Wow, no one likes the layout posts. I guess layout remains a mystery to many, huh?
Well, anyway Happy Halloween! This is the night we celebrate and relive the glorious Crusades.
If you want any candy from me, you better wear one of these costumes. No modern puffy stuff, ok? Think of who you could conquer with great outfits like this! Maybe you could march out and take back the Holy Cartoon Land of Los Angeles from the infidels!
It might be time to restore its ancient glory.
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Sneak Preview of My Pitch Blog!
Hey head over here and read my latest pitches in progress and drop a comment so I can impress an executive, ok?
Chapter 3 of Maintaining some Goddamn Guts from Storyboard to Layout.
emotional states change from moment to moment- draw it!Here are the rest of the pages from the maintaining guts from storyboard to layout manual.
MAKE THE CHARACTERS LIVE AND FEEL!
I can't stress enough how important it is to make every pose completely distinct and unambiguous. We should feel the state of mind of each character every step of the way as the story plays out. Cartoon characters should not be stylized graphic images.
They are living pulsating blogs of quivering protoplasm, stuffed to the membranes with engorged emotions of every degree of intensity and subtlety. Don't leave it up to the audience or the animator to figure out what the characters are doing and FEELING. Your pencil needs to show us.
That's why you need to know all your drawing principles first. They are your story telling tools. Without them you are very limited in what you can say visually!
Don't rely on stock expressions you've seen in Disney movies or Spumco cartoons. You need to feel the emotions as you go, and have the chops to be able to draw them as they happen.
Notice that Rip does not merely pinch Chunk. He has feelings about the pinching. Pinching is important to him in very specific Rip like ways.
The pinch itself to a writer would be the end of the gag, but to you the performer, it's not enough. The gag has to be intensified by how the characters feel about the action. These are things that can be drawn and acted.
Break down the actions into States Of Changing Feelings
First Rip aims his pincers at a clear piece of tender flesh, then his eyes and grin widen as he anticipates the sheer pleasure he will derive from Chunk's coming pain. As Rip tightens the pinch, his face cinches up to show the effort. When lets go, he looks at Chunk so that he can enjoy the reaction.
His face registers not merely happiness, but a proud sort of smug satisfaction, the look of a man who has done his job well. You should have this look when you draw your layouts and present them to the ornery director. Show him how proud you are of your clever mischief. That's why you make cartoons in the first place, right?
The emotions quickly change as the gag is over. Chunk is out for revenge and Rip's face and body attitude portrays "Oh, yeah? What are you gonna do about it, Punk?"- all without having to resort to dialogue to tell us what he feels.
ALWAYS USE A CHECKLIST BEFORE HANDING IN A JOB!
In any creative department, there are so many things you have to plan and think about as you draw that it's very hard to remember everything, especially the functional needs of the scene.
It's very handy to have a checklist that you can refer to when you finish your scenes. You just go down the list and look at your drawings to check for each important point. If you see that you missed something, you can then fix it before you hand it in.
If you are this thorough in your work, your director will love you and the next creative person who has to work from your drawings will not have to solve problems that you didn't address. He has all his own complicated functions to perform and needs completeness from you!
REMEMBER: Your director may want to push you creatively, but he shouldn't have to point out functional problems. If you are a pro, your scenes should function correctly and you won't need to be constantly reminded to say- keep your poses within the TV cutoff...or your silhouette doesn't read clearly, etc.
Well there's my Dad in a rare calm and relaxed pose in his beautiful back yard. You should see all the great flower beds he creates! Anyway, all you diehard Spumco fans owe a lot to my Dad (as I do). he is one of my biggest cartoon inspirations and his spirit and personality crawl all over my cartoons.
He's in Visit To Anthony. He is a big influence on the character of George Liquor.
George and my Dad believe strongly in discipline and order and rules.(Especially their own!) "When you bring home the bacon, then YOU can make the rules!" "As long as you're in my house, it's MYYYY rules!"
Nothing makes them more crazy than when someone bucks the established order. I think this instilled in me a great disrespect for authority, but at the same time inspired a great reverence for the entertainment value of authority figures. Maybe that's why I think Ranger Smith is as big as star as Yogi Bear. I find rulemaking and the urge to make rules even where none are needed hilarious.
It must have driven Dad crazy to raise a cartoonist who never took anything important seriously.Dad is like the Canadian version of George Liquor. We don't have Republicans in Canada, but we have something quite like them. My Dad is every fish's worst enemy. I have written some stories where George goes to Canada and hangs out with my Dad at his cottage. They are very much alike and both hate hippies, the Beatles and wimps, but their differences are much more important to them and it just takes a couple beers to get them beating the crap out of each other like real men. Here is our relationship to this day. Does your relationship with your Dad ever change? My Dad is such an entertaining character that I had him do voices in some of my cartoons. Here he plays Ren's Dad. There are scenes in the cartoon actually from my childhood. I kind of combined my Dad with his Dad. My Grandfather was a Ukrainian Orthodox priest and even more strict than Dad, if that's possible! Grandpa was real nice to me though- except that he always kissed me on the mouth and ripped my face off with his stubble whenever we visited.
Dad also plays the part of the freeway cop in Stimpy's Pregnant.
I think the reason why I love Kirk Douglas so much is that I recognize the intensely emotional manliness of my own Dad in him. Watch Detective story and see what I witnessed every day growing up. A manly guy with a soft heart that was constantly torn between rigid laws and extreme emotions that boiled beneath the surface and every once n a while exploded out of control.
The fire chief in the original Firedogs is half my Dad, half Ralph Bakshi. "I've had it up to heeeeere with the likes of you!" I saw my Dad whack the underside of his chin like that every time I did something stupid (which was every day!)
My Mom is also a great influence on me but in the opposite way. She is the calm, logical member of the family. She can reason situations out and is analytic about everything. That's probably where I got it from-where all my manuals and my thirst for explanation of complex ideas came from.
My Dad is the fiery emotional one and I inherited that too.
Anyway if you love the characters he inspired, please wish my old man a Happy Ass Birthday and tons more! His name is Mike and he can still kick your ass.
Aaron Simpson from Cold Hard Flash is gonna make some special T Shirts available for this Christmas season, but I need some help from you. This your chance to be creative executives and give me some notes.
I think we are gonna do 3 different designs but all the creative hasn't been totally decided yet.
T Shirt 1
1) IT'S DISCIPLINE THAT BEGETS LOVE! (That will be printed on the shirt) George's bad little nephew Slab has done something bad. I think he broke the new kitten and Ernie told on him. Now George gets to deliver his tough love. a) on Model George smiley face
I've got 3 different expressions for George here. Which do do you like best?
b) Extra Excited George Smiley Face
c) Far Too Happy about Discipline Face
T Shirt 2
2) SODY LOVES CARTOON GEEKS Gimme a catchy saying for this design!
I need a good saying to print with this pose of Sody Pop. Something that both guys and girls would proudly wear on their chests. I kinda wanted to relate it to the idea that hot chicks like cartoons or guys who read comic books, but that doesn't have to be it. Any ideas?
T Shirt 3
WHAT'S THIS CRAP?
After reading all the comments on Eddie's post about this classic undergarment, I thought maybe we should reissue it.
Are you gonna buy it if we do?
By the way, all these will be specially printed on nice shirts. It's not a Cafe Press sort of thing, but I just wanna be sure enough folks are interested before we spend our own hard earned cash printing them.
Online advertising has many distinct advantages over TV ads. The ads can be longer than 30 seconds. This gives more time to get the message across and more time to make the ads be fun and understandable. The ads can take you to the sponsor's website. The ads can feature entertaining mascots.
MAKE PEOPLE UNDERSTAND AND REMEMBER THE PRODUCT: Think about how many TV commercials that you are vaguely aware of but can't remember what they are selling.
