Hang Kali On Your Wall

Hey folks, Happy New Year! Thanks for a great year of comments and fighting! No seriously, it's great to know there are so many cartoon fans who are as passionate as me about the stuff and willing to shed blood for their beliefs.

Hey I bet some of you out there would love to have some cartoony decorations on your walls. Kali is constantly turning out sketches, paintings and color marker renderings and I so I said to her, "Why don't you see if anybody would want to buy some of this stuff?".

Kali, like all students is always struggling to get that exorbitant tuition paid and then eat on top of that. I'm sure lots of you out there know all about it!





Her current obsession seems to be the original TV Chipmunks from 1960. We've been watching those and they are really fun, way different than the creepy incarnations of the last 30 years, more cartoony, no cheesy pathos or moral lessons.













She has these great pages of inked doodles and I'm trying to get her to scan some and show 'em to you. I bet you could snap one up for a good bargain. I'll try to post some later today.

She can do custom stuff for you too, like caricatures of you and your buds.

Find her ass here:

http://kalikazoo.blogspot.com/2007/12/kali-is-on-winter-break-and-will-fix.html


Thanks again for a fun and educational year. Let's explore lots more cartoons this year.

Next: Various theories of animated "takes".

Mike Judge and Humanity

I've used the words "humanity", "sincerity", and others to describe a quality in entertainment that I can't find the perfect word for. If you've got a better one, let me know!

It's a quality I find in The Honeymooners, All In The Family, The Three Stooges, Bob McKimson cartoons, Kirk Douglas movies, Johnny Winter music, early Beatles and many other entertainments and entertainers. It's not the artistic finesse or skill - although that comes with many of my favorite entertainers...it's more a quality of truthfulness, an open, no-bullshit view of the world, a way of communicating universal and real human emotions and sensory feelings that cuts through current trends and styles.

You won't find this quality in blockbuster animated features, Cirque Du Soleil, but maybe sometimes in the odd TV show.

Mike Judge has this mysterious quality of sincere, open minded truthfulness and he sees what's really funny about actual humanity versus phony popular trends- he makes fun of when humans lie to us about who we are. He speaks to real people.

A MESSAGE FOR EDDIE!

When so much modern entertainment is polished insincerity, it's refreshing to watch something and laugh out loud.

When I watch King of The hill, I'm pretty sure I can tell which scenes are Mike unfiltered and which are teams of writers trying to evoke fake pathos. I'm caught off guard by Mike's jokes and laugh really loud, then it quickly switches to someone trying to manipulate me to cry over some writer's contrivance. It's a weird combination of elements.

Buy This Cartoon and many more here:

THE ANIMATION SHOW

***CHUCK JONES had humanity supplied to him for awhile by Mike Maltese. Tex Avery, The Fleischers and Clampett had it in abundance.

UPA went out of their way to excise it from their cartoons- so much so that even Jones saw it.What kind of humans are entertained by this? Send pictures.

NOW'S HERE'S THE REAL TRUTH ABOUT HUMANITY!

WATCH UFC TONIGHT ON PAY PER VIEW!

THE BATTLE OF THE CENTURY!

CHUCK VS WANDERLEI

Clampett Structure - Clever and Entertaining Setups Tale Of Two Kitties

Clampett and Film/Story Structure

Clampett has a reputation of being wild and anarchic (thanks mostly to Chuck Jones telling everyone that) but in reality, his films are extremely well structured and tightly controlled.

All storytellers have to find ways to balance storytelling devices with entertainment. You have to tell your audience what your story is about at some point and this requires a setup. Setups can be boring or expositional as the writer or director explains to the audience through words what they are supposed to expect from the story.

Exposition to Setup the Story

Tex Avery usually spends a minute or 2 having a character explain what the story is about before the actual entertainment starts, "Whatever you do, don't make a noise, not one little sound!" and then we know that there will be a succession of gags around someone trying not to make a noise.

Entertaining Setups

Clampett's setups are very clever..."clever" is a word you usually associate with Chuck Jones, but Clampett's clever is different. Jones wants you to notice that what he just did is clever and he will point to the clever bit in some way (a character will glance at the audience and pause, to let you know to appreciate it)

Clampett doesn't care if you know what he did was clever. Cleverness is just one of many storytelling tools he uses to entertain you with. He's so confident in his power to entertain that he just throws tons of ideas at the screen and doesn't worry if you miss some or just feel them.

