1 Preston Blair He started by drawing from the Preston Blair construction lessons. This teaches the logic (the brainy part) of drawing 3 dimensionally.
2 Copy Classic Model Sheets
3 Copy Classic Cartoons (Using knowledge from lessons) Then he moved to draw poses from classic cartoons while trying to APPLY the construction lessons to the poses. Copying classic cartoons teaches you a lot about posing, acting, angles and more. But do it after you start to understand construction. You can see his first sketches (Chicken Hawk) are a bit hesitant or shaky, but then later he gets more confident (Porky Pig). That means it's starting to sink in. Practice makes the concepts from the lessons sink in! It's not enough to understand a theory. You have to apply it over and over again, until you understand it instinctively!
4 Draw lots and lots of studies-not just one time He drew lots and lots of studies from the cartoons. the more he does, the more it all sinks in and the better he gets.
5 Draw Toys to Learn Even More about Construction
6 Draw the Same Drawings Again to try to fix Problems This is a very important and useful step. Be your own critic. Analyze your studies. Write down what you think is wrong, THEN DRAW IT AGAIN AND TRY TO FIX THE MISTAKES! You will improve very fast this way.
8 Do Cleanups Of Good Cartoon Drawings Doing tight cleanups of good drawings also helps all the concepts sink in. I wouldn't make this step 1, though. It's not enough just to have a crisp clean line. You need to know where to put the lines so that the lines make the shapes look solid and convincing. That's where learning construction comes in. Doing all these lessons together makes everything make more sense and makes your drawings get better and more convincing.
7 Get A Job Cleaning Up Someone With Experience If Mitch keeps going this way, I'll send him some cleanup or inking work and he will learn even more, but he is taking all the smart steps towards getting skills and knowledge of functional cartooning.
Hey Mitch, I have a couple suggestions or critiques for you. If you are man enough to have me do it in a post, let me know.
I really do appreciate your love gifts! Thanks loads.
Robert Davis Sarah Johnston Nico Colaleo Stephen Rogers Jason Heath Adam Koford Joel Mackey Marlo Meekins Leo Brodie thistler productions/Josh Salmon Mitch Leeuwe Ian Maxwell
This week's Mighty Mouse Cartoon is loaded with all my obsessions.
RANGER TELEVISIONthanks to Ted for the color image
MOUSE FAMILIES! AVOID DOMESTIC STRIFE - DRIVE A RAMBLER!
Credits:
Script by Tom Minton Character Designs: Jeff Pigeon, Carole Holiday, me BG Paintings: Vicky Jensen Direction: Me Sheet Timing: Bob Jaques Layouts: Jim Gomez, Mike Kazaleh, Lynne Naylor, Ishtvan Majoros, Bruce Timm, Ken Boyer
I forget who did the storyboard. If you remember, let me know! Byron Vaughns? Jim Smith?
This means you need to know how to use negative areas in your drawings. Basil Wolverton has a way of drawing ugly that is actually very cute. He uses strong contrasts, negative spaces and obvious distinct forms. The details in the cross-hatching do not try to hide the beauty and imagination of the statement. If you erased the cross-hatching , the shapes would still be distinct and funny.
Avoidance Of Clutter I stared at this for awhile and still don't know what I'm looking at.
A lot of young (or amateurish) artists have a problem with clutter. I was talking to a student the other day who asked me to look at his drawings on his blog and they had a typical problem. Too cluttered.
Some clutternuts will draw a head shape and completely fill it with the face. No empty spaces. All fill. That makes the face hard to see, and also makes it hard to animate expressions. You need space above your eyebrows if you want your eyebrows to move and make expressions, for example.
You need empty spaces to draw your attention to filled spaces.
Clarity Of Design VS Ambiguity A lot of young cartoonists are influenced by modern comic strip "art". Many strips have characters that you have to stare at for a few minutes before you can even see which part is the face. Where the mouth or nose is, etc...What expression the character is trying to make.
Shameful.
Every design and drawing should commit to itself. It should be absolutely clear and distinct, so you have total control over what you are trying to say. Organic Drawing
Learning and applying the cartoonists' code, our fundamental promise to the audience and our debt to our forefathers.
Bob Clampett, Tex Avery, Jim Tyer, Milt Gross and the rest are up in cartoon Heaven staring down at us wondering what the heck happened to the art they created and took to such high levels.
We should be able to take the head start they gave us and do work that makes them not only proud, but jealous!
This course explores 2 essential concepts of cartooning that just seem to have been completely abandoned
Exaggeration is not some uncontrolled anarchy like many stuffy animation critics would have you believe. Tex Avery was a highly structured master of what cartoons are and he was very careful in planning his seemingly crazy ideas.
Cartoon characters need to look alive, and motivated from within if they are to engage the audience. Drawing characters that look alive seems to be a rare skill today: Instead of life, we get a lot of pointy graphic clutter. I want students to learn to draw CHARACTERS, as opposed to graphic symbols. You should think of them as real creatures and draw them as if they are controlling the action, not being pushed around by you and a commitee of executives.
Using simple organic characters made of pears and spheres. 30s rubber hose character principles are continued and added to by more principles that make the animation and drawings more natural or "organic".
Overlapping Action/Follow Through Weight Through Timing Specific Walks and Runs Lip synch For Assorted Muzzles and Beaks 4 legged characters Timing Variations - Avoiding tricks
The visual language of acting Acting in cartoons consists of appealing to 2 senses, the eye and the ear.
The voice actors tell your ears some emotions and the animator tells your eyes how the characters feel.
You should be able to do a story in complete pantomime using the visual tools that are at our command.
In this course, we would learn just the very basics of cartoon acting tools. In the next year's more advanced course we would explore more subtlety and specific acting. Expressions Starting with simple basic expressions and the basic emotions, to get used to drawing them with clarity and form. PosesLearn to make bold, distinct clear poses that tell how the character feels using all the good cartoon principles. Mouth Shapes - Generic mouth shapes are better than Specifically Disney mouth shapes, but not as good as mouth shapes specific to the character and the scene. Training your eye and brain to see that.
Studying Classic Cartoon Acting:
Generic-early Disney, Tom and Jerry Slightly Specific - Tex Avery More Specific – Chuck Jones
Your eye and your brain are mortal enemies. Your eye is a liar, but a sometimes intuitive interpreter. Your brain is an analyst that has been dulled by too many kicks in the head from modern culture.
I want to train both these important faculties and this will enable you to learn faster and make you a much more aware and inventive functional cartoonist.
The art of cartoons is the art of distilled fun. It should be fun to learn how to cartoon. It should be fun to make cartoons. Your goal should be to give the audience more fun than they ever imagined possible.
Here, I partially filled out the ex sheets for you.