ADS CAN BE ENTERTAINING AND SELL THE PRODUCT This is the way to get huge click throughs and sales. Make the ads entertaining!
I've been doing animated online ads in Flash since 1997 and here are a few.
Products can directly sponsor shows, which is the ideal way to advertise your product. The audience associates their good feelings about the show with the sponsor, and the star of the show advertises the product.
Eddie Fitzgerald is the most imaginative cartoonist alive. He is also is the king of Halloween. Here is his opus from Bakshi's Mighty Mouse Show.
OPENER:
WITCH TRICKS, PART 1:
WITCH TRICKS, PART 2:
Oh just so you can actually read the credits, Marc has graciously slowed them down to human speed so you can see how many famous names got their start from Ralph Bakshi...
I whipped up a storyboard and we shot it, but it never went past that. Mike Kerr acted out some of the little things the wolf did and I stuck 'em in there. Like the clicking of the fingers. Don't ask me what it means, but I thought it was funny, so there it is.
My commercials have won some awards but more importantly - they sold the product very well. Spumco Nike
I try to make entertaining commercials that the audience doesn't want to fast forward through.
My philosophy when I make commercials is to satisfy 2 customers:
1) The Sponsor
I believe in selling the product first. I want to be creative, but my creativity is in service of getting the audience to like the product and want to buy it.
I'm definitely not out to merely exercise my creative vision and make films that look good on my reel.
Pushing the product is where I exercise my creativity. And it's a lot of fun for me to do that.
2) The Audience
I believe the audience has to want to watch a commercial for it to be effective. Today it is very hard to grab people's attention before they instantly grab the remote and fast forward through the commercials.
My commercials have a history of people enjoying themselves and remembering the product.
I designed and animated the original Old Navy Cartoon Spots. When they aired, ON informed me their product sales increased 500%.
It's hard to compose a lot of characters together. It takes more time for more characters. It's hard to make each character have a different pose.
It's hard to design lots of different character designs. Most comic artists, even great ones like Jack Kirby tend to draw the same character over and over again in a crowd.Here's a dandy crowd of 'tudes with all the faces the same.
Milt Gross has none of these problems! He draws crowds filled with different characters and with each one having their own faces, body shapes, and body attitudes. Look how each of these top hatted fellows have a similar angle-but not exactly parallel. They are a group and individuals all at the same time. This whole group has a single silhouette. They together make a single fun shape. Yet each character is an individual and s on a slightly different angle.
HIERARCHY OF FORMS- The specific details obey the general idea
Gross is a master of hierarchy. His individuals contribute to a group form. Just like details on a face follow the construction of a cartoon face.
The specific parts obey the general idea.
All these snooty folks have a haughty demeanor, yet none are exactly the same. A variety of individuals that fit a type.
Hierarchy, rather than anarchy! He has lots of different designs for women too. Milt Gross is the opposite of today's rubber stamp comic strip artists. The ones that use the same stiff poses and expressions over and over again. Look at the bustle of life. The lines of action of all the high society folks here all work together to create an organic group flow.
I can't believe how many funny head shapes Gross concocts.
Hey I just checked my account and found some more donations.
Thanks very much indeed! I spray you all with golden teat magic goo.
Here is a list of the cream of humanity, folks who love real cartoons:
Eric Bauza Heather Sheffield Bruce Herbert Emmanuel laflamme Dominic Bisignano Flash Cartoons Studios Art Fuentes Taber Dunipace Michael Webb Brett Thompson Kirk Teetzel (great last name!) Andrew Arett Ricardo Cantoral Chris Lutes Patrick Sevc Andy Latham
This is very very appreciated. I spend a lot of time on these lessons and things, so this will really help.
Boy, if everyone who reads this blog sent 5 bucks every few weeks I could upgrade what I'm doing and make more films, so thanks very much!
Hopefully you will work for me after you become cartoon geniuses too!
Here look, even Kali is finding time to brush up on her construction:
OK, here's a quick review of some studies. I hope you don't mind if I make 'em public where other artists can benefit from your work. If so, comment and let me know and I'll take yours down.
AMIR AVNI
Amir gets high points right away for how industrious he is. He is really taking the task of improving himself seriously. He doesn't just study one cartoon once. He is doing it every day it seems, and that will put him way ahead of the competition fast.
This construction of Bugs Bunny seems overly complicated to me. Amir has added more construction lines than I did in the films. I don't know what some of them are for. But his final drawing is excellent and shows that he is getting the message.
All the details and features of the characters are wrapped around solid 3 dimensional forms.
He also has LEFT CLEAR SPACES BETWEEN AREAS OF DETAIL- very important. He also checks his copies carefully and critiques them. Then he draws them again to try to correct any mistakes he finds. That's the way to improve fast.
Walter's forms are a little too vague and soft. He needs to commit to the major shapes and then add stage 2, then stage 3. It kinda look like step 2 and 3 were done at the same time.
This one has more commitment to the basic forms but the structure of the secondary forms is a bit wobbly. Nose is floating off to the left of the muzzle. The closed eye is not very solid. The lines around the eyes are floating around instead of describing a almond shape with a slit in the middle. The hair is not coming out of Bugs' head.
This looks like step 1 - the basic forms was pretty good, but some of the final details are breaking up the shapes of the forms-especially on the left side of the head of the dog.
To Everyone*** wrinkles, lumps and folds should not stick out from the silhouettes of your drawing! Too many lumps eats up your forms. Smooth those wrinkles out...comb the wrinkles so they look related to each other
The top of Bugs' head doesn't make sense. The hairs are cutting holes in his head instead of growing out of a solid egg shape like they should.
WIGGLY STUDIES
These are much too wiggly.
These look like the artists didn't do the drawings the way the instructions explained. They need to be much more careful and not so rushed.
The proportions marked off from Bugs head don't match. It is very easy to measure the proportions but the artist didn't here. the neck is longer than the head here. should be same length as head
More...Not bad, but the top of Bugs' head isn't connected. The left side is higher than the right. The neck is too wiggly.
The cranium is too squashed.
This one has a good feeling for solidity, structure and the details all wrap around the forms.
Yikes! to both of these...much too scratchy and lumpy
Here is a really cool frame from Tex Avery's "Heckling Hare". It's a hilarious scene animated by Rod Scribner.
Scribner loves to draw lots of extra wrinkles and brow folds on his characters, yet he still keeps them appealing and solid. They are not just arbitray lines and details floating around on the head. They make sense.
They wrap around the structure of the head and they describe certain things-expressions, eyebrows.
At first glance all the wrinkles make the drawing look complicated, but if you break it down to its forms first, then it will help you understand the drawings better.
Scribner uses the same classic principles that Bob McKimson and all the old animators used, but he applies them to his own style.
HOW TO STUDY OTHER PEOPLE'S ART
You can learn a lot by copying frames and animation from old cartoons. But the way to do it is:
Don't draw straight ahead.
Build up the drawing using proportions and construction. The Preston Blair Book explains this method of drawing very well, but I will help demonstrate it for you.
STEP 1 - PROPORTION + ANGLES
First, I measured the proportions of the characters and copied the proportions. Then I sketched in the rough forms that make up the poses, and drew straight lines through the forms to check that the angles the heads and bodies are tilted on look like the film frame. Bugs is made up of 3 major forms in the drawing: 1) Head 2) Neck) 3) Body
After breaking down your characters into their first level of forms, then take each of those forms and find the next level of forms.
Start with the heads.
Bugs has one head. The one head is made of of 2 major parts: 1) The cranium -upper part of head 2) The muzzle- lower part of head Each of those levels is then further broken down into sections.
Upper head is made up 1 eyes, 2 eyebrows and 3 space around them.
all these sub forms have to wrap around the larger form that they are stuck to.