TALE OF TWO KITTIES

This cartoon is a masterpiece of entertainment, acting, story and film structure, crazy ideas and cartooniness. And cleverness.

It's structure is multi-leveled.

This post covers the setups. Clampett has to setup the story and character relationships but doesn't want to rely merely on exposition. He does it in 20 seconds, and you don't even see the characters for most of that time.

http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/Clampett/42TaleOf2Kitties/1Tale2Kittiesopensml.mov

The very first thing we hear is "Hey Babbit!" but we don't see the character. The audience already knows this will be an animated incarnation of Abbot and Costello, but Clampett teases us by not showing them. Instead he shows a fence and we hear the violence happening behind it as we see loose boards slamming and garbage flying up in the air as Babbitt smacks Catstello around.

(BTW, a modern audience doesn't know who Abbot and Costello are and this cartoon structure still works. )

This is a really clever and indirect way to establish the characters and it builds suspense and curiosity in the audience. We are hooked right away and can't wait to see what's coming."

Set Up Audience Curiosity and Characters

"Hey Babbit! Cut it out! I don't wanna do it!
By the way, this layout of the fence is great. It has a flowing S curve that gives the pan a much more dynamic motion than if the fence was just horizontal and vertical lines.

Setup Story Plot and More About Characters

In the first tight acting scene of the characters we can really see their relationship. Catstello is wimpy and Babbit domineering. It's funny lively acting while they quickly make the story point that they are hungry and Babbit wants Catstello to catch a bird for them.

"You wanna eat, don't you?"
"Well go up and get the bird!"
This funny shot shows how hard it's gonna be for Catstello to get the bird.




http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/Clampett/42TaleOf2Kitties/2setupcatssmll.mov

Clampett makes us think at first that Catstello is an animal lover and doesn't want to hurt anyone, when in reality he's just scared.
"But I donn't wanna hoit nobody Babbbit..."
"What's the matter fraidy cat, this is only a tiny little bird!"
"You mean only a teensy weensy itsy bitsy tiny defenseless bird?"

This is all Bob McKimson animation. Full animation that deserves the work that went into it. No tricks. No squishy stretchy snapping away from and into poses. It's all done to let you enjoy the characters as characters, not as animated cliches.

Catstello Finds Courage

As soon as Catstello thinks the bird is too tiny to put up a fight, he gets courage. This could have been done with one quick pose and expression, but Clampett gets McKimson to milk the new found bravery with 3 different stages of fun personality animation.

"Let me at 'im!"

"Gangway, I'll moidelize him!"

He turns into a Gorilla in the middle of the bravery scene and hops around. This is a pure Clampett type of idea. Just for fun, but it makes the point.


"Let me at 'im!"

Then he goes into a boxer bit...
Many of the top animation directors have been assigned certain skills and signatures that define them. Because Jones' style and cleverness is so obvious, he gets the title of being the clever stylish guy.

Friz gets the title of musical guy, because his timing is so mechanically to the beat and it's hard to find any more tangible cartoon skill that everyone else isn't much better at - he gets music and timing by default. Tex is the wild crazy guy.

Clampett is all of the above and much more. A lot of his creative tools are behind the scenes working to make the entertainment experience stronger and richer, so they don't get written about by critics much. Because you have to actually get into deeper analysis of his films to see how they work, they are harder to write about. Especially if you don't make cartoons yourself and aren't aware of all the problems you have to solve firsthand.

Compare these acting scenes to later cartoons and see if you don't think 40s character acting in cartoons is more fun that the walking talking and held poses of 50s cartoons.

Much more of Tale Of Two Kitties to come.