I marked off all the beats and bars to the left. Each key pose happens on the beat that is numbered next to the drawings.
I wrote which beats had what lyrics and how many inbetweens to get to each post. Note that beats 6 to 10 re-use a few drawings that cycle left and right.
So you don't need to redraw the same drawings over and over again. Draw them once, then repeat them where the ex sheets tell you to.
When I was a kid, I loved Terrytoons. I still do! There was a Saturday Morning Mighty Mouse Show that was really cool.It had bumpers with Mighty Mouse riding a rocket and talking to us in a different voice than he had in the cartoons.
Then they would show classic Terrytoons from the 40s and 50s. These were fully animated but I knew there was something unique and strange about them. They were good but sort of slapdash at the same time.
I also had super 8 silent movies that I ran over and over for my friends. Woody Woodpecker, Zippy The Chimp, Ub Iwerk's Puss In Boots and a Gandy Goose and Sourpuss cartoon. The cartoon was a take off on Mickey's Trailer. I must have watched that cartoon a million times.
Terrytoons made a practice of taking cartoons that were hits 10 years earlier and copying them using their own characters, now that the gags were completely out of date. It's a very ignorant yet funny practice. Joe Barbera would do something similar all through the 60s. He was always behind the times, but in a really funny way - like the episodes where Fred would sing Rock 'N' Roll.Gandy is a loveable homosexual. Sourpuss was a mean curmudgeon. Gandy and Sourpuss had a funny relationship. They slept together and would invade each other's dreams. Sourpuss was the asshole character and Gandy loved him nonetheless. Their relationship inspired Ren and Stimpy.
Later when I teamed up with Ralph, he let me explore bizarre domestic situations in the Bakshi Adventures Of Mighty Mouse.
It was all practice for the Ren and Stimpy Show and my other cartoons. There is something inherently fascinating to me about domestic squabbles. They are a never ending supply of funny material.
Here, why don't you bone-up on Gandy and Sourpuss and I will reward your research on Friday.
Here's the latest lesson from the world's cheapest animation school.
ANIMATING TO A BEAT: The 12x Beat
12x is a very standard unit of time in cartoons. It's roughly the time it takes for a human to take a step in a normal walk. A fast walk would be 8x per step. Pepe Le Pew's hop cycle is 12x per hop.
Here is a perfect scene to learn the essential concept of animating to tempos. The scene is very simple and basically just moves from one pose to the next to the beat. No fancy overlapping action or secondary motions to distract you from the core concept of beats.
It's good to study just because it is so simple. A beginning animator needs to get used to how long a beat is in frames. This song is a 12x beat. Sing along and tap your foot to it, until you memorize the rhythm. Then do it later when you don't have the animation in front of you. After a while you will know what a 12x beat feels like.
THE FIRST FEW "KEYS"
The music in this scene is 2 beats per second, or 12 frames per beat. Each of these frames below is a key drawing. They are the drawings that you see and feel for each beat - the important drawings. The rest of the drawings are on the way to these keys. Those are the inbetweens.
Each key is either 12x or 24x away from the other keys next to them. You should number the keys according to which frame they would appear in your animation test. Number your ex sheets that way too.This would be frame 25 (1 frame past the first 2 beats of pose 1.)
THIS IS THE SECOND POSE IN THE SONG
In the beginning of the song Oswald holds each pose for 2 beats.
Add 24x to to frame 25 and you get frame 49. Got it?
Then it goes to a new pose on every beat. Watch the film frame by frame. Number the inbetweens by counting backwards from the key. If there are 4 inbetweens on the way to frame 49 and they are on "1's", then they will be numbered 48, 47, 46, 45 The mouths are animated on separate levels, so that the body and head animation can be cycled or reused. When you animate this scene, animate the actions first. After you shoot it and see it working, then go back and animate the mouths on a separate level. Some of the poses are held for a few frames once they stop. The face keeps singing while the body is stopped.
Watch the clip. The song starts on the second scene. If you copy this animation, you will benefit greatly. If you shoot it, send me a link and I will post some of them.
Just to confuse things, the clip is running at 30x per second ... like video. Film is 24x per second so you have to calculate a bit. Some of the frames are repeated to make it run at 30x per second.
That's why you see some double images in the clip. If you follow my instructions above as to how to number the drawings, it will end up at 24x per second.
Toys are Better Than Life Drawing for Cartoon Construction Studies
Life drawing in theory can be useful to an animator. It can teach you perspective and construction, foreshortening and the like, but in reality, it's very hard to look at very complicated structures of human beings and break them down into fundamentals you can use for cartoon shapes.
You get too easily distracted and confused by the tons of details on real live creatures. You can't see the underlying forms easily.
Most cartoons don't show any important influence from life drawing anyway. Even the ones that are supposed to be "realistic". They suffer from the confusion between detail and form. Form is more important than detail.
I'd put some examples up, but some folks will freak out.
The details need to follow the physics of the forms, and the more detailed your cartoon design is, the harder it is to control - especially if the underlying form is faulty to begin with. Drawing well sculptured toys makes the fundamentals of construction and perspective much easier to grasp, and just as importantly to then be able to instantly apply them to your cartoon drawings. When you turn a toy around, you can see how the features change shape as they bend around the curved surfaces.If the head tilts up, then the features that stick out (noses) start to obscure the features above. You see more of the underside of the form than the top. This may sound obvious, but try to draw it! Construction is not something that comes natural to me. I naturally draw "by design", that is to just put shapes that balance well together in 2 dimensions. That's a fault, because it doesn't mean the characters will turn well when animated.
Some folks have a natural eye (or brain) for construction - like Jim Smith, who just somehow sees the structure of something instantly. I see the details first and have to force myself to think about forms. (Squinting your eyes helps blur details and allows you to see the underlying structures better)
When I draw toys, it helps me to get more used to the logic of structures in space. If I did it a lot, it would start to become second nature and I wouldn't have to think about it so much.
Today, when almost everybody draws ridiculously flat, real animation can't even exist. We have to rely on silly tricks to zip characters from one abstract flat pose to the next. This severely limits what we can achieve creatively.
WHEN YOU COPY, DRAW SLOW, CAREFUL AND THINKNote on the 3/4 poses, the feet have no perspective...(except for that pink stumpy thing on the right)
When you copy something, there is a purpose to it: to learn something. If you draw too fast, you will not learn anything.
You want to carefully study your model.
When I am learning something, I tend to draw stiff, because I am thinking about what I am trying to learn. The drawings don't come out all pretty with clean flowing lines and stuff.
When you study, you are trying to be accurate, as opposed to beautiful and flowing.
Once you have done your stiff drawings, you can loosen up a bit and then try again from memory and see if what you learned sunk in.