Lower head (muzzle) is broken into 1 nose area, 2 cheeks and 3 mouth
Each of those layers is in turn broken down into more parts.
To get the eyebrow expression I usually just draw one line right through both eyebrows to describe the expression in one connected stroke.
Later I can erase the middle unibrow section. This way the eyebrows are related to each other in the final drawing and not just floating independently of each other.
When drawing the mouth expression, you have to make sure that the cheeks and jaw all relate to the mouth. They are all part of the same mechanism.
Once you have your basic expression wrapped around your head and muzzle, the last step is to add the details that help solidify the expressions.
Eyebrow wrinkles above the eyebrows. They follow the same direction as the main eyebrow line. They wrap around the head too, the same way the eyebrows do.
The mouth cheek area: The lower lip has to relate to the mouth shape and so do the cheeks.
Teeth: Draw them as blocks of teeth first, not as individiual teeth. Make the blocks be in the same perspective as the head.
Once the blocks look solid, them break them into individual teeth.
Now I drew this first drawing without first constructing it. I already know how it works so it only looks half crappy. But compare it to the below that I drew with construction first. See how much more solid and convincing and powerful it is?
ALL THE DETAILS FOLLOW LARGER FORMS
When you know your principles of drawing well , then you will be able to draw with much more confidence and you won't be afraid of details and you will have a lot more creative choices you will be able to make in your own work.
Cartoon direction has meant many things depending on the studio and era. In most cartoon fans' minds the idea of a cartoon director is represented by what Bob Clampett, Tex Avery and Chuck Jones did.
This kind of director was in total charge of every creative aspect of the cartoons, the story, design, animation, color, backgrounds, voices...and timing.
The Unit System Headed By a Director- the Benevolent Dictator
The director had his own crew and this crew stayed with him for years and they all grew creatively together under his guidance.
The director didn't personally perform each job, he chose which he wanted to do personally and supervised the rest. Each director concentrated on the aspects of the production that fit his own talents the best, and everyone else on the crew supported him and did what the director himself couldn't do or didn't have the time to do.
Chuck Jones was great at posing and character design, so he drew most of the poses in his cartoons. He relied on Mike Maltese and Tedd Pierce for story and various background artists for the BG styling.
Clampett was great at ideas, gags, personality, timing and exaggeration, but gave his animators more leeway than Jones did.
Avery was really good at high concepts, gags and structure, but had other artists "refine" his poses and draw them in their various styles. He also gave his animators more freedom than say, Jones would.
This concept of Cartoon Director is the ideal. It gave one animator the total creative control over the films and produced the longest lasting, most popular cartoons and characters in history. One experienced animator.
***** THESE DIRECTORS ALL WORKED THEIR WAY UP! From assistant animator to animator and then maybe to story or design and then to director. It's not like on today's shorts departments where they just pluck you out of high school and call you "director". The classic cartoon directors all knew how cartoons were made and then on top of that had a clear vision of how they wanted to express themselves because they had animated themselves and learned under other directors.
LESS CONTROL AT OTHER CLASSIC STUDIOS Directors at other studios had somewhat less control. At Disney's the directors all had to report to Walt and their jobs were to translate Walt's vision to the screen, so they weren't directors like at WB and MGM but they still supervised many of the artistic aspects of the film making- unlike the later TV directors. (I bet you can find more detailed info on how Disney directors worked at Mark Mayerson's site. He's pretty thorough with his history.)
SATURDAY MORNING TV DIRECTION
By the 1970's there was still a job in animation called "Director" but it bore little resemblance to what it used to mean.
By then every job in animation was unrelated to the next. There was no more supervisor at the top of a "unit". Each job went through a cold department, run by a department head.
Cartoon assembly Line- no more communication between artists
The Storyboard supervisor. The script editor. The layout department. Character design department. The development department. Background Painting department. The Voice Recording department etc.
Each of these departments worked on multiple series at once and no artist had a personal vested interest in any of them. He just did his job according to the rules-and pretty retarded rules they were. The main rule in every department was- "Don't ever make anything up! Don't create anything. Do exactly what you've already done a million times."
Jobs in animation studios were as boring as office jobs-except that there actually were many talented cartoonists and we all had fun on breaks and lunch acting like idiots and making each other laugh. You just had no way of putting that energy or humor into the cartoons.
The weird thing was....most people were completely OK with that!!
Not me.
Directors Merely Timed Sheets
"Director" meant writing timing sheets. The director didn't work with any artists. He was just grabbing storyboards off the conveyor belt and writing up timing formulas onto ex sheets.
The first of these directors were old time animators like Bill Hanna, Ray Patterson, and Charles Nichols, who at least knew how to make the timing seem natural and not clunky.
But they eventually started training non-artists and taught them them the formulas, so by the 80s, there were all kinds "directors" that had no idea what any of the actual symbols and squiggles they would scribble all over the timing sheets actually meant!
The timing became completely amateurish, just like every other aspect of cartoons.
'VOICE DIRECTION"
The craziest job category to come out of the Saturday Morning Cartoon system was the voice director.
In classic cartoons, the guy who had supervised the creation of the story and who was going to work directly with the animators would direct the voice recording sessions. Completely logical.
Clampett already knew his own stories intimately and knew how the characters should act because it was his own film. He has already worked on it every day for a couple months before Mel Blanc would come in.
Now we have people who have no creative input in the cartoons except to see the script for the first time and then tell the actors how to read the lines. Right in front of the person who might have actually been working on the story for months and who really knows what's going on.
Even Mel Blanc Needs Direction
Mel Blanc was the greatest voice talent in history, but he would be seeing the dialogue script for the first time when he came in. The director would have to explain what was going on in the story and guide Mel to get the emotions the way the director saw the film. Sounds logical, right?
If Mel had just read the script and acted it out as he went along with no guidance from someone who molded the story, he would get the whole emotional pattern and context of the story all wrong.
Visit To Anthony This exact thing happened to one of my cartoons-Visit To Anthony. There was a character patterned after my Dad - and I didn't get to direct the character's voice in the cartoon, although I directed the rest of the voices. Games animation -who finished the film- hired a well known good actor to play my father, but whoever directed him..didn't. It sounds like the actor is just reading the lines for the first time and has no idea of the context of the story or what's going on. I imagined that the "director" was too afraid to give any direction to a star. That coupled with the fact that whoever directed it hadn't worked on the story and didn't know my Dad.
THE TV ASSEMBLY LINE SYSTEM SUCKED
This whole assembly line system was what I walked into in the 80s. I had wondered why for 2 decades, cartoons didn't seem to have any point of view, style or quality. This is why.
There were no directors and no director system.
It wasn't because there was no talent. I was working with Tom Minton, Eddie Fitzgerald, Lynne Naylor, Bill Wray, Bruce Timm, Jim Gomez and many other super talented folks but it was impossible to get anything we wanted to do to end up on the screen because of 2 main things:
1) The Stupid Production System That Erased All Creativity
2) There Was No Training Ground
This was the other big disaster caused by TV production. Even if you had talent, you couldn't learn how to use it. Talent without skill and knowledge of how things work leaves you pretty helpless. (This is where we are again today)
You couldn't learn to animate properly. Or time, or do layouts right, or act, or work with voice talent.
No one knew how everything fit together anymore because the director/unit system was gone, and then all the animation was being shipped overseas, so you couldn't even learn how crappy animation worked! You just stared at the films you worked on when they came back from Asia and died. It was awful, but even if we would have been allowed to complain and fix things, we wouldn't really know how to go about it.
Everyone was completely creatively helpless.
In 1980 it sure looked like the days of fun, quality and creative animation were gone forever because the whole system was geared against it.
(amazingly, cartoon fans in their 20s sometimes come up to me and tell me how they loved 80s cartoons, the ones that we all were ashamed of making!)
