's why I think animation and comedic characters have generally been more complex and charismatic in shorts and television than in features. Good short characters are easy to write lots of stories for.

Many animated feature characters are basically throwaways, blank slates that you ride through the spectacle with.

How many animated feature characters could hold up in a series of shorts? That's the true test.

I'll get to more of that with the next character post about Disney style characters.

These fit neither the abstract, nor the realistic categories of characters.

They are their own strange inbred entities that exist in mutated form only in the cloistered world of Cal Arts animation.

Then there's Dreamworks, a whole other level of ....what?

Check out this magnetic chunk of star quality

What makes a character a character? pt 1 Realistic VS Abstract

ICONIC CHARACTER PROPERTIES

Who doesn't want their cartoon characters to be true stars? To be a truly iconic character you have to have these properties:

A Specific Design
A Unique Voice (an extinct concept)
A Specific Personality
Specific Mannerisms
http://home.earthlink.net/~thimbletheatre/index.html

POPEYE MOST UNIQUE STAR CHARACTER OF ALL TIME

By these criteria, Popeye would be just about the greatest and most creative character ever.
Not only is his design, voice and personality completely unique, so is his dialect!

E.C. Segar made up a dialect that I've never heard anyone speak except Popeye. "Infinks is almos' as iggorant as aminals!"

4 Broad Categories Of Characters

There are only a handful of sweeping general types of characters that cartoons draw from.

1) Realistic-personality based on human observation

These are characters that are identifiable, because you know people like them in real life. They are believable. You can put them in preposterous situations and it makes it really fun to see how a realistic character will react in an impossible situation.

The better the writers, actors and directors of these characters, the more specific and engaging they become. They can be simple or deep but have to be specific to really be engaging.

To create rich characters that are based on reality, you have to be very observant of human nature, both in its broad categories, and then in its detailed specific variations.

To act a real character, or draw one, or write dialogue for one, you have to have keen senses. You have to constantly be able to notice details that escape the average artist or writer.

It is the talent of caricature that makes identifiable characters engage the audience and not every creative person has this. Some writers who are good at plot may not be good at character. It's a different ability.

This is less about imagination than it is about acute senses. It's about pinpointing interest in what really exists and leaving out the boring parts, or the parts that everyone has in common.

Sincerity and naturalness from the artists and actors is needed to pull this kind of character off. Audiences respond well to honest depictions of characters culled from the street, that aren't Hollywood insincere lies.

Bugs Bunny - Street Smart Wiseguy

Bugs is a regular guy. A teenage wiseass, class clown type. He's just like someone who was in your class.

When he was created, this was so unique that he caused a huge sensation - just because he was so uncartoony, but in very cartoony situations.

Moe Howard - Bossy Asshole
Moe is a caricature of a type of person we all know. He is my species. A very specific version of a relatable general type of actual human.


George Liquor - Republican

George is also a realistic personality. A republican disciplinarian type. I've known many variations of this type and combined my favorite parts from different examples into one uber-Republican.

Bluto - Bully

Every guy in the world was either a bully or has been bullied by someone like Bluto.

2) Abstract Characters

- A made up "Created" personality, not realistic but entertaining. These types of characters are truly "created" because they don't exist in nature. They aren't based on observation; instead they come more from the imagination.

Elmer Fudd

Elmer has a weird combination of specific characteristics:
He's completely hairless, retarded and wimpy-yet wants to kill helpless things, then cries when he succeeds at it.

He can't say his Rs and Ls and has a very distinct timbre to his voice.

Does anyone know an Elmer Fudd in real life?

Daffy Duck

A complete lunatic that says "woo woo woo" when he gets excited and bounces and flies all over the screen like a maniac.

This is my favorite character!

Interestingly, they changed him from a made up abstraction to a realistic character later- a selfish backstabbing coward.

I like him better when he's just unpredictable and crazy.