I did this quick sketch at a pizza joint a couple days after my Top Cat study. It's a little wonky, but some of what I sketched slowly 2 days earlier sunk in.
If you also start to study and you draw slowly and carefully, and critique your own studies honestly, then you will absorb much information that later you can apply to your own work.
If you want to learn construction well, this is a very good exercise. Draw toys. You can draw the same angles that I did above and compare them to mine, then try these new angles below.
If you want me to critique them, put links in the comments to your drawings.You can also take your drawings into Photoshop along with the photos and lay them on top of each other at a % to check how accurate your copies are. See, Kali is doing it: http://kalikazoo.blogspot.com/2007/09/muskie-soaky.html
So we combined them and made a real tear jerker to prove to the world how much pathos oozed from us.
INTERMISSION
You're probably wondering why Kirk has an English accent. I don't know either. Ralph did me a favor and directed the voice because he thought I was too busy, so it came back as a wacky surprise.
I would have to save my intensity characters for later cartoons...
TRIVIA: The title of the cartoon (and Polly Pineblossom wanting MM to help those less fortunate than her) was inspired by a show I watched growing up in Canada.
Anyone wanna hear backstories of the making of this and other MM cartoons? I'm still working on the chipmunks one.
BTW, I'm pitching the concept of sponsoring online shows like this, with bumpers, shorts and ads attached, so toss in a short comment if you like the format...(a clean one, if possible!)
Before I discovered him, all my drawn and acting expressions came from standard cartoon acting. I saw "Detective Story" in the early 80s and it opened the door for me to a much wider range of emotion, emotions I had personally experienced in life, but had never seen translated in cartoons, or even to that extent in live action.
I immediately started using more human expressions and gestures in my cartoon work, much to the horror of my Saturday Morning cartoon bosses at Hanna Barbera and Filmation.Kirk Douglas' talented back.
Kirk Douglas has a presence that makes you feel like he's really there in your living room. Most actors seem to be acting and allowing you to watch, but Kirk is pulsing, surging flesh and blood that commands you to experience his every conflicted emotion. He's not on the screen. He's right there next to you scorching you with his fetid breath. I wanted that in my cartoons.
Not until Ralph Bakshi hired me to direct Mighty Mouse, did anyone encourage my burning need to bring actual human emotion to cartoons.
Basil Wolverton is one of the most original and funniest cartoonists of all time. He invented this crazy gross but cute style that no one has ever topped. He inspired the gross closeups in Ren and Stimpy and lots of 60s cartoonists, including R. Crumb. He was also a preacher!
You have to see his art in the flesh! We went on a trek to Santa Ana last Saturday to see his wonderful stuff. Of course Kali and Eddie just had to get some free ground pig faces nearby. Basil predicted Eddie.
The show is free, but you'll want to pick up a really great book on Basil's work while you're there.
This course is designed to make the graduates as skilled as possible.
On top of that, they would be trained to be extremely observant and analytic. They would be able to adapt to many drawing styles, because they would know the difference between what is a universal drawing principle and what is a superficial stylistic habit.
It doesn't matter if you plan to be a 2d animator, CG animator or even a Flash animator, these skills will put you at the top of your chosen branch of animation.
It's also designed to inspire the cartoonists to enjoy the immense potential of creativity that is possible when you combine skill, imagination and fun.
1st year
1) 1st Principles of Cartoon Drawing
Basic Construction
Traditional Animated Cartoon construction: We will learn classic cartoon construction in the same order that classic cartoonists learned it, starting with rubber hose construction and working our way towards sphere and pear construction. http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2007/02/rise-and-fall-of-construction-in.html
Toy Construction: Drawing cartoon shapes in actual 3 dimensions Cartoon toys are cartoon shapes (non-anatomical) modeled into actual 3 dimensional objects.How better to learn how cartoony shapes look in different positions than to turn toys in different positions and draw them?http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2007/09/top-cat-turnaround-toy-construction_19.html
Classic cartoon construction is strictly theoretical. Drawing toys puts the theories to the test and will make you draw more dimensional than you ever thought possible.
Silhouettes These drawing tools are used for the purpose of clarity. They give the artist control of how the audience perceives their poses.
Drawing Funny Near the end of the year, once the students have a good grasp of basic cartoon drawing tools, then we will apply them to the task of making people laugh by visuals alone. I'll have to think about how to actually teach this. It may be more of a case of encouraging it and inspiring people by showing tons of examples from the funniest cartoonists in history.
2) Inbetweening and Cleanup
Historically, the most successful method for learning anything has been the apprenticeship system.In the early days of animation, cartoonists broke into the business by assisting more experienced animators.They cleaned up the animators' rough poses and drew the inbetweens.Being an assistant animator teaches you many important principles of animation. You just absorb what the animator is doing and then when you begin to animate yourself, you have a great head start.I think the first year students should inbetween and cleanup the 3rd and 4th year students' animation.
Cleanup itself is extremely important to good animation.Animation is about more than smooth motion. It is about clear distinct drawings, expressions and poses. Smooth motion of vague or sloppy drawings cannot compete with smooth motion of strong distinct entertaining drawings.
3) 1st Principles of Cartoon Motion
We would learn the basic tools of cartoon motion, step by step starting with rubber hose animation.
how to read and write ex sheets. -walks, double bounce walks, runs, basic movement, figure 8 motions, Overlapping Action basic lip synch, ¾ walks with animating backgrounds Animating the impossible-using the medium to do what only animation can do.
4) Life Drawing
Studying the general from life
with an emphasis on slow careful drawings, structure, perspective and proportions.
In the first year, we would concentrate on:
Proportions perspective foreshortening
Not much detailed anatomy until 2nd year.
Life drawing has not brought many tangible benefits to young animators' cartoon skills.I have seen many student portfolios that have decent life drawings, yet primitive cartoon drawings.Life drawing should be geared to help the student apply general skills from observing life to his cartoon drawings.That would be the aim of this life drawing class.No quick gesture drawings. Scribbling is not a useful animators' tool.
5) Caricature and Observation
Observation over style: Learning to use your eyes and senses to analyze, rather than copying trendy or established styles. When you sit down to caricature a person, you should try to bury all your preconceived notions of what "caricature style" is.
There is no caricature style. Each person is unique. Every person is a unique style and the person should dictate what you draw.
You should not filter the subject through what you think your style or your favorite caricaturist's style is.
The purpose of caricaturing in this course will be to break your prejudices. You will be amassing many many new shapes and forms that you can later apply to your animation characters.
You will learn how to see contrasts and how to exaggerate them, thus drawing attention to what makes people and shapes have a distinct clear visual overall statement.
This will help kill any tendencies to genericism that the rest of the business instills in young artists.