Now with all this tedious background info to bore the crap out of you, I will try to give you some thoughts about the first cartoon I directed. It was called "Meowww"
check in later
the stills are below...
TODAY'S PRODUCTION SYSTEMS
...many of today's production systems are versions of mine that are mutating back into the 80s system. They have elements of both systems in different proportions depending on which studio and whether series or shorts' departments.
I wonder if anyone who works in this kind of patchwork system has any thoughts to share with us...
Do they still call any shows "Creator-Driven"? Do the creators supervise the stories and the voice-direction? Does he supervise the posing, if not the actual animation?
It will feature the first cartoon I (almost) totally directed.
By almost, I mean in the sense of an old time director, I supervised every creative aspect of the cartoon - except the final editing. I had no control over the sound effects or cutting.
On Bakshi's Mighty Mouse, I supervised all the stories and design and I restored an old time -director-unit system. There were 3 or 4 directors who theoretically would supervise all the creative aspects of individual films. 2 of the directors were actually kind of reluctant to do that and didn't really approve of the whole idea in the first place!
This trailer has Meoww - (Mine) and Witch Tricks (Eddie's first cartoon)
This was the first time I ever had so much control over a cartoon, let alone the whole series. But I learned quickly that you really only have as much control as you have skill, experience and knowledge. I think I wanted this cartoon to be like a Warner Bros. cartoon. It's not totally my own personal style of humor. We were only slightly cautious with what stories we presented to the CBS executives and I think this story was to test the waters.My only previous experience with partial direction was on a New Jetsons Cartoon a couple years earlier: High Tech Wreck.
I say partial, because I didn't have anything to do with the story or storyboard, voice direction or editing.
I designed the characters, supervised and drew many layouts, supervised the colors and BGs and chased everything around the studio to follow it through.
I had a great storyboard drawn and written by Tony Benedict that inspired me to draw the poses as lively and funny as possible. By a lucky accident, I got to actually hand out the show to the animators in Taipei personally. I did some pretty bad timing in many scenes but got lucky in others. That experience gave me at least some first hand knowledge of how everything fits together and what can go wrong-and right.
Anyway, back to "MEOWW"
We had a lot of fun drawing it. It was full of cartoony lively poses and we were lucky enough to have Dave Marshall oversee the animation in Taipei and he did his best to insure that the animators actually used our poses. They would lose something in the cleanups, but nothing like the way everything creative gets erased on our own coasts by the normal production system.
Even so, when the animation came back and we watched it on the movieola in Bakshi's studio we were pretty disappointed. I thought Ralph was gonna fire me for sure. Maybe he did! I got fired every couple weeks.
It just didn't seem to play. The timing was mushy. The voices sounded weak and unsure and the gags seemed dated and quaint.
I had this exact same experience a couple years later when the first Ren and Stimpy cartoon came back from overseas and we all watched it on the movieola. (although the gags weren't quaint this time. I never tried to imitate WB or anybody else again.)
Actually, maybe worse, because the overseas studio was not as careful to follow what we sent as Cuckoo's Nest and Dave Marshall were on Mighty Mouse.
On Ren and Stimpy, I had control of the editing - which I didn't on Mighty Mouse, so I patched up the first couple episodes with sound effects and music bandaids and somehow it made the films play better, even though much of the animation and timing weren't working on their own.
But I didn't have this opportunity (or even the idea) to change the feeling of this first Mighty Mouse cartoon in editing.
It still was quite a revolution when compared to the cartoons being made everywhere else and I think I was hardest on it than anyone.
This very style led directly to Tiny Toons, but I quickly veered away and concentrated on weirder stories, stronger personalities and more surprises.
Working on Mighty Mouse, with Ralph's support, experience and a real live Director's/unit system, we were actually able to learn from mistakes and get a little better the more we practiced our craft.
First of all we have to talk about toys before 1970. From 1970 on everything went to Hell. Not just toys either!
Hanna Barbera character toys used to work well whether they were on or off-model.
Some characters just lend themselves to great merchandise. Usually I collect Hanna Barbera toys because the characters translate so well.Here's one from around 1970-the tip of the change. Boo Boo's face is still cute, but his body is beginning to exhibit lumpy attributes...
WB toys never had a Golden Age. Strangely, it's hard to find good Warner Bros. toys. They always seem to come out the blandest, even though they are the best cartoons.
These aren't horrible, but they lack the fun of the HB toys. Of course, the more modern the toys, the more bland they are...
DISNEY FREAK SHOW
But Disney used to be great!
THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION: At least up until the last couple decades. Now they've ruined the fun with too much quality control and fear by people who don't even like cartoons but are in charge of every aspect of what was once supposed to be fun. I can't think of much appealing or fun merchandise today. Now everything is either too sweettoo conservatively on-model
or too vague, lumpy and soft in a new mushy kind of off-model way. We are living in the age of vague lumpiness all around, not just in toys, but in every walk of life it seems.
BONUS SUPER-LUMP SECTION
Have toymakers completely abandoned the idea that kids want cute, fun things to play with? Is it possible that toys will get even uglier in a few years? Hard to imagine anything less fun or more formless than what poor kids are stuck with today. No wonder they grow up all angry and their pants don't fit. They are emulating the lumpiness that they've seen all their lives.
What's next?
Maybe fat old people will become fashionable. America's Next Fat Bald Wrinkly Man Show will be a big hit.
I mean fat and wrinkles are the biological equivalent of formless cartoons and toys.
Modern corporations go against obvious human nature and make the opposite of what we naturally crave.
Sometimes a storyboard only gives you minimal information about the scene, as in this example. The Cliff's Notes version of the story.A storyboard is a springboard. It isn't the final visually creative act in a cartoon. The next stage is layout and posing. When posing, you have a lot of things to plan and think about, all of which can lead to you toning down the board.
But in fact your job is to go further than the board without changing the intent. Not rewriting it from scratch. You don't want to undo what the board artist did. You want to caricature it and fill it out.
Stronger poses, better acting, more breakdowns of the actions and thinking processes of the characters. You have to do all this while still making it all functional and useful to the animators.
It's very tricky to balance so many disciplines at once, but that's the pose artist's job. From years of experience seeing how hard it is for artists to do all these things at once, I compiled manuals based 0n actual common problems I've witnessed many times.
Make Characters Think, not merely DO
These layouts have added poses. They show the characters thinking between their main actions. This act of thinking brings the characters to life. If we just animated the bare poses from the storyboard, the cartoon would end up being quite mechanical. In many modern cartoons, that's all that's expected. Scriptwriters merely want you to draw the characters saying their lines, not acting them. Not feeling their situations.
Note that the first few instructions all have to do with function. You have to get all the functional stuff out of the way before you get to the creative part. You can see that there are many things to think about. This is very different than just making a bunch of funny drawings. This is enlisting your funny drawings to perform very specific functions. That is much harder than filling up a sketchbook with doodles, so start drawing functionally as soon as possible! More to come....
You might have noticed that the first few poses are stiffer than the later ones. The functional poses I had to really think about. Once I had everything fitting into the scene, I warmed up and then the poses got looser and more cartoony.
Ideally I would want all the poses to be loose and natural, but in TV you don't always have the time or money to redo what you'd like. Features have on average, 50 times as much money to spend per minute than TV cartoons and that's way everything is perfect.
We are working on that post about how to construct Bugs Bunny today, but in the meantime, check out all the work Marc Deckter has been doing for my Cafepress shop.Some commenters complained that they couldn't get certain images on the shirt or undies they wanted, so Marc has fixed all that. There is a lot more variety now.
THE IMAGES ARE BIGGER NOW ON THE SHIRTS AND THE COLORS IMPROVED.
Animation students can learn 2 things from this lesson:
1) What a double-bounce walk is and how to draw one.