Curly Howard

Who can explain Curly's character??
He has a million unique mannerisms and vocal exclamations, but you somehow always know what his emotions are-even though they are expressed in completely abstract ways. Jerry Howard was a creative genius.

He took all the basic human emotions and made up a new acting language to express them to us. Wow.

Stimpy

Stimpy's personality couldn't exist in real life. He is an idiot-who can also create a Happy Helmet. He is empathetic to those who are meanest to him.

He's an abstract idiot and genius at the same time.

Jerry Lewis

Jerry Lewis made up a sort of retard character that has a million completely unique expressions and mannerisms.

There are lots of "clownish" characters in comedy, but not too many as specific and abstract as Jerry.

PopeyePopeye is a complex collection of weird traits that shouldn't go together.

He's an old skinny man who can beat anyone up.

He has a good heart but picks fights sometimes just to get his orneriness out of his system.

He has the strangest dialect ever in cartoons.

He has a man's reproductive organs where everyone else has a face.

Skinny upper arms and thick lower arms.

He eats raw soggy spinach out of a can.

Amazing that someone made up such an odd assortment of traits. How did Segar do it?

Realistic Characters Can Work Well With Abstract CharactersThe contrast between an identifiable character with a cartoonish abstracted character if well handled can add up to a lot of fun and laughs.

All these characters have something in common, wheteher they are "realistic" or "cartoony".

They are all really specific in all their details. Their looks, voices, mannerisms, expressions, everything.

THEY AREN'T BLAND.

They have charisma and that's what to me, makes a true character and a star.


NEXT:

3) CROSSOVER CHARACTERS- combining observation with imagination

4) DISNEY CHARACTERS -neither realistic nor created abstractions

Popeye Rules

What's great about Popeye?

I love Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Droopy and many other classic cartoon characters, but the series that is most consistently funny and inventive to me is the Fleischer Popeye cartoons. For a solid run of about 6 years, these cartoons are really fun, funny and inventive. And they glorify in their cartooniness.

I'm absolutely amazed at how long these cartoons have been off the air. When I was a kid, everyone loved Popeye-even our Dads!

How can you raise decent kids without Popeye cartoons?

Luckily for everyone now, Jerry Beck and his group have managed to release these great cartoons on DVD and I hope everyone snaps them up for themselves and for any kids you know too!

Popeye is a true American hero and a great example for our youth, unlike 50 Cent.

There are a ton of great things about Popeye, and here are just a few of the things that I like about them.

Throbbing

SOLO THROBBING ACTION

The first few cartoons throb to the music beats. This is a holdover from the Betty Boop cartoons.

Since all classic cartoons were timed to rhythms, this throbbing action was Fleischer's entertaining way to keep holds alive while someone else is doing the talking or action.

I think we should all throb constantly to the beat in real life.


INTIMIDATION THROBBING!

A Song In Every Cartoon

Almost every classic Popeye has its own theme song. Many were especially written for the cartoons, and some were already well known hits.

WE AIM TO PLEASE

A CLEAN SHAVEN MAN

A DREAM WALKING

These songs were woven into the storylines and add a lot of good feeling to the cartoons.

This is another practice, like throbbing that should come back to cartoons.

Although nobody today can write catchy melodies anymore. It's all that new age warbly broadway and animated feature stuff about spreading your wings and soaring like the eagle who devours the bunnies now.

Buy the Popeye collection and experience real songs! You won't stop humming them.

Gruesome Closeups

The Best Girl Cartoon Character Ever

OLIVE ROLLERSKATES

Olive Oyl is the the most distinct and entertaining girl character in cartoon history.

Usually girls are pure stereotypes.

The beautiful girl.

The fat one.

And now, we have the girl who is smarter and stronger than the wimpy ass male leads.

Olive is specific and distinct in every facet of what makes a person unique.

Her design.

Her voice.

Her personality.

Her movement.

Her expressions.

She is also funny as Hell.