6) Applications
This class will be totally devoted to making sure that the students apply what they learn from their other classes to actual cartoon drawings and animation.This is a big hole in most animation schools. We will plug up the hole here.
If you learned foreshortening in life drawing yesterday, you will then do a bunch of drawings of Donald Duck using foreshortening.
If you learned new eye shapes or head shapes in caricature class, you will draw simpler more cartoony characters that use those shapes.
7) ROOTS - History of cartoons
cartoons, comics and animation from 1920 or so till about 1965.(this would be every year and each year I would have the students study aspects of classic cartoons that relate to their exercises.
This course is meant to broaden the cartoonists' horizons and to inspire them. Disney will merely be one of very many styles we will look at.
Electives
If I had my choice in electives, I would design courses that would broaden the interests of cartoonists but at the same time enhance their creativity and ideas.
Music,
Dance (every year)
Technical Crap Basic Flash
Great Entertainers from other fields
Gene Krupa Jack Benny Fred Astaire Kirk Douglas Joan Crawford Peter Lorre The Three Stooges Buster Keaton Elvis Frank Sinatra Ella Fitzgerald Cab Calloway
many many more...
I'm curious as to how many people would take a course like this. If you are thinking of going to an animation/cartooning school in the next couple years, read this outline of my year one and tell me in the comments whether you would sign up for something like this. (I will add the other years in posts soon)
If I get enough interest, maybe I can take it to an art school.
I know one thing. If I started a school for cartoons and animation, the graduates would be in great demand throughout the industry.
Many cartoonists who have gone through the rigorous Spumco training have gone on to great success and fame.
This course would be even more focused on the students because there would be no show deadlines complicating the matter.
I bet if I get a hundred or 2 comments from wanna-be students, we'd have a good argument to sell this school to someone.
Imagine that you were creating the curriculum for an animation college. What course titles would you start with (like: Pencils Gone Wild - Jim Tyer's Crazy Drawings)?
and I answered:
I’m actually going to do a blog post breaking down my ultimate cartoon school course, year by year.I sure wouldn’t start with Jim Tyre or “crazy” stuff!I would teach power skills and would have the students learn principles in the same order that the original classic animators did.
So it got me thinking about it and I figured I would write up a curriculum for a cartoon school that I would have loved to attend.A school with a definite practical purpose to it.
No mushy ambiguous or mystical courses, just meat and potatoes.Designed to give the artists the most possible skills and super observant eyes that can discern the difference between style and principles.
To give the students the most control possible over their creativity and destiny.
The whole course is based on the fastest period of growth in animation history: from 1930-1938 or so. What those amazing animators learned in that period they learned by trial and error and audience reaction. - While working on production!
We have the benefit of their learning and can surely learn something fast in 4 years if we follow what they did and take advantage of some hindsight.
Joseph Baptista Mitch Loidolt Eric Parks Dragan Kovacevic Robert Holmen Carol Barker Barbara Miller Brett Thompson Galen Fott Douglas Fortenberry Edward Watts
If was a programming exec, I would make shows formatted something like this:
MUSICAL BUMPER - TWIST AGAINST THE WILL OF THE MAN
COMMERCIAL FOR TOYS OF THE STARS TO GET NAKED WITH
CARTOON _ MIGHTY'S BENEFIT PLAN
This was my favorite of all the Bakshi Mighty Mouse episodes. It came out the closest to what I envisioned. There are many episodes that make me cringe. BTW, I have restored some scenes in this cartoon that were cut out way back when. They aren't in this copy, but you can see the cartoon uncut wherever I do a retrospective.
OHOORIDS CEREAL COMMERCIAL
PREVIEW OF FEATURE MUSICAL - GIRLS OF ROCK 'N' ROLL Here's some really great animation of Alvin and the Chipettes. (Steve, who did it? Glen Keane did some didn't he? Dan Haskett? Rebecca Reese?) And how weird are the human character designs? It's like 2 different movies!
FINAL BUMPER - RELIGION IS PRACTICED BY EVEN PRIMITIVE CULTURES - GREAT SONG!
Ross Bagdasarian is one of my childhood heroes. Not only did he write and sing funny cartoony songs, he came up with one of the most unique family stories in history.
Ralph Bakshi glorified Ross' originality.
A lonely man finds love and companionship in his own back yard.
Ralph was the first man to let me share my great love of pathos with the world.
What does every man need in his life?4 foot tall hairless rodents!
See Elwy and The Tree Weasels tonight. With assorted extra rodent treats!
Don Martin is a super cartoony cartoonist whose view of life is firmly rooted in humanity. He doesn't draw "realistic" but he appeals to the real observations and funny bones of real humans. No whitebread mentality. Hey check out his early work for science fiction magazines!
Well, this whole blog is dedicated to my own view of what makes quality, but I thought I'd just spell it out.
There is no one ingredient that makes "quality" for me. I like a lot of different things. Mainly if something grabs me, then I like it. It's afterwards that I try to analyze why I liked it, mainly so I can learn and improve my own work.
You don't have to have every possible good ingredient in a work of entertainment for me to consider it "quality". Mainly it has to be fun. I can break down fun into separate qualities:
Charismatic Fun CharactersNot very many animation cartoonists have succeeded in creating truly charismatic characters with defined personalities. They mostly happened at Warner Bros. Popeye came from comic strips, which were more consistently successful in creating strong characters.
The Flintstones came from the Honeymooners. I guess that was kind of cheating, but the designs and voices brought a lot to the characters. There are lots of cartoons I like that have star characters, like Woody Woodpecker or Tex Avery's MGM cartoons, but there isn't much to the characters themselves. The cartoons have other traits that make them entertaining. Cartoony This includes not just the drawing style, but the whole attitude. You can have caroony drawings, cartoony animation, cartoony voices, music, sound effects and on and on.
Humanity
Humanity is an outlook that certain artists have. They share it with regular folk. It's a clear and honest look at life. These creators observe the world in its raw, funny and humanly faulty truths. They make art that reflects and exaggerates real human motivations, characteristics and what regular folk on the streets find amusing. It's not polished up, sweetened and made phony. Warners was such a breath of fresh air when it found its style, because its whole attitude was reality-even though the cartoons were highly imaginative and much more cartoony than Disney. They reflected real people. They weren't archaic artificial abstractions like Disney cartoons. Mickey is a cute character but has no soul.
Disney and his followers - to me, lack humanity and that's the main reason I can't get into them. Even if there is some measure of skill, it's not enough. It's not a skill in telling life's stories or noting the interesting things about human nature, it's a skill in whitewashing life or now imitating what has already been done by previous whitewashers.