2) What a 10x beat feels like
10 X BEATS
Different tempos in animation have different feels.
A 12x beat is an easy natural feel. An 8x beat has a quick uptempo feel. A 10x beat is inbetween those 2. It feels urgent, like a march beat. Brisk and energetic.
The scene below is timed to a 10x beat. All the main actions fall on multiples or divisions of 10s. Watch it and feel it.
Tap along to the beat. Each of your taps will be 10x apart.
The old cartoon directors used metronomes to time their scenes to. They would set the tempo they liked and act out the scene to the clicks. I use click tracks in my animatics.
In a normal walk a character goes up and down once each time he takes a step. Usually when you step, your leg bends DOWN to take the weight then it pushes UP on the way to the next step. There are endless variations of this, but that's the concept.
In a double bounce walk, you go up and down twice in each step. Not only do you go down as your foot contacts the ground, you go down again in the middle of the step.
WHY??? A double bounce step is musical. It's like a dance. It's fun. It's in lots of 30s cartoons. Porky Pig in Clampet's cartoons always walks double bounce. It shows that he's youthful and full of pep. It also conveys innocence.
------------------------------------------
Here is Flip's walk, and I have broken it down into keys and inbetweens for you. You can step through this cycle frame by frame to see how it works. DOUBLE BOUNCE WALK CYCLE + JOHN'S NOTES (4.5mb)
RIGHT STEP -DWG 1 (body in upward position- no lean)
UP - DWG 4
SQUASH DOWN IN MIDDLE OF STEP - DWG 6
UP AGAIN JUST BEFORE STEP 2 - DWG 9 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- STEP 2 left foot on ground (body leaning forward)
(STEP 2) LEFT STEP DOWN - DWG 11
UP IN MIDDLE OF LEFT STEP DWG 14
SQUASH DOWN IN MIDDLE OF STEP - DWG 16
UP AGAIN JUST BEFORE STEP DOWN - DWG 19
----------------------------------
REPEAT CYCLE BY STEPPING DOWN RIGHT AGAIN
DWG 1
The other drawings in the cycle are basically inbetweens. *** - but watch the foot that is off the ground...that won't pure pure inbetweens.
UbIwerks cartoons are great to study animation principles from. And they are really fun too.
Wow. Just a couple years ago, you could barely find Milt Gross comics anywhere. Now thanks the the Animation Archive and collectors like Marc Deckter, all this killer stuff is being made available to all us lucky cartoon fans.
Gross is amazing. He never seems to run out of funny shapes and designs.
What's that middle balloon attached to?
If only crazy people really wore hot dogs on their heads instead of starting wars, we'd all be much happier.
This silhouette is a work of art just by itself. It's almost psychedelic. I'm getting a flashback...
Funny kids.
He doesn't just draw a fat lady. He makes her a special kind of fatty. She's a big block of lipids. Nice contrast between her and the little guy following!
I'm gonna put up some frame grabs from the cartoon today to show you the different styles of the layout artists that posed the cartoon. You should watch some other 80s cartoons on youtube and compare the posing to Mighty Mouse. The same artists worked on many of those but were not allowed to do any actual poses and especially not in their own styles.
His first copy is not bad, but a little on the flat side. I gave him some tips and then suggested he do it again, this time fixing the mistakes. http://aapractice.blogspot.com/2007/10/pulling-my-hare.html He compared it to the original to see how accurate he was. I also suggested that he write down what he is learning from each drawing he copies, so he can apply the general knowledge to his own drawings.http://aapractice.blogspot.com/2007/10/wellgulpnow-ive-seen-everything.html If you are planning to be a cartoonist, you'd better get your suicide drawings down, because there is a huge call for this in our business. It's always good for a laugh. Almost as funny as stereotypes. After he copied some drawings, I told him to try to draw the characters in his own poses to see if he was learning anything from the copies. When you study something, it's not enough to merely copy. You should be trying to understand what you are copying so that you can apply it to your own work. http://aapractice.blogspot.com/2007/10/more-to-see.html
Going from storyboard to layout has similar problems that cleaning up a drawing does. You have to not lose the life of the board (when there is any). It's not the same as tracing though, because you have other problems to solve and sometimes you have to put the characters "on-model" which is not tracing the model sheets! A layout artist has these tasks to fulfill:
1) Functional: The scene has to work 2) Enhance the Storyboard Artists' ideas- this means to take the poses and acting further, which is not easy. There is a lot of analysis involved. 3) Add poses and expressions matching the voice actors' inflections. 4) Make the drawings tight enough that the animator knows where to put the lines. Leave nothing vague. 5) Draw the characters "on-model". That means they have to look like who they are, but without toning everything down. They still have to be alive and constantly in action and thought.
HOW CAN WE CONTROL OUR CARTOONS CREATIVELY IF WE DON'T ANIMATE THEM IN-HOUSE?
Unfortunately for all of us, TV studios don't do animation in house. They send it overseas, or now some move cutouts in Flash. Even some of that is sent thousands of miles away- away from the control of what should be the cartoon director's supervision.
Animation is the most important creative tool we have. That's why we call it "animation" and not "storyboarding" or "scripting". (I stole that from Eddie)
Because we don't do animation in TV anymore, no one even knows what it is or how it works. That is our #1 biggest creative problem and why creatively, TV can't evolve, it can only decay as each successive generation copies the previous one's mistakes instead of learning to animate and adding to a book of knowledge by animators amassed from generation to generation.
ANIMATION'S CREATIVE PARTS
The creative parts of animation comes from 2 basic elements: 1) The drawings - the drawings visually tell the story and the acting 2) The movement- the movement and can smooth out the drawings and color the emotions and acting, but smooth movement without original compelling, entertaining, custom made drawings doesn't hold much interest.
Animation is expensive, because it takes so many thousands of drawings. That's why it is sent to cheap overseas studios to do. So my TV theory is, if you can't afford lots of drawings to make it smooth, then keep some drawings here and make them entertaining. I reasoned that expressive characters will tell the story better than smooth bland ones anyway.
AT LEAST CONTROL THE POSES, IF NOT THE MOTION
When I started experimenting with the TV production system, I realized that the closest thing we had to controlling any of the animation was in the layout department.
Layout is the step before animation. It's where artists plan the scenes and draw the characters and backgrounds in relation to each other. In the early 80s, that was still being done in the U.S.
I figured if I drew funny poses and acting in my layouts, then at least the animators overseas would have something to go with, even if the cheap animation wasn't going to be smooth.
THE LAYOUTS ARE KEY IN TV CARTOONS
By the mid 80s, even layouts were starting to be shipped to Asia and there went the artists' last chance to have any control over the final product of the cartoons. I found myself heading up a layout department in Taipei, Taiwan on The New Jetsons. It was here that I started experimenting with what was to later become the Spumco layout system.
MY LAYOUT SYSTEM-HOW IT EVOLVED (JETSONS)
We had Hanna Barbera send us audio cassettes of all the dialogue from the cartoons and we listened to the tracks and drew poses with lots of life that matched the actors' inflections.
The young layout artists like Bin and Ronald and others all were eager to do it this way and drew some lively fun cartoons.
The trick was then getting the animators to actually use the drawings! They were trained to look for anything that wasn't on the model sheet and then "fix it" - put it on model. So they would undo all our efforts, until I found a sympathetic director who worked extra hard to untrain/retrain the animators and he made them use what we did....then there was another department of assistant animators! and then a mysterious department called "Model fix-up Department"!
Holy crap! The whole system was engineered to bland out any creative input anyone along the way had managed to insert into the product.
MIGHTY MOUSE SYSTEM
On Mighty Mouse we worked on my system and did all the layouts in house. Our overseas director Dave Marshall used my crew of Chinese layout artists, who were now animating and made sure everyone there used our poses. The animation as someone said in the comments was not the smoothest- but at least our cartoons were now acting!