Individual and Funny Walks and Runs

In many cartoons characters merely walk. In the Fleischer Popeyes, it seems as though someone commanded the animators to make sure that every walk is unique and fun.
The characters hardly ever just walk from this story point to the next as cartoon characters today do.

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2007/05/nextwillard-bowsky.html

Great Personalities and Chemistry

The characters of Popeye, Olive, Wimpy and Bluto are not only individually unique and fun, their chemistry is perfect.

E.C. Segar created the characters and imbued them with individual eccentricities, but the Fleischers added the voices and many mannerisms.

When you have such rich characters and great animators who understand them, you can drop them into infinite situations and the stories then write themselves.

Visual Metaphors Galore

Popeye shows his strength by having battleships in his biceps, hands that turn into vice grips and lots more fun stuff that can only happen in cartoons.

This kind of stuff didn't even happen in the comics. The Fleischers added these wonderful treats.

Beatings

Popeye has some of the funniest and cleverest violence in the history of film. Beatings are an essential element of cartoon entertainment and these are the best ever.

Clever Technical Structure



OLIVE SKATES THROUGH TRAFFIC

The Fleischer artists and animators were real showmen. They purposely devised complex and impressive technical scenes with the purpose of entertaining the audience.

Long before computers, they relied merely on talent, showmanship and ingenuity to pull off some of the trickiest sequences in cartoons.

Unlike many modern show offy animated sequences, this show offy stuff was entertaining, like watching Fred Astaire dance. It's not merely technical, it's fun and artistic.

Many cartoons were written around the technical sequences, like "A Dream Walking".

Clever Situations

You would think with only 3 main characters you might run out of story ideas pretty soon, but the Fleischers kept devising new situations for years for these guys.

In fact, Popeye was hardly ever in ships! He beat up every animal and every race in every environment on earth.

Great Voices
Mae Questel
Jack Mercer
Gus Wickie

These were all very distinct voices - unlike today's bland star actor voices that do nothing to help give the characters individuality.

Perfect Translation From Comics To Animation

Usually when you try to translate characters from one medium to another, it's a creative disaster.

Executive types love to take something that is popular in one medium and remove what made them popular when they translate it to a new medium.

The Fleischers did the exact right thing with E.C. Segar's characters.

They left the personalities of the characters intact and found voices that perfectly suited their personalities.

The comic strip stories were continued every day and whole plots sometimes took months to complete. This type of story structure obviously wouldn't work in a 6 minute cartoon, so The Fleischers devised new story structures that took advantage of the personalities and atmosphere of the original, but added the things that only film and animation could do. Music, acting, motion gags, magic and more.

Humanity

This is an element that is rare in many forms of popular entertainment.

Popeye and the gang, as crazy and preposterous as the cartoons can be, still reflect real human emotions, motivations and the uncontrived actual things that our species naturally find entertaining.

There are no new-age messages, no characters clamoring to prove that they can be the best me that can be, no artificial pathos, no lecturing the audience about the writers' beliefs, just pure real street-smart fun. The Fleischer animators were a lot more in touch with real people than the Disney animators.

IS IT DVNRED OR MESSED WITH?

It remains to be seen. Jerry has posted some clean frame grabs that look great to me.

The 2 color episodes are suspicious.

I was doing a commentary on Sindbad and I kept screaming about the print, because it was neon pink, purple and turquoise and they kept swearing to me that that was not going to be the final print. They even showed me another one which looked totally different and had assorted colors in it.


It seems that the My Little Pony version is the one on the dvd if these frame grabs are any indication.

Who knows, it's possible that those are the actual original colors, but it's very hard for me to believe that in 1936 there was a 12 year old girl who picked all the colors for such sophisticated cartoons.


Ali Baba looks a lot more like 30s colors, very rich and lots of subtleties.

It does look like the engineers pulled up all the purple they could find in the BGS though and pumped the saturation up, but look how different it is than Sindbad.
This looks like 80s little girl color palette to me. I really doubt anyone used colors like this 70 years ago.