McKimson's gift to Dads - humanity

Y'know, when you read a lot of animation histories or critiques, you find that the animators that get the most points among the critics are the ones who seem to have invented the most stuff, broke ground or bucked the establishment. Skill at entertainment is not high on the list of praise and I think that's an injustice. (just look at what wins animation academy awards)

To me, all art and entertainment should aim at communicating with humanity and speaking truth to human nature. Yes, great innovators are to be admired, but so are great pure entertainers. Entertaining at the top levels requires great talent and skill and love of the audience, and most of the audience is not made up of critics or art historians. It's made up of us people who have real lives and all experience universal emotions and situations.

Kids look for certain things in their entertainment that is different than what the adults need, and certainly different than what the critics need. The general perception of cartoons today is that it's a medium for kids, but it wasn't always that way.

Most grown up men aren't that into what cartoons are all about - fantasy, silliness and wild imagination. They certainly aren't looking for art and imaginative flights of fancy.

After all, they have to be mature and bring home the bacon, shave 4 times a day, raise smart ass kids, worry about rent, taxes, Liberals, stocks and pensions. They are slabs of meat riddled with real life stress.

So what do men find entertaining? The essentials: Fear, pain, stupidity and abuse.

These are all universally funny and that's why the 3 Stooges are the most popular comedians in history and Bob McKimson is the greatest cartoon director for the unwashed capitalist masses.

McKimson delivers the goods and I'll bet he made the most popular WB cartoons after Clampett left the place. Mckimson is the Jules White of the cartoon world.

This is top level fear.

This scene completely says it all:

http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/McKimson/UpstandingSitter/FearIntoAbuseclipsmall.mov

Nothing is funnier than a good ass beating with a board...except when it's a beating that's the result of causing a burly male to experience extreme fear.
What else do regular guys need from entertainment?

WHY DONT WE HAVE DISCLAIMERS LIKE THESE?

*** These frame grabs are from a remastered cartoon. The lines have been ridiculously thinned. Note how jagged that makes them. The colors have been "modernized" by taking out all the subtleties and pumping up the primaries and secondaries. It makes the cartoon strobe when you watch it on TV and flattens everything out, but this is all you get to see because we have removed the Film-maker's version from history."

Merry Christmas Everyone

Once Upon A Wintertime

Illustrations by the Walt Disney Studio
Tom Oreb

Happy Christmas Eve Theater Presents: THE COOKIE

Guest Speaker: Kali

Ah, the fresh smell of sugar cookies covered in goo.


Dumbo was given the first cookie to try. After one delicious bite he gave it to his friend, The Sad Purple Burro to taste.


The Sad Purple Burro agreed in a monotone drone,"it was good."


Then o'er yonder came that minx, Joan Octopussy!
"Give it to me," she demanded. The Sad Purple Burro complied.


Just as she nibbled her first suck, then along came Porky Pig with ravenous eyes.
"C-c-c-c-c-c-c-ould I have a p-p-piece of your coo-coo-coo-coo... could I have a bite of your baked goods?"
Joan thought about her figure, and decided she didn't need the rest of the cookie, and tossed it to Porky.


Porky came home to his cat, Sylvester and said, " now you be a g-g-g-good little pussy and I'll let you have a special treat."


Sylvester licked his lips and enjoyed his cat snack. The neighbor, Quick Draw McGraw spied the cat's sugar biscuit, and yelled to him, "let me have the rest, sugar is no good for a cat!"
Sylvester threw Quickdraw the tiny morsel.


Quickdraw found a nice high place away from everyone else, and scarfed down the last bit of the cookie. Just as he was wiping his mouth some shelve-natives approached! They saw Quickdraw eating a cookie, and the Worm King shouted, "give us the rest of your cookies or ...DIE!"
Quickdraw panicked and tried to explain to them that he had no more.


"Do you think I'm playing games here, boy?"


As the angry natives drew nearer Quickdraw whistled for his trusty horse, Sterling! Quickly they galloped away down the shelfside to safety.


Quickdraw came home to his cabin in the Christmas Tree Forest, and told his lover, Liberace all about his wild adventure. Liberace proceeded in doing a celebratory can-can dance.


THE END!

more yuletide

Chuck Jones Transylvania 6-5000, 1963 Clever

I love this cartoon. It 's very clever.
It's one of Jones' last WB cartoons.
I wonder how Maurice Noble co-directed this? Did he do rough BG designs and turn them over to Givens to do finals?
This is a cartoon that really uses what cartoons can do that other mediums can't compete with.