These creators are just too polite to admit life and humanity as they are in all their glorious imperfections, blemishes and rudeness.These simplistic characters don't act like real people, they don't have honest recognizable motivations. It's like what Christians think people should be, rather than what talented entertainers observe life to be really like. As if they get their characters out of film school books instead of from the street or the neighborhood.
Nowadays the main characters - that we are supposed to root for- are positively wimpy and I can't imagine anyone wanting to identify with that. That doesn't mean the cartoons can't be successful. But I think if there was competition from more sincere less naive outlooks of humanity, it would be harder for these things to make money.
Creativity- Impossible Things That Can Only Happen in CartoonsI'm amazed at how little magic there is in cartoons anymore. It used to be an innate obligation among cartoonists. It was our job to do the impossible and make it seem real. Unfettered imagination fell out of fashion in the 60s and has never truly recovered.
SkillI certainly admire skill. Bob McKimson is one of my all time favorite animators and when he is directed by Clampett he is super entertaining. Classic Disney cartoons are skillful, but that's not always enough for me.
I can study Kahl's animation with awe and mathematical admiration, but it doesn't move me the way fun animation does.
I think every artist should amass as many skills as possible-but recognize the difference between skill and style. Skills are style neutral.
Skill is not an end in itself. It's merely your tool kit.
The more skill you have, the more variety of creative things you can make-as long as your skills aren't confused with stylistic cliches.
Fun
Fun is not the same as funny. Swing and Rock 'N' Roll music is fun but not usually meant to be funny. Woody Woodpecker cartoons aren't particularly funny, but they are lively, colorful. musical, wacky and ....fun.
Betty Boop is really fun. Fun as opposed to dreary.This kind of movie reminds me of the feeling of going to your room without supper. Or doing your homework.
FunnyNot all classic cartoons are funny, but most strove to be. I always strive for it, even if I don't always succeed. Did it Blow My Mind
Now I don't expect every cartoon to blow my mind, but the ones that do are at the top of my list.
I borrowed this phrase from Eddie, because it's so right.
Does It Swing?
To me, cartoons and lively music go together. My favorite cartoons tend to be musicals,
The Fleischer cartoons are probably the swingingest of all time. They had the best music during the swingingist period in American history- the 1930s.
All through the 30s, mostcartoons were timed to songs. This gave way in the 40s to a more straight ahead style of timing. Chuck Jones for example would time his cartoons sstraight ahead (although to beats) and Carl Stalling would score it aftewards.
Clampett continued the 30s tradition of timing the whole cartoon to music and songs, not just to a beat.
You don't have to have every single quality I listed to make a great cartoon, but the mnore you have, the more I will love it.
Here's one that has almost everything and in heaping helpings:
Post Mortem:
Well sadly most of the qualities that I look for in cartoons are considered corny now, or have just been forgotten. You don't have to have all these qualities in a cartoon to be quality, but the more you have, the more quality it is to me.
I'm amazed by how many people will argue against all this, and how vehemently. I get this comment a lot, "Why do all cartoons have to be funny and cartoony?" And I always answer, "They don't. But why can't at least a few be?"
Eddie says I should go further and demand that they all be. In my honest opinion, at least 80% of cartoons should strive to do the sorts of magic that only cartoons can do, but we don't even have 5% today. Cartoons should by definition be cartoony. Shouldn't most music be melodic?
It's truly baffling to me how much energy and argument I have to summon up just to convince the world to let us have fun again. "Oh Pleeeease have some ice cream!"
That's why this blog exists. To try to revive some excitement for what made cartoons cartoons in the first place. To bring back lightness and joy to cartoons. Distilled fun. Without the filler.
What is this mysterious beast that everyone knows when they see it but few ever bother to define? People toss the word around maybe even more than they toss around another mystical term: "Story".
I think Quality means very different things to different groups of people and therefore is not a very useful term.
If you were to write a meaningful review of an animated film, it would be more useful to define what specific elements you are judging that add up to your definition of quality.
DIFFERENT HUMAN TYPES DEFINE QUALITY BY DIFFERENT CRITERIA
A modern feature animation producer's idea of qualitywould probably be different than an animated film critic's definition, although with some overlap. Both those general types of people represent many others like themselves. Quality = amount of details. Sure, you say everyone is different and an individual, but I'll say probably not. Most people fall into groups. Within each group there might be some subtle variances that to others in the group seem large, but to the outsider the differences are negligible.
ANIMATION CRITIC CRITERIA
Professional critics who specialize in animation have a certain general set of criteria in common. When they watch a feature, they tend to look for:
How It Compares To Disney
Disney created the template that we still -70 years later- unquestioningly follow. The rules he set for what makes quality animation are completely different than what makes quality in other mediums and we have been chained to this ever since.
Many animation critics do not realize how insiduously they have been brainwashed by Disney's rules.
Story
No one knows what story is anyway, but everyone holds it in high regard. Animated features have completely formulaic predictable stories, yet critics still manage to find ways to talk about them, because story in a writer's mind means "words" and words are easier to write about than pictures, acting, cutting or pure entertainment value.
Dramatic
Are there live action style sequences in it? That's worth a few points because live action is inherently superior to mere cartoons.
Kitschy Cuteness This style of cute definitely flips a switch on animation critics. It reminds them of when they were 3 and first saw Snow White.
Pathos Somewhere burned in our genetic memory is the knowledge that cartoons are supposed to be funny and make you feel good. Everyone instinctively knows it, but funny doesn't win awards or garner a lot of serious respect.
Disney figured this out long ago and came up with the idea to do the opposite of what cartoons are good at. Instead of making us happy (laughing equals good feelings) he decided to make us miserable and figured out ingenious ways to make us cry. "Hey fellas, let's shoot the character's Mom! That'll destroy everyone in the theatre!"
The critics eat this stuff up. I think they like the surprise that a cartoon can be something other than what cartoons are good at, even though it's no longer a surprise. It would be a surprise today if a cartoon dared to be a cartoon again.
Animation producers prey on the critics' auto-reactions to fake pathos and have devised a handful of filmic tricks that push the cry button.
Did It Give Me Something To Talk About That Will Make Me Feel Smart?
Of course a critic's trade is to overanalyze everything and try to find "meaning" in their entertainment. If they just said "I like it. It made me cry and had lots of action and pop-culture references!" maybe no one would take them seriously - although that would be very useful to the audience.
DISCLAIMER: Of course I'm generalizing and not every critic fits the generalization exactly.
Leonard Maltin is a big exception. He writes about what he feels naturally when he watches entertainment. In clear English with no circumlocutions. He was one of the first brave souls to champion pure entertainment like The Fleischers, The Three Stooges, Bob Clampett and other geniuses who traditionally had been snubbed by the critics. We owe him a lot.