BUT! Luckily there are only 3 color Popeyes anyway. The rest are black and white, so they can't mess with the colors-although one expert pointed out to me that the contrasts were pumped up, so that now the BGs have dark blacks in them rather than the original milky greyed BGS that stayed in the background.

Let's just hope they haven't done the line thinning jitters and the strobing pans.



If you like cartoony cartoons, buy this sucker now and laugh lots!

Later Today...WHAT MAKES A CHARACTER A CHARACTER?

WHAT MAKES A CHARACTER A CHARACTER?

5 CATEGORIES OF CHARACTERS WILL BE BROKEN DOWN

1) Realistic-

personality based on human observation

2) Abstract-

A made up "Created" personality, not realistic but entertaining

3) Crossover Characters -

part real, part abstract

4) Disney Characters -

based on previous Disney

5) Saturday Morning Cartoon Characters -

from retarded cartoon writers who are still stealing from Archie comics



PETE EMSLIE'S POPEYE!
Btw, Pete Emslie a very talented cartoonist and caricaturist has written his own blog post about his childhood fun with Popeye.

PETE'S POPEYE

After you read that, look at his great caricatures!

How Can We Bring Back Cartoony Cartoons?

These close ups are in that style I thought was Willard Bowsky. Peter has cast some doubt in my brain as to who actually drew them, but whoever it is, is a real cartoonist and his stuff is really fun to look at.This is a cartoon that exults in being a cartoon. It's not trying to hide it.

It's not trying to compete with live action on its own terms.It uses what cartoons do best-funny magic.
Fun to look at pictures that do crazy things.
Characters with funny personalities and distinct funny voices. (Listen to the voices in that Ratatouille clip! Is there anything remotely distinct about them?)
This whole blog is dedicated to bringing back real cartoons. There are still many real cartoonists alive today who could do this really fun type of animation but there is no studio that will take advantage of them.
It's also hard to learn how to be cartoony, when nothing in the media is anymore and there are no schools that teach it. That's why it's great that there are so many blogs that are making a whole new generation of cartoonists aware that drawing can actually be really fun.

Wouldn't it be great to look look forward to coming to work every day and be able to actually use your imagination and think up ways to make people really laugh and pleasure their senses?
The reason I put up modern animation styles and make fun of them is to contrast them to this fun stuff. To really show how hugely different the philosophies are.
I'm not against having other types of animation on the planet, I would just like to have a reasonable % of cartoons doing what they do best.

The Pixars and Dreamworks and Disneys could exist if they wanna make the same films over and over again. If they want to abandon all cartoon tradition, fine.
But some smart studio oughta make room for real cartoons and really funny cartoonists and let them loose to actually use their imaginations.
If someone put 10% of the money that they spend on animated features or prime time animated shows into an unashamed cartoon studio, that studio would clean up. I think it would largely kill at least all the Pixar and Simpsons imitators.


Maybe the next generation of cartoonists will see all these possibilities on the blogs and then do what's so obviously fun and right.

BTW, if you click the label "cartoony" below it will take you to other posts about particularly cartoony cartoonists.

Isn't it crazy that we have to add an adjective to cartoons so that you will recognize the ones who actually draw cartoony?

I'll put up the clips from these scenes this weekend so you can see how much the animation is.

BIG POPEYE DVD POST COMING

LATER TODAY

KEEP CHECKING BACK

A Story Of Rod Scribner

In the late 30s and early 40s, Tex Avery had a powerhouse animation crew that any director should die to have. He directed Bob McKimson, considered at the time Warner's top animator, Irv Spence for awhile and Rod Scribner, who no one had yet figured out was a total genius.

Tex had the #1 unit at Warner's but didn't really take advantage of them. The style he developed was a style of sarcastic jokes told with stand up comedy timing and delivery. This in itself was fresh and new for animation, a real innovation-especially for the west coast.