GREAT LAYOUTS BY BOB GIVENS

I love the BGs in this. Not merely because they are stylized, but because they are also really well drawn, composed and moody.

Bob Givens used to say "You would think Chuck was a Goddamned *#% from the way that he draws, but I've seen him with girls, so I guess he's not."

This cartoon is very stylish, but it's not so much so that it becomes too cloying as some other Jones' cartoons do. Instead, it's very handsomely designed and drawn.

DRACULA IS THE STAR, NOT BUGS

This design of Dracula is really good. It's a combination of animated cartoon forms, human anatomy, Ronald Searle and Chuck Jones all in perfect balance.

This would be really hard to animate, because of all the complex organic forms and stylized angles and curves. But since it is made up of real cartoon principles and the animators have been animating for 20 years or so and learned the classic techniques, they are able to pull it off.
Today, when many cartoonists try to be stylish, they don't have the solid drawing and animation background that Jones did, so it just comes off looking like bad drawings or collections of drawing mistakes.
To do this takes extreme control. And lots of careful decisions.

EXPERIMENTING WITH DESIGN AS YOU GO - Designing by organizing a group of concepts

Here's something that you don't see much of anymore: Chuck designed the character but didn't stick exactly to his first conception of him. Instead of being a model sheet design with every exact incremental shape and size carved in stone, it's a collection of design concepts and ideas, left open to constant tinkering throughout the cartoon.
His proportions and details keep changing, not only from scene to scene, but from pose to pose. Does the audience notice this? Of course not, but today's executives and show runners would seem to think that they do and will get mad if you play with the character designs as you go.
This method of creation opens up the creators' pallete and allows for a much wider assortment of entertainment possibilities.
It isn't uncontrolled ignorance like much of today's stylized stuff. It's highly controlled sophisticated visual concepts. Each character is designed as a combination of general concepts, rather than specific mathematical proportions and shapes.

DRACULA'S HANDS

Aren't these hands great? Inspired by real hands, but just stylized enough to give him a gothic evil flavor.

THE SKIN TOOTH

I know some cartoonists who hate the Chuck Jones patented skin tooth, but I think it works perfectly here.

The animation in 1963 has lost a lot of the 40s punch and dynamics, but what Jones' animators did here is still very skilled and clever and has subtle contrasts in the timing.

The Bill Lava music kind of slows the pace down, but it's so visually stunning that I almost don't notice.

http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/Jones/63Transylvania65000/Dracintro.mov


Dracula's Floating Cape
Chuck Jones being clever again.

BUGS' DESIGN

Bugs changes all through the cartoon too. I loved the way Jones drew Bugs when he was using his "handsome style" rather than his fruity style. I used to always notice the bumpers he did in the original "Bug Bunny Show" from 1960. The Friz and McKimson bumpers looked bland and lifeless by comparison.

Here's a strange design, almost looks like Friz.
Some of the animators are drawing Bugs too tall.
One weird thing about the later Bugs. He has tiny hands.

Here, he has the gift of human arms.

Just to compare with classic 40s Bugs...







There are lots more good things about Transylvania 6-5000 - like the gags, and I'll get to 'em soon.

BTW, this is also one of the rare remastered cartoons that hasn't been significantly altered by engineering wizards. The colors are mostly still subtle and the lines haven't been thinned to where they are all pixellated like in so many other Looney Tunes DVDs.

almost here

Acting tool 3) Gestures - McKimson examples

http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/McKimson/UpstandingSitter/McKimsonChickenGestures.mov
That last post I did on acting

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2007/12/acting-head-motion-to-punctuate.html

got me to thinking about acting through gestures, which is something many animators do. McKimson was really into gesture acting (as opposed to acting through facial expressions)

This chicken scene is funny acting. The actual gestures themselves are pure McKimson and there isn't a lot of variety to the held poses. What makes it more interesting is the variety of ways the animator comes up with to anticipate each of the held arm poses.
This looks like McKimson animated it himself, but Greg Duffel told me that the scenes that look the most like McKimson's own work were actually animated by his brother Charles McKimson - who would take Bob's layout poses and translate them exactly in great family loyalty.
The McKimson dynasty were chicken masters.