YOUR DAD'S DEFINITION OF QUALITY (NON ARTIST ANIMATION PRODUCERS)
People who aren't actually interested in art (like most animation producers) don't judge the quality of something by its aesthetic parts.
Is this the ugliest character design ever? Do you know of anything that can compete?
They have no choice but to judge the art by how complicated or "real" it looks. Real to the untrained eye. I've used the analogy of your Dad choosing a painting to hang over the couch and deciding by counting how many individual leaves the artist painted in the trees.
Not by how well composed the scene is, not by the flair of the brushtrokes, not by the sensitive blending of the intricate colors. Not by the feelings it evokes. "GIMME LOTS OF LEAVES AND MORE CLOUDS! MAKE SURE THE LEAVES ARE GREEN! AND I WANT A BLUE SKY!" For the most part, feature animation producers are like your Dad.
Details- Quantity - Moles, Pubes and Pores Count - Moles per Square Inch
Pocahontas consults the wisdom of the magical pussy-tree, complete with every fold and crevice.
Ugly Non-cartoony Tasteless Design Animation producers hate appealing cartoony characters. They think simple, well-balanced shapes are immature and cheap looking. Dic really was cheap, but felt guilty about it and they didn't want the audience to think it so they designed their characters too lumpy and detailed.
Now, big budget feature companies can put real money into their Dic -inspired designs and make the characters uglier than was ever thought possible.
Hard To Do
If it's really hard to do and all the animators and assistants want to kill themselves, then you know you're getting your money's worth.
Crowds Crowds are very hard to do and therefore in great demand from quality animation producers.
It doesn't matter if each character in the crowd is god-awful ugly, because there are so many that you probably won't have time to notice. Spectacle Is It More Expensive Than The Competition? How trendy is it?
Today's trend is to have pop-culture references everywhere and to have everyone have 'tude, and to have the women be smarter and tougher than the men.
I've never understood trend-think but that's the executives' stock and trade. They don't have artistic taste or story instinct. They only have ugly details and trends as their creative tools.
MY CRITERIA OF QUALITY
Well, this whole blog is dedicated to my own view of what makes quality, but I thought I'd just spell it out.
There is no one ingredient that makes "quality" for me. I like a lot of different things. Mainly if something grabs me, then I like it. It's afterwards that I try to analyze why I liked it, mainly so I can learn and improve my own work.
You don't have to have every possible good ingredient in a work of entertainment for me to consider it "quality". Mainly it has to be fun. I can break down fun into separate qualities:
Charismatic Fun Characters
Cartoony
Humanity
Creativity
Skill
Fun
Funny
Did it Blow My Mind
I borrowed this phrase from Eddie, because it's so right.
Does It Swing?
Hmmm, this is going to take forever to illustrate and describe, so I'll leave my explanation till tomorrow...
Like I said before, I sure envy "realistic" artists that actually draw really well, like Gene Colan.His poses are solid yet wacky at the same time. The few times I've had the opportunity to use artists like this, they had an easier time adapting to more cartoony styles that I needed for animation. Plus they could draw things from any angle and had good senses of composition.
MARIE SEVERIN
Here's a little known Marvel artist: Marie Severin.
She was the one who I think designED Marvel's color style, which was quite different than the other comic brands at the time. She used a lot of subtle colors and greys. She created a real mood for the Marvel artists and stories.
She also drew really well! She was probably their best "cartoony artist":
Marie could make expressions even with characters who had masks covering their faces!
She did a lot of stories for Not Brand Ecchh. She drew very solid anatomy, funny poses and could even caricature the other Marvel artists' style!
I especially loved the way she caricatured Ditko. Ditko created the rubbery bent legs and distorted poses that so many other Spiderman artists followed after.
My idea of a really great creative studio is to mix animation artists and cartoonists with some of these solid draftsmen from related fields of cartooning.
The different approaches-if encouraged - allow all the artists to grow and create things they would not have thought of in their own inbred environments.
Jim Smith, Vincent Waller and Bob Camp helped us more cartoony-animation artists aim higher with our skills and allowed us to break out of many animation cliches.
Ralph Bakshi started the "creator-driven" rebirth of cartoons with his NEW ADVENTURES OF MIGHTY MOUSE that came out on CBS in 1987. Many new-style cartoons flourished in the early 90s following Ralph's lead. My work on Mighty Mouse led straight to my own Ren and Stimpy Show a couple years later.
HOW TO FORMAT CARTOONS AND WORK WITH SPONSORS
If I had total control over not only my cartoons, but also the business and packaging, here is how I would air them.
Ralph hired me as the supervising director on Mighty Mouse and then I hired most of crew. It all came together really fast, but Ralph was the one who made sure that we were basically left alone by the network people to do our thing. It was the first cartoon series in at least 20 years that was actually made by cartoonists. We wrote, designed and directed it. I even changed the whole production system. I brought back the old "Unit- system" to replace the horrible anti-creative assembly line process that the other studios had been using on TV.
Everyone worked really hard because it was the first chance any of us had to actually have fun making cartoons. It launched many careers and revolutionized cartoons for awhile.
This system and process should come back. If it doesn't, talented cartoonists in animation are doomed to be replaced by computer geeks who can't draw but can use programs.
NIGHT OF THE BAT BAT
STORY BY JOHN K. AND JIM REARDON DIRECTED BY JOHN K.
I always thought Superheroes were funny, because the whole concept is so preposterous. Especially Batman and Robin who don't even have superpowers. They just have fancy underwear. This was my first spoof of the Dark Knight. I did another in the Ripping Friends, years later.
The story was forged in a funny way. I had the concept and the rough plot basically worked out. I had just hired Jim Reardon out of the infamous Cal Arts. He was a funny cartoonist so I said, "you'll be a writer." The kinds of gags he specialized in were "one-liners", gags that at the time seemed dated to me but funny none the less. Bob Hope style throwaway lines. Jim came up with so many that I actually got sort of mad at one point. I said "Can't you come up with more action or personality gags? This is a cartoon for Christ's sake - not a @#%*@#** sitcom! "
Then it dawned on me that I could make the one liners part of the plot and Jim and I reworked the story to make fun of Bob Hope type gags. Little did I expect that in a couple years one-liner cartoons would become all the rage in prime time, and here I was thinking they were dated!
I think this is also the first male cow who stands on 2 legs that ever appeared in cartoons. I wanted to have his teats sticking out, but that was too risque for Saturday Morning cartoons at the time so I kept them stuffed in his shorts. SOME STARS WHO WORKED ON THIS EPISODE:
RALPH LYNNE NAYLOR BRUCE TIMM KEN BOYER JIM SMITH BOB JAQUES EDDIE? VICKY JENSEN LIBBY SIMON ISTVAN JIM GOMEZ MIKE KAZALEH ANDREW STANTON JEFF PIGEON DAVE MARSHALL BIN MIKE PATAKI (AS the Cow) PATRICK PINNEY (MIGHTY MOUSE) CHARLIE ADLER (BAT BAT)
If I left anyone out, let me know and I'll add you! It was a long time ago and I don't remember every detail of who did what.