If you watch his Warner's cartoons the animation of course is great technically, but it isn't anywhere near as visual or exaggerated as what he would do a few years later at MGM. His animators seem uncast, interchangeable, because what he wanted from the animation was to get from one joke to the next smoothly and with live action comedy timing. The animators would inject some of their own styles into the scenes, as long as it didn't interfere with the joke.

Scribner's scenes are very solid and unless you are a fanatic like me, you would have a tough time telling the difference between his animation and McKimson's in Avery's cartoons. He started breaking out during the last couple years of Avery's direction.

Scribner's animation at the time actually feels a bit claustrophobic. It looks like the characters are filled with pent up energy. Their gestures now and then stretch out but are quickly pushed back as if there is an invisible force field surrounding them and stopping them from completing their motions.




Clampett took over Avery's unit in 1941 and the cartoons that the same animators were doing changed quickly. Clampett had already been directing for 5 years with the "junior unit", the younger "less experienced animators" as Clampett referred to them.


Even so, the most energetic and experimental animation happening at Warner's happened in the black and white "junior" unit.

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2007/05/pinch-and-outrage-bob-clampett.html

Chuck Jones and Bobe Cannon did some really wacky and expressive animation for him and then so did John Carey, Vive Risto, Izzy Ellis and a few other animators who are not as well known to history.

Bob told me that during the black and white period, he would have certain ideas he wanted to animate that he decided not to do, just because he didn't think his animators were yet skilled enough to pull them off.

After a short period of finishing some of Tex's cartoons and getting used to his new crew, his cartoons just exploded with imagination and most of all - a new energetic style of movement.

Eddie, Milt and I pestered Clampett for stories about all the animators all the time when we knew him and we would ask the most about Scribner. How did he get that crazy loose style?


George Lichty
Bob said Scribner came to him early on and asked if he could try a new looser style of animation - inspired by the loose finish of one of his favorite comic strip artists, George Lichty.

MORE GREAT LICHTY HERE!

http://www.animationarchive.org/2007/07/comics-george-lichty-grin-and-bear-it.html

Lichty was one of my favorite cartoonists when I was a kid so this story really interested me.

Lichty is great for a number of reasons. He was an extremely skilled technical artist who happens to draw cartoons. His compositions are great. He draws difficult and interesting perspectives in his cartoon panels. He can organize and compose crowd scenes.

He has a very hard bitten street-smart sarcastic outlook of life which I, as a hard-bitten sarcastic 8 year old kid really took to.

But what Scribner was alluding to in Lichty's work was the finish. The brush lines are very loose, organic and fast. To the untrained non-artist's eye it might even look sloppy. A non artist won't see the great solid drawings underneath the superficially loose finished line work.

Check out the beautiful natural poses of the girls in the panel on the left.


Looney Tunes morph from the McKimson Style to the Clampett style

TheWarner Bros. cartoon drawing-animation style was basically Bob McKimson's making. Very very tight, solid and careful and volumetric. Less squashy and stretchy than Disney's. More weight and power. Conservative. Earthbound. The rest of the Warner's animation staff strove to emulate McKimson's skill-but didn't think to leave out the conservatism.Scribner wanted to break through the safe logical membrane that the Warner's house style confined him in.


Clampett was all for it. He was already experimenting and wanted more and more life and energy in his characters. He was already able to get more of that from his animators than other directors could, but here at last was a kindred soul that didn't need to be pushed to let go.

BEFORE LICHTY

AFTER LICHTY

He gave Scribner the go-ahead to try out his Lichty looseness and he got this:
The combination of Scribner's new breakthrough animation with Clampett's understanding of personality and his wildly inventive direction cemented the revolution of Warner's against Disney's. Scribner and Clampett not influenced the other animators in their unit, but also the rest of the studio - many against their wills. Friz hated what was happening but got swept along in the inexorable gushing current.