At Spumco I refined the system further, but anytime I worked with any new artists or studios I would have to retrain everyone to get them to not tone down whatever we sent them to work from.
This is getting way too long...maybe later I will tell the whole history of how we had to create this production system and train other studios to follow it.
SPUMCO LAYOUT MANUAL
Hey, I just found a Spumco layout manual that explains a layout artist's tasks in detail, step by step. Want it?
Not too much to say about this, except it's cute, appealing, innocent and is nice to kids. It doesn't make you want to fast forward through it.
This is Capitalism at its best and smartest! Commercials like this and the Funny Face commercials show that it's possible to please your audience and consumers and still make a buck.
Today's businesses seem determined to irritate us while trying to get us to buy something. I can't make sense of that.
Joe Henderson said... Woah!!! People are really offended by this??? I'll set the record straight! Im an enrolled member of the Paiute-Shoshone Indian Tribe of the Owens Valley and I find nothing wrong with this image at all. If anything its an image of an Indian smiling unlike all the Hollywood crap they give us where we all are Stoic looking, or even worse the single tear running down our face.
Where is the artist or even this company trying to be racist? Last time I looked, and maybe John could back me up on this, I'm not orange, and I don't wear feathers in my hair.
I'm actually curious to how people here would design an Indian character being completely "PC"??? Let's see it People!!!
Thanks Joe, Here's your reward. See you next week! Here's an inbred Hillbilly caricature from the same cartoon, so all us ignorant white folk who love Hank Williams and classic country music can be outraged.
Have you noticed the fact that "Goofy Grape" wears a Napoleon Bonaparte hat, thus implying he's insane because he thinks he's Napoleon? Obviously this Goofy Grape fellow is a slanderous depiction of the good citizens of France!
People just need to grow some balls and stop acting like everyone is out to bully them.
By the way, tell that to all the millions of whites who were slaves to Muslims in North Africa during the 16th-18th century.
And the wonderful serfdoms of the middle ages. Or whites selling white slaves during the very early colonial america (when incoming black slaves were considered incredibly valuable, while white slaves were "expendable.")
Every race has been treated terribly by another race in one way or another in history,so why do we keep blaming people today who had nothing to do with the actions of people from the past?
I must say - I'm surprised at your crude insensitivity, John. Of course "Injun Orange" is offensive...
I think Freckle-Face Strawberry is offensive, also - to the fair-skinned and the abnormally sun-sensitive. They have feelings too, y'know.
Likewise, Lefty Lemon is highly offensive to right-arm amputees, and people suffering from Yellow Jaundice.
Rootin' Tootin' Raspberry is offensive to cowboys with The Mumps.
Goofy Grape is offensive to mentally-challenged people with Port Wine stain hyper-pigmentation and/or Hemorrhagic Rash .
Jolly Olly Orange is offensive to the Fore Tribe of Papua, New Guinea - who are afflicted with Laughing Sickness. (Also to Viet Nam veterans who were exposed to Agent Orange during the war.)
In fact, the term "Kool Aid" itself is surely be offensive to people with HIV-related illnesses, and the spelling-challenged.
Lastly, Loudmouth Lime must certainly be offensive to Matt Blasi - and other humorless, hypersensitive, pro-censorship, "politically correct" Thought Police-types who have nothing better to do than write indignant, self-righteous letters to cartoonists about the outrageous effrontery of long-defunct soft drink packets.
OK MIKE, YOU ASKED FOR IT. HERE'S YOUR PUNISHMENT!
The fella that started all this controversy about colorful kiddie food in cartoony packets posted again and said all the same things he said the first time, even though he's been answered in the comments by many others.
A few of the comments have been insightful. The rest are (par for course on the Internet) over-zealous, reactionary dribble. Mike Fontanelli and several others clearly don't understand the difference between a discussion and an argument. So, let's clarify a few things.
First, I asked for a clarification as to what John K meant by his statement: "This is considered offensive today. Insane or what?"
That clarification has still not been given.
Second, I asked: what is NOT offensive about it? This means that if you (John K and others) DO NOT think it is an offensive image, I'd like you to elaborate WHY. It also implies that if you DO think it's an offensive image, please explain why.
That should have tipped people off that I was attempting a discussion, not a flame war - that I am not so persoanlly (sic) offended as attempting to create a dialogue of WHY such an image might be considered offensive. But some people would rather jump on their keyboards and rattle off furious responses than contribute anything worthwhile to the discussion.
I wrote: "Because it IS offensive. It depicts a parody image of stereotypical Native Americans used to sell a ridiculous product in a humiliating context. What is NOT offensive about it?"
This is part personal opinion, part observation based on how this image is view in the context of our modern society. I believe it if offensive because it isn't simply an image of a Native American. It's an image of an orange Native American wearing ceremonial or traditional garb and decoration. It caricatures an element of Native American culture without consideration for how that culture uses, feels about, or interprets such imagery.
I then reinforced it with the following examples: "if you had an old-timey "black-faced" image on the wrapper and sold it as "Negro Nectar," people wouldn't hesitate to call it offensive. If you had a white face on it and called it "Cracker Cranberry," it would also be offensive."
Based on current American societal decorum, such examples would be considerd racist and/or offensive. Why? Is it that we're simply juvenille book-burners, anti-"barrels of fun" as Mike Fontanelli puts it? No. That's a simplistic explanation devoid of real intelligence.
This remains a point of discussion.
I understand that John K is not making a pointedly political statement here - he was simply showing us a piece of art in emphasize a point. I'm certainly not blaming John K or calling him a racist, and I'm not saying that offensive humor and elements of art should be subdued and done away with. To the contrary, as a poster noted, I'm a fan of Marc M.'s Sick Animation, a highly-offensive collection of art.
Jordan wrote: "But when you make fun of people such as say....native americans, and they are ravaged and murdered (you know the story) and then their image used to sell some american juice drink, THAT'S what makes it worse than say, a white person being made fun of to sell an american juice drink. There IS a difference...It seems more like a "fuck you" to the native americans, haha, now that we killed you all, we'll make fun of you on our products! If it was WHITE GRAPE JUICE and had a nerdy Caucasian business man on the cover, well, what are we making fun of? How successful and in power he is? So, go ahead, who cares."
This is an excellent point. There IS something most people have missed from this discussion. Perhaps its a capitalistic exploitation of ethnic imagery, perhaps it's simply that things have shifted in a modern context; what was once inoffensive is now offensive. My comment is not centered around capital (product) as Krieg stated.
John K. loves to talk about the terrific animation and art principles in the cartoon "Coal Black," and he's right - those principles are terrific! But it doesn't mean the film isn't offensive. It is.
John K wrote: "Indians murdered and tortured each other and made totem poles. Are the totem poles racist, therefore? Let's burn the last few and erase them from history."
That's a common argument made when people oppose affirmative action for blacks in the United States. 'Why should the government help them? Africans were enslaving each other before the Europeans go to them!'
True. But there is a world of difference between white European chattel slavery and what Africans did to each other. The two are incomparable.
John K wrote: "Cartoonists and comedians make fun of everything. That doesn't mean we are condemning whole groups of people every time we acknowledge obvious cultural traits.
This thread proves my point of everyday common insanities that we take for granted, like political "correctness"."
John, there's a fine line between acknowledging culture and mocking it. A very fine line. What you're offering is - and you have a bad habit of doing this - a broad generalization where culture, art, and license to interpret are given free reign to interact. I don't think you mean any harm, but that doesn't mean that it's harmless.
I've brought things like this up before and you've waived it away as "mysticism." Your refusal to actually investigate the finer points of your arguments weakens your emphasis that no harm is being done. If you're right, then why not really examine such facets of art-culture interaction? Why not consult outside data and scholarly sources?