WHO WOULD PAY HARD CASH FOR A SHOW LIKE THIS TODAY?
Chris must have thought some of my lessons, advice, stories and cartoonist profiles were worth something to him because he dropped 25 big ones on that Paypal button to the right of the blog. He's the first one to do it, and no one even prompted him. Maybe some day this blog will find a way to support itself.
Wait a minute. When Joe Barbera died at the end of last year, you had a great post about him and how you met him when you were first starting out. You said he agreed with you that Hannah-Barbera's early stuff was way better than ScoobyDoo and it's clones, and he agreed with you. He couldn't understand what people saw in it. Now you're saying he deliberately pushed HB in that direction? Whats the story?
I read Ardy's comment and thought it deserved a good response. The answer is not simple though, and I doubt I can give a complete one in a single post, but I'll start...
JOE BARBERA TALENTED AND CONSERVATIVE
Joe Barbera was very talented, but he was also a very conservative guy. He wasn't someone to "push the envelope" or experiment. He liked to stick to the tried and true.
How else could he and Bill have made the same cartoon over and over again for 15 years straight at MGM?Once they had found their hit characters, Tom and Jerry, they never created any more. They just kept polishing their jewels. Why mess with a formula that works?
When Bill and Joe opened their TV studio in 1957, they had no choice but to break all the rules of how they had previously made their cartoons.
TV CARTOONS ARE CHEAPER THAN THEATRICAL CARTOONS
They had been used to making high-quality fully-animated Tom and Jerry cartoons for budgets around $35,000 per 6 minute short. With that kind of lush budget, you can take your time and do smooth, flowing animation. You can do a new angle for every scene in the cartoon. You can have shadows on the characters. You can have a small crew of top animators that know what you will approve and what you won't. You can watch over every detail of production and have it come out exactly the way you want.
To Joe, the more rounded the characters and the more lush the cartoons, the more quality they were. Joe was a very proud guy and he liked to be known as one of the top creators in the field of animation. He was a real Hollywood kind of guy.
Theatrical cartoons in the 50s began being dropped from many theaters and most cartoon companies closed shop. Now Joe and Bill - and all their animators were out of work. They were forced to innovate. It was that or starve.
The TV cartoons were $3,000 now per short - less than 10% of the budgets they were used to. Bill and Mike Lah (and maybe others) created a "limited animation" system that would allow them to do new cartoons every week at the terribly poor budgets.
LOW BUDGET RESTRICTIONS
Here are what you might think are the worst handicaps to quality that a low budget would cause:
Less Animation
They had to cut down the number of drawings in a cartoon from about 15,000 in a Tom and Jerry cartoon to a few hundred in a Huckleberry Hound cartoon.
To anyone who loves full animation they will not like animation that barely moves at all. Some people hate limited animation on the sheer grounds that there is not much animation in it. I'm not one of those. Joe Barbera was.
Less Camera Angles
Hanna Barbera Cartoons were made so that almost every shot was left to right with a low horizon. This way, the same animation drawings can be used in multiple scenes. If you think tricky camera angles are important to your storytelling, like Brad Birdand many others do, you aren't going to be happy with your new restriction.
This type of simple layout forces you to live or die on your characters, because that's what the audience is going to be looking at all the time - mainly their faces.
A Simpler Design Style
Joe didn't like Ed's designs when he was working for Tex Avery and he told him so. "Why are you drawing this Mr. Magoo stuff? No one wants that! People want round, cute, lovable characters."
Bill must have convinced him to use Ed's style because they had a theory that on small 50s black and white TV screens you would need simple looking easy to read characters that had bold thick lines around them. They didn't think Tom and Jerry designs would read as easily on TV then.
A Simpler Background Style
Tom and Jerry (top), Yogi Bear (below)
Tom and Jerry VS Huckleberry Hound
Simple backgrounds can be painted faster and again will probably read clearer on small tv screens. Too much detail will be lost with poor picture quality.Bill and Joe adopted the style that Tex and Ed Benedict had been using in the theatrical shorts at MGM.
Art Lozzi and Montealegre worked out a fast but appealing Background painting style.
The cartoons now had to be churned out at a greater rate than theatrical cartoons. There was no time to polish anything or even talk directly to every creative member of the team.
In fact, Bill and Joe split their directorial duties severely.
Joe would be involved up front in the creations of the characters. the general show concepts and the designs, while Bill would handle the actual production.
Joe worked with the voice actors- Daws Butler and Don Messick. ...with the writer-storyboard artists- Mike Maltese, Warren Foster, Dan Gordon, etc. ...with the designers -Ed Benedict, Dick Bickenbach
Bill handed out some of the production work to in-hose crew and freelanced the rest - the layouts, animation, ink and paint, backgrounds, camera etc.
He didn't personally supervise much of it. He used industry professionals whom he trusted and accepted whatever they handed him. It was the only way to meet the schedules and budgets.
Music Library Instead Of Custom Scores and Recordings
Whereas at MGM Bill worked directly with Scott Bradley to custom score every cartoon to each and every animated action, now he could only afford to use stock library music. (Like we did on Ren and Stimpy)
Bigger Crew and less Person to Person Communication
They had to hire a lot more artists and staff than they had ever supervised at MGM, so now many artists who had never worked with Bill and Joe directly were speedily doing HB work in their own styles with no time to get everyone to standardize. 2 key members of Tex Avery's crew helped forge the Hanna Barbera style.
All this lack of control probably horrified Joe. But it made him and Bill rich and more famous than ever. But less respected by their peers.
NEXT- The surprising creative advantages of the new cheaper assembly line system.
There were other mediums besides old cartoons that used to be good to kids and understood how strange kids' tastes are.
#1 rule of kid stuff. All kid products should be weird and make no sense. Logic is the enemy of fun. Any executives listening?
Toys used to be cool. Golden Books, comics and other related products all had their own styles and strange design customs.
One of the greatest kid design mediums in history was the Halloween Costume. I don't know who these designers were, but they all shared some traditions and odd ideas.
The basic concept that held all the infinite design variations together was this: A costume has to be a character who wears a drawing of himself on his shirt. I wish I knew what genius came up with that inspired idea! Wouldn't you love to have a shirt with a picture of yourself on it? I know Eddie would. It's even better if the character wears his friends on his shirt.