Warner's was no longer a cheap, less animated imitation of Disney. It was a force that everyone else now had to scramble not only to catch up to, but to even understand. To this day, not a lot of people realize what an explosion of creativity and power those few years in our history were.

I wonder if the animators knew at the time how big this revolution was. I get the feeling they really didn't and I'll tell you why in a later post.

SCRIBNER DOES AVERY - 1940

SCRIBNER DOES CLAMPETT - 1943

Interesting side note: After Clampett abandoned Warner Bros. in 1946, McKimson shoved Scribner back into a smothering force field again and when you watch Scribner's characters twitch and agitate, it looks like they are trying to bust their limbs through but never quite can.


MORAL OF THE STORY: GET SOME INFLUENCES FROM OTHER FORMS OF CARTOONS! NOT JUST DISNEY

Let's have animation evolve again!

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2006/09/importance-of-having-lot-of-influences.html

Constructing Bugs Bunny

This Bugs Bunny model sheet uses all the classic principles of good drawings together and is appealing too.
Bugs looks simple but is really pretty tricky.

Do you ever wonder why the modern versions of Bugs don't look like the real Bugs from the classic cartoons? Not only does he have mushy construction now, but there are some subtleties in his face that are just really hard to draw. Not even all the original animators could catch them.

We won't start with the subtleties today. Let's just look at the broad forms, two ways.

Same basic construction, less a couple subtle nuances

1) Generic on model 40s Bugs







I thought at first these scenes were by Bob McKimson, but after looking closely, I' don't think so. It's almost on model, but the features seem to be just slightly out of place. Maybe it's Virgil Ross?

Greg Duffel, help me out here!

Anyway, they're still very good, very conservative and conservative on purpose. Clampett contrasted everything in context to help tell his stories better. Conservative against stylish and wild or specific.

Here's McKimson for sure:
Note how almost perfectly solid his construction is.

Clampett cast his animators according to their natural strengths and personalities. He wanted this scene to be Bugs in control and confident - the Bugs the audience was used to, so that when Bugs started to lose to the turtle, he could show you what would happen to a cool confident character when he's no longer in control. Someone used to winning would obviously lose control in a big way, so those scenes he gave to the funnier animators like Scribner.

Clampett told me he hated formula and every time he and his cohorts would discover a formula that worked, everyone would want to just make the same cartoon over and over again and not screw with the formula. This would make Bob want to make fun of the formula in rebellion, which he did in this and other cartoons.

But to make it work, he couldn't just have Bugs be wild and out of control all through the cartoon. He had to set it up so that the audience would see Bugs as they knew him, and then take them on a wild ride out of the formula.


2) Exaggerated fun Scribner 40s Bugs

This Scribner drawing uses the exact same construction and cartoon drawing principles as the other scene, but it has way more contrasts in the shapes. And more imagination in the shapes and expressions and poses.

Here's a flatter, less contrasted design from another cartoon:Everything is even proportions.

Scribner's Bugs in this scene is actually even more solid than the "on-model" Bugs. Scribner was a wizard! he could draw all the classic principles better than any other animator at Warner's, but he was also the most creative animator there. Maybe he was from space or something.





Here's Kali's first tries at the conservative on-model Bugs and my translations of the construction.

Bugs' head in the left drawing is veering off to the upper right and his cheek doesn't seem quite attached to his head, so I roughed in Bugs' basic construction next to it.




Here I tried breaking down the drawing. I need to tilt the head back more to make it closer to the pose in the frame grab. But note how all the details flow along the the larger forms.

Toes are same direction as feet. Fingers fit in direction of hands. Eyes wrap around head, etc.


Now here's a Scribner frame:Look how solid even the ears are. Everything is solid and complex. And sensible. The smaller forms ride along the bigger forms. They obey the same perspective and physics.

Different directors experimented with Bugs' proportions and details, but used the same principles as the 40s Clampett Bugs.


Compare to this modern Bugs. You can tell the artist is being real careful, but even so, a lot of the lines and forms are just floating and don't follow the larger forms they are riding. Like the wrinkle lines above his nose.