Kenneth Clark's famous doll experiment is a great place to examine how images, merchandising, and culture interact in enormously harmful ways.
John K wrote: "Politically correct people are free to condemn the vast majority of humans who just act naturally. Shouldn't we be offended by them? Let's make laws against them."
Another broad generalization in which all "politically correct people" are misers, undermining your sense of fun, and threatening to make the world PG-13.
That's nonsense and you know it.
I'm not supporting censorship. My stance is this: before we jump to ANY conclusions about the effects of art of people, culture, etc., we should make an honest examination of things. IS an image offensive? If it's considered offensive, why? Are there arguments to be made on both sides?
I'm not saying that I, Matt Blasi, am right, nor am I simply trying to be contentious. I'm saying that the relationship between art, ethnicity, and culture - the line between offensive and inoffensive - is a fine line and one that requires more care than simply saying, "This is considered offensive now-a-days and that's nonsense."
I respect your work, John K. I respect your art and your incredible understanding of how to create, conceptualize, and invigorate art. But I'm not an animator and I'm not here (like some posters) to simply kiss behind. If I see that you've made a statement that seems wildly off-base, I call you on it in a respectfu manner (unlike many posters).
what is NOT offensive about it? This means that if you (John K and others) DO NOT think it is an offensive image, I'd like you to elaborate WHY.
How do you prove a negative? It's up to you to prove that it *is* racist.
See ya Steve
MORE PEOPLE TO GET OFFENDEDLUMMOXES
FRENCHMEN
SCOTSMEN
RHINOCERI
GORILLEN
None of the above categories of creatures have ever been persecuted or harmed by anyone else, so it's ok to make funny depictions of them.
Is there a culture or race on earth that has never persecuted, killed, tortured or been persecuted by others? If not, then I guess us cartoonists, novelists, historians, musicians and a lot of other people are out of business because we cannot ever acknowledge them. I say, why not all us funny looking people get along and agree to enjoy the funniness of every race, culture, costume, man, animal and anything that is fun?
Insanity is a common theme in my cartoons, as I said in my last post. Here's a whole lineup dedicated to the insane, with the main feature another Mighty Mouse brought to you by Ralph Bakshi.
Cuckoo For Cocoa Puffs
Night On Bald Pate
This is the first time I ever got to do a cartoon about an insane character. When Ralph read the script he rejected it. (He rejected 2 out of every 3 stories we wrote, I think just to keep us on our toes. I said let me record the voices first. After he heard the cassette of Patrick Pinney playing a chemically deranged Petey Pate, Ralph said "I get it now. Make the Goddamn cahtoon. You're f*****in' crazy Johnny. You'll get us all fired. I love ya"
I'm not completely sure what you meant, John. Did you mean to say that it's an insane image and is ridiculous, or were you questioning how such an image could be offensive?
Because it IS offensive. It depicts a parody image of stereotypical Native Americans used to sell a ridiculous product in a humiliating context. What is NOT offensive about it?
Think: if you had an old-timey "black-faced" image on the wrapper and sold it as "Negro Nectar," people wouldn't hesitate to call it offensive. If you had a white face on it and called it "Cracker Cranberry," it would also be offensive.
Why (if I'm reading your question right) is Injun Orange NOT offensive? Have you asked any Native Americans if they find this offensive and why or why not? I did, here at the University of Florida, and the answers I received were pretty clear: it is offensive because it degrades Native Americans and their culture into a marketing ploy for Pillsbury products.
There's a fine line between comedy and racism, and it requires more care and study than simple opinion.
I'll ask one of my native american friends if he's offended: "Joe, are you offended by a happy generic face with an Indian headress selling Koolaid?"
I would actually love to have a caricature of a marauding Cossack on a Cranberry Juice packet. No one ever caricatures my roots and traditional native garb and strange marital practices, and I'm more offended that I'm left out!
What is it about insanity that so delights our every pore and follicle? Insanity works great in entertainment. Whether we are talking about actual clinical forms of insanity like schizophrenia, solipsism, amnesia or made up ones, they all make for great fun on the screen.
EVERYDAY COMMON INSANITY - Losing Our Wits
But then there are the common every day forms of insanity we all experience: when we argue about politics, deal with executive logic, fall in love, get jealous, have road rage, practice religion, try to discipline the kids and expect them to obey us. The kind of normal common sense we apply when we use tools to fix a faucet or solve simple problems goes right out the window and we become irrational chemically controlled lunatics.
This is considered offensive today. Insane or what?
Everyone can identify with the crazy intense emotions these normal everyday human experiences grip us with.
Modern cartoons don't tend to exploit intense emotions or insanity, but I always thought the animated cartoon was the perfect medium for it. Mike Lazzo (CARTOON NETWORK GURU) called some of my cartoons "Psychodrama" about 12 years ago and that was the first time I heard that label, but I liked it when I heard it. (I'm not sure whether it was a criticism or a compliment!) My own life has been filled with psychodrama and I have taken real events that I've witnessesd (or caused!), and adapted them in my cartoons. Whenever someone goes nuts in front of me, instead of being scared, I usually zone out instead and go into intense study mode, so I can use the material later.
This scene in Sven Hoek was inspired by a real life event. Ren's line delivery is an imitation of someone who had an episode in the original Spumco studio - in my office. After it happened I ran to get my Sven Hoek storyboard and changed a whole scene to make it more intense and real. That's what real life events are for! Many of them are much crazier than anything you can imagine in a cartoon, so I take advantage of them when they happen.
One complaint I get from many executives is that my cartoons are too unrealistic. They don't know how wrong they are.
INSANE CLASSICS
Here are some great movies to go insane with if you ever get the chance:
Beware My Lovely
Beast With 5 Fingers
MAD LOVEKISS OF DEATH DETECTIVE STORY THE ENEMY WITHIN STRAIGHT JACKETNIGHT OF THE HUNTER
----------------------------- TOMORROW'S MIGHTY MOUSE PISS-SHIVER-PACKED EVENT: Go Insane with cartoon psychos John K., Ralph Bakshi and Tom Minton!
Did you ever notice that when you clean up one of your own drawings, it loses some guts? This is a problem all artists face, but it's even a bigger problem in animation because each drawing passes through so many different artists' hands.
Especially in this day and age when everything is so departmentalized.
If it's hard for an artist to clean up his own style without losing something, imagine how hard it would be for someone in another country who is seeing your style (after it's already been traced a few times) for the first time and really doesn't care anyway.
In animation, an idea gets copied over and over again before it actually makes it to the screen. The natural order of life seems to be that copies are inferior to the original, so that the more something gets copied, the crappier it gets.
And unless your studio has a system designed to combat this problem, you are going to end up with bland cartoons, where none of the artists who contributed to it recognizes his or her own work.
Here are 4 stages in an animation production that all use the same poses. Many studios have more stages than this. Each stage tones down the previous stage.
Storyboard Layout Animation Cleanup
TRUE TALES FROM ANOTHER DIMENSION
For the last 40 years or so, we have been plagued with an assembly line system based on a misunderstanding of the term "on-model".
Ever since I got into the business, I realized that no matter what you drew in your scenes for a cartoon, it would never end up looking remotely like that in the final cartoon. The system is geared to erase all the artists' specific and original contributions to the film.
Even the few artists I knew that actually tried to put some life in the cartoons would always be disappointed when we screened the finished cartoons. It was as if we never worked on the cartoons in the first place. As if it had all been done by a crappy computer.
All our work had been smoothed out, planed down, straightened out. Most young cartoonists come into the business all eager and optimistic that they are going to be the ones to breathe some life into the art again. But after a year or 2 of experiencing this blanderization process, they quickly lose their ambition, sell out to the man or go insane.