Another variation of the concept: The picture of the character on the shirt has to look different than the mask of the same character. It really helps if the colors also don't match. I have a feeling that the guys who made the masks never met the guys who made the shirts. Maybe they were outsourced to different continents?
I wonder where the patterns on the shirts came from? Were they inspired by medieval knights' costumes? Every little kid in the 50s and 60s looked like they were on the Children's Crusade on Halloween. Is that what Halloween is? A holdover of the Crusades?
KNOCK-OFFS ARE GOOD TOO
I love when companies just steal characters and do weird versions of them and give them funny names. This works for all toys and merchandise. Here's a great site with lots of cool costume fun! http://retrocrush.buzznet.com/archive2003/costumes/
As with everything, the modern version of this product category has completely degenerated.
OLD = COOL
NEW = POO
In the late 60s everything that was once cool went to Hell.Lumpy, bland, puffy brown stuff for kids. Imagine going on a crusade dressed like this? The infidels would know how weak western children have become and destroy what's left of our civilization in a flash of fire and blood.
The 50s and 60s was a Golden Age for kids. So what did the kids who had all this fun do when they grew up? They became dirty hippies and then corporate executives and ruined everything so that no more kids could ever have fun again! They took the prizes out of cereal, the violence out of cartoons, the fins off cars, played soft rock, went to Cal Arts and created reality shows.
Amid Amidi created the first animation magazine that really gave people who loved cartoons what they wanted in a magazine. They wanted rare art, interviews with lots of artists -known and lesser known- from every creative department in animation and some new opinions and insights that didn't follow the accepted ones that had been handed down for generations.
ANIMATION BLAST set the model for all the animation blogs that followed. Amid certainly inspired me to add my 2 cents worth every day.
The magazine is a classic and if you want to get back issues, better order them quick, because many of the issues have since sold out.
Here is an article from Amid's design issue. He interviewed me about my design hero, Ed Benedict.
There was one mistake in the article, and now I can correct it: This BooBoo model is the one I am talking about in the article. Boo Boo Bear's profile looks completely different than his front view. The BooBoo drawings printed in the article aren't Ed's. They are mine. I inbetweened Ed's 2 views of the character to show how to morph the one view to the next.
I like looking at Ed's development sketches. He takes an idea and then does lots of variations of it, looking for a design that clicks. If it didn't click, he'll toss the concept and he'll try another idea and develop that- all the time waiting for a design that is not only a design, but an instant iconic character.In other words, when you look at the final design, it's so much a character that it just seems like it's always existed. These are all his exploratory sketches as he was hunting through his brain for the finished character.Ed was an animator long before he became a designer. He animated on Oswald cartoons in the 30s (with Tex Avery, Bill Nolan and other stars), then did storyboards and layouts for commercials and layouts for Disney in the 40s. In the 50s he got his first break at character design on Tex Avery's shorts. By this time he knew functionally how to design characters that would work for animation and not merely look "designy". Even so, the animators at MGM resisted what he was doing at first. They didn't like the "UPA style" and thought it was impossible to animate. Ironically, they did some of the best stylized animation ever. A lot better than the animation in UPA's own cartoons!
Tex, on the other hand, loved Ed's work and the only condition he gave Ed, was that each drawing had to make the gag work. Ed layed out Tex's cartoons following Tex's storyboard poses. He didn't just design the characters as many "designers" do today. The designs had to be functional. There is no better training to be a character designer than to be an animator first. Then you know the difference between what can work, and what will just cause problems for the animators. (This advice applies to storyboard artists and writers too)
When Ed started designing the characters for Hanna Barbera's TV cartoons in the late 50s, he had a double problem.He had to design to please Joe Barbera as well as the audience. Joe never liked the stylized characters and only went along with it because it was the fashion. Ed would do his exploratory designs and then have to pull them back to please Joe who didn't like anything "too weird".
By the late 60s, Joe had pulled everything back so much that everything became super bland and that was the end of fun cartoons. The Saturday Morning Age of cartoons and their awkward bland designs have since even influenced feature animation films which I never in a million years expected to happen.
WHAT MAKES A GREAT ANIMATION DESIGNER? (besides talent)
A solid foundation in traditional animation.
You have to understand the basics of how characters move, talk, act. The only way you can know this is by doing it. It's of no practical use to think you understand it in theory.
The best way to learn it is by animating simple rounded characters. Not stylized characters that rely on motion tricks.
In any job in animation, you want to be able to put your money where your mouth is. If you are expecting someone else to make what you do work, and they tell you it won't, you would want to be able to prove it by doing it yourself.
The ability to not be chained to it.
A good designer needs to understand the functions of animation, but also needs outside influences.
Animation has always been a small, mostly inbred industry.
It can benefit by animators with open minds, who don't want to merely animate generic characters smoothly - as most top animators do.
Designers need inspiration from a wide variety of sources- related arts such as illustration, caricature, comics, actors, performers, family and friends.
With lots of added inspirations, we can add much color and variety and humanity to our animation, without designing shapes that can't functionally work.
He knew Don Martin personally, worked with him and did a lot to help Don get some rights back to his original artwork. I asked him in my last post to let us know who Don's influences were and he kindly replied.
** Note that my Cigarettes the Cat is pretty much stolen from "Spooky". I actually got the idea for the design from the retard cat in Clampett's Kitty Kornered and changed him into a non-retarded cat and then later discovered Smokey Stover and Spooky. So, I'm caught. Hopefully I took it a lot farther and changed the personality.
[his fire hat may have inspired Martin's way of drawing feet, no?]). He dug the Popeye comics and cartoons but wasn't aware of Tex Avery or Bob Clampett (by name anyway).
All artists are influenced by others which is most evident by their early work. To see later stuff by Jack Kirby, it'd be hard to realize his early swipes were of Alex Raymond and Hal Foster.
Also, concerning the humor art of Gene Colan, I had him do some stuff at Cracked, shot from his pencils. Beautiful stuff from an underrated artist who was rarely successfully inked by other artists.
Great blog, John, and a true service to mankind!
Beast regards,
Mort Todd
Hey Mort, what are you up to these days? How do I find you?
That means it's starting to sink in. Practice makes the concepts from the lessons sink in! It's not enough to understand a theory. You have to apply it over and over again, until you understand it instinctively!
Be your own critic. Analyze your studies. Write down what you think is wrong, THEN DRAW IT AGAIN AND TRY TO FIX THE MISTAKES!
Wait a minute. When Joe Barbera died at the end of last year, you had a great post about him and how you met him when you were first starting out. You said he agreed with you that Hannah-Barbera's early stuff was way better than Scooby Doo and it's clones, and he agreed with you. He couldn't understand what people saw in it. Now you're saying he deliberately pushed HB in that direction? Whats the story?