There are perfectly straight lines and parallel lines in the drawing too, which instantly kill the volumes.
This one too is much flatter than the original Bugs:

Want to become a better cartoonist? Learn these classic methods and watch your control and results dramatically improve. Try drawing the other frame grabs.

Want more Scribner stories? Wanna know how he upped his style when he went from Avery to Clampett? He actually asked permission from Bob to let him be more creative!

Ramjet Construction

LEARN BY COPYING AND ANALYZING
I always encourage young cartoonists to absorb many styles by copying them and trying to understand what makes them work...

rather than falling in love with a single current trendy thing and crippling your ability to see the difference between truly good and merely trendy. The more styles you copy AND ANALYZE AND UNDERSTAND, the better you will be as an artist and as a judge of what's skilled as opposed to just current.Kali has been copying some of my favorite artists like Fred Crippen, Johnny Hart and Brant Parker.

Those artists superficially have simple, flat styles. But there is much more to them than meets the untrained eye.

STRAIGHT AHEAD VS CONSTRUCTION AND PLANNING

Kali has a really good natural eye and like many young talented cartoonists tends to copy things "straight ahead".


That is, starting at one end of a drawing and then continuing to the other until it's finished. If you have a really good eye for copying you can make a decent copy...but you won't learn anything.

You don't absorb an understanding of the WHY something looks the way it does. Then you can't use those principles to aid your own original drawings.

I encourage young artists-usually against their stubborn wills to use planning in their drawings. To use a method.

CONSTRUCTION MEANS CONTROLLING YOUR DRAWINGS AND MAKING THEM HAVE A SENSIBLE PLAN

Starting with "Construction". The most important tool you need.


I started taking Kali's eyeballed copies and drawing over them to build the drawings out of large forms that in turn are carrying smaller forms and details.

Then I thought, maybe I should show her how to construct even a stylized drawing.

CONSTRUCTING A GRANNY

This is a beautiful, well planned design.

It has:
Contrasts in shapes, sizes, angles, positions.
Negative shapes to draw your eye to the positive shapes. Her cheek compared to her eyes and mouth, for example.
Room for the features to move.
Silhouette
Line Of Action
Shapes are well balanced
Details fit into the forms; they don't exist in their own planes

On top of all those skilled, planned artistic principles, it's funny.




Here's another character I constructed.

When drawing a form-such as the cranium,

Draw both sides at once-draw the whole shape of the cranium.

Look at both sides to see that it makes a convincing form, not wonky or melty.Draw your biggest forms first-each on both sides of the form.

The cranium.
The lower face
The torso
The legs.

Then take each of those major forms and divide them into the next level of parts that make them up.

Cranium into eyes-make sure the eyes fit well into the cranium-that they look like part of the head.

Lower face-break up into jaw, cheeks and mouth-make all those parts work together each shape fits into the next.


Kali started doing this and her drawings instantly got better, more convincing.
I took one of her improved sketches and made it a little more solid.
Here's more Kali sketches before my second fine tuning. She gets better with every planned drawing she does. She is naturally gifted and learns fast. The more methods she uses the more her gifted eye will understand the why of the beautiful.

http://kalikazoo.blogspot.com/

You can do this too. Learn faster by learning why and how things work. Don't rely merely on talent.



Wanna try one? Using THE METHOD?
We have also been studying how to construct and draw Bugs Bunny, by copying McKimson and Scribner.

Bugs is really subtle and hard to draw!

Want me to show you how to construct them both ways?

After I see how you do on the Ramjet contruction, I'll post Bugs - who is more difficult because he is more 3 dimensional and has smaller details.

Great Character Design

Here are some great character designs, all from one single cartoon.Each one is different - a specific character, yet they are all in the same style family.
They are deceptively simple, yet they have all the design principles I talk about in my manuals.

Plus they're funny.
Here's some brilliant organic asymmetry.