No matter how talented or skilled you are, you need a system that is geared to the creative process and understands practical realities. I have always been plagued with this problem of how to get creativity to happen in an environment that is completely designed against it.
That's why I am so analytical - why I have to figure out solutions to so many problems. I would rather just get a bunch of creative folks together and do what we do naturally, but there was no place on earth designed for that when I started. No Looney Tunes or MGM or Fleischer studio that has a logical production system.
I had to recreate one and then pass it on to all the studios that worked with mine. Most other studios - service studios that do the animation and ink and paint have been trained by the American or Canadian assembly line studios and cannot bring themselves to change their ways to accommodate originality and fun in their work-even when you send them the finished drawings.
They are so used to blandness that they don't believe that you actually want them to use what you sent them, and they take it upon themselves to fix your work for you. That was happening to Spumco on The Ripping Friends, so I had to put manuals together to show our service studios how to use our drawings without completely toning them down or changing them. Unfortunately, they never gave our manuals to the artists, so we got blanderized despite our efforts to save them money and time.
Maybe you can benefit from some of the tips in this "maintaining guts" manual. If you ever work for me, you will have this same problem - to not tone down what you are handed from the previous department - which is not an easy thing to do. For months, I kept asking the supervisors in Canada on the Ripping Friends whether they were using our layout drawings or not, and both studios would constantly assure me that they were. When they finally sent me xeroxes of their layouts we saw that they didn't use any of our drawings and had redrawn everything from scratch. Then I sent this manual and called them to go over it page by page.
We were looking at these closeups of Crag that Jim Smith drew and I cleaned up, and the supervisor said: "Wow. You really did want us to use your drawings exactly!"
Then I asked why they didn't after saying they were. "We weren't doing it because your and Jim Smith's drawings were 'off-model'." Jim and I designed the show, but our drawings were off-model I found out. I have plenty more of these manuals about maintaining guts if you are interested.
Mike doesn't have his own blog, but he should, because he has such a sophisticated and unique view of the world. Eddie, Kali, Steve and I always try to convince this highly educated cartoonist to share his insights and clever observations with the rest of you but he refuses, so it's up to me to do it for him.I can just hear his eminence giggling like a high school girl as he send me these things. Mike studied literature in University by the way and has a deep understanding of the classic writers.
Please beg Mike to start his own blog and let him enrich your lives as he does ours.
Some great Mike topics:
Are Rap Artists "artists"?
What he loves about modern "culture"
How "THEY" even ruined girls.
The I.Q.s of executives.
Who is more talented between Dane Cook and Buster Keaton.
His favorite version of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
I'm just going to touch on the subject because there are so many things I could go on about, so let's just start with an overview.
HERE ARE 2 TYPES OF LINEWORK: A PENCIL ROUGH AND A CLEANED UP INKI think an animation drawing should be tight enough that a cleanup artist or inker can preserve what the animator wants. The animator should not hand in vague scribbles and then expect an assistant to figure out where the drawing is. Both these artists have some responsibility to use lines to convey distinct drawings that have a commitment to an idea.
GREAT LINE WORK CAN ENHANCE GREAT DRAWINGS Jack Kirby is considered the king of comics and for good reason. Many of his classic comics have unfortunately suffered from sloppy inking. Joe Sinnott (who inked these 2 pictures) really worked to bring out the best in Jack's work. He made his characters look solid, organic and made them stand out against the backgrounds. A lot of other inkers tended to flatten out Jack's work and make the images harder to read. To me, the work then looked too stylized, less alive. Some people like that better, though.
LINES DON'T EXIST BY THEMSELVES A line isn't important for its own sake. There are some artists who think having a big bold clean line is practically the art itself, and the drawing it describes is unimportant - as in many modern fake-UPA style cartoons.
If you have an uninteresting or ugly drawing underneath, no amount of thick clean lines can hide it-at least not from me.
On the other hand, great drawings can also be ruined by poor line work. Each animator, layout artist and cleanup artist should all understand and feel how to do warm descriptive lines that draw attention to the good qualities in the drawing they are bordering.
LINES CAN HURT DRAWINGS AS EASILY AS THEY CAN HELP THEM
Then there are styles that purposely use wiggly I'm not even sure if this is for real. Maybe it's someone's idea of satire.
or scratchy lines-maybe to make you know you are looking at drawings, maybe to be ugly on purpose, I don't know.
Many artists, as they get older lose their line quality. I know I can't draw as "clean" as I could in my 20s. That's why I rely on younger inkers and clean up people-but I train them to know where to put their clean lines without "losing the life" of the original roughs. In the 60s, Disney introduced the xerox process. This was a way eliminate the cost of doing all the beautiful hand-inking they used to do on their cartoons. They sold the concept to the animation community as a way of preserving the spontaneity of the artists' drawings -maintain the liveliness. To me it looks terrible. When I see scratchy lines boiling and shimmering at 24x per second, I can't help but be aware I'm looking at individual drawings, rather than animated characters. Plus, the xerox line itself loses a lot from the pencil drawings. It's a cold, harsh itchy look.
By the 1980s, sensitive artistic line work was a thing of the past.COMPARE POPEYE IN THE 30S TO POPEYE AND EVERYTHING ELSE IN THE 80S
I had to fight the whole industry to bring back thick and thin organic lines to cartoons. You would never believe how hard everyone resisted. I was a dirty radical to want the lines around cartoons to look good. Not only did I want thick and thin to come back, and organic lines, I even wanted to have some color lines - and everyone thought I was insane! But that's a whole other story.
LINES ARE YOUR DRAWINGS' SERVANTS
If you have a grasp of your drawing principles, then your lines can do a lot to bring out the elements of your drawings.
His lines are very appealing - but not merely appealing for their own sake. They make sense. They are there to help describe the drawing underneath. They are slightly loose and rough, but a cleanup artist would have no trouble knowing where to put the final lines, and how much weight to give them.
His lines are artistic, but they are subservient to the drawings they are describing.
They aren't just one skinny even line that travels around the outline.
Preston Blair also has beautiful flowing lines.They are drawn quick, but perfectly describe the forms underneath. These aren't quite clean enough for a final cel, but the inker knows exactly where everything goes from the clean up.
Many animators work very rough. That's fine, but I think it's their duty to go back and tighten up the drawings to the point where an assistant or inker knows where all the details go, and how the forms actually work solidly. As I've said before, smooth motion is only part of good animation. The drawings you define with your lines, the specific expressions and details are also part of the equation, and I can't see why an animator would want to give up that layer of fun and control. I think some Disney features in the last 20 years have suffered from cleanups that don't reflect the animators drawings very well. I've seen many scenes with underlying loose animation, but stiff Filmation-style cleanups that undermine the motion. It seems like somewhere between the animator and the clean up department, something is not connecting.
From a rough but defined sketch like the Sody one above, a good inker (like Brian Romero) can work his magic and give you a smooth, alive, organic being. HIERARCHY OF LINES DESCRIBE HIERARCHY OF FORMS Lines, like forms obey a hierarchy of importance. Some parts of your drawing are more important than others and need thicker lines. Details are less important, get thinner lines, but still have to flow in the same directions as the larger forms.
It's not quite that simple and not completely a science. There are some general rules to help out, but then part of it is instinct.
SHANE GLINES Shane Glines used to ink a lot of my stuff and he knew exactly how to enhance what the drawing itself was trying to say. You admired his lines, but you saw a character first, not a bunch of disconnected details.
***Note to Mitch- when you copy the old cartoons, try to get a feel for the pencil lines animators used to use. Your lines can help give your drawings more form.
Have you noticed the fact that "Goofy Grape" wears a Napoleon Bonaparte hat, thus implying he's insane because he thinks he's Napoleon? Obviously this Goofy Grape fellow is a slanderous depiction of the good citizens of France!
Sacré Bleu-berry!! :)