Here's a famous McKimson Daffy Duck scene that really defines his style. I think Mark Kausler told me this was animated by Manny Gould.
http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/McKimson/UpstandingSitter/DaffyHipHopClip.mov

This is similar to and different than the chicken scene at the same time.
Here, Daffy uses broad arm gestures, but there aren't many holds. You don't see the final poses, because the arms keep swinging.
Bill Melendez told me that he and Rod Scribner used to make fun of McKimson's acting style and then he acted it out for me, swinging his arms and pointing in the air and at me and shoving me around his office.
He said all of McKimson's gestures were literal. If someone said "you" in a sentence, the character would point to the you he was talking to.



Here's a funny "scoop" gesture that you see in a lot of McKimson scenes. Maybe it's a Manny Gould trademark?
Daffy is amazingly ugly in McKimson's cartoons. I wonder what his theory was behind that?

SCOOOOP!

I find this acting style totally hilarious because it's so ignorant. It's such a man's way to view the world. Pushy and shovey. It's like Daffy is manhandling the air to get his points across. I know real people like this.
It's the opposite of today's full animation style which is completely gay. That's ignorant in a wrong way.

Here Daffy says "slapping my head", so in McKimson's world of course the gesture has to be literally slapping.




If you say "rattle my brains" you better show it.This is man animation at its most blatant.

it's coming

Acting - Head Motion To Punctuate Dialogue

Here's some fun animation from Chuck Jones' "You Were Never Duckier" 1948, Chuck's funniest year.


There are accents in speech that you can hear. People (and ducks) punctuate those verbal accents with visual cues. That's what actors try to mimic.


TOOL 2) USING THE HEAD MOTION AS VISUAL PUNCTUATION

THE GENERAL IDEA:

pose

HEAD ANTICS SLIGHTLY

INTO NEXT POSE

ANOTHER ANTIC

KEY

http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/Jones/47Duckier/DaffyHeadacting.mov

VARY THE STRENGTH OF YOUR ACCENTS:
GET A BIGGER ACCENT BY USING A STRONGER ANTIC

KEY

HEAD MOVING SLIGHTLY ROUND KEY

BIGGER ANTIC CREATES STRONGER ACCENT

TALK BY MOVING HEAD SLIGHTLY AROUND KEY

SPINNING ANTIC FOR BIG ACCENT

ANTIC AWAY AND ROTATE INTO NEXT KEY

You can also use gestures to help punctuate the dialogue. This bit has much stronger emphasis in dialogue, so uses more visual accents and signals and with great variety. It doesn't seem typical of Jones, because it's very exaggerated. It looks a lot like some animation in his hilarious "Pest In The House" which appears very influenced by Clampett. Jones' cartoons calmed down quickly after these cartoons.



http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/Jones/47Duckier/DaffyGestureActingsmall.mov




Basic tools of visual acting:

1) Expressions
http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2006/03/specific-acting-in-looney-tunes-duck.html
2) Head Motions (this post)
3) Arm and hand gestures
http://mayersononanimation.blogspot.com/2007/06/six-authors-in-search-of-character-part_13.html
4) Body poses
http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2007/04/foghorn-leghorn-mckimson-henerys-dad.html

Most animators shy away from strong expressions and instead rely on the other 3 tools. You can use any and all of them in different proportions to create variety and emphasis.

A good voice track should inspire the animator to use which visual accompaniments most fit the track. The best animators customize their acting to fit the track. Most use formula.

animation trends 30, 40s, 50s, now

My favorite period of animation was from the 30s to the 50s. That's when the most creative and skilled cartoons were made.

Things changed quite a bit during those 30 years and in a general direction. I picked out a handful of cartoons that typify each period. They follow the major trends of the times.

(I left out New York cartoons for the time being, because for a while Fleischer defied the trends and went its own way.)

These are all west coast cartoons, done by the same basic groups of people using all the same principles only in different proportions and with different focuses.

Late 30s - Building the tools

Action:
http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/Dis/worm37/wildfightsmall.mov

The Worm Turns 1937

....animated by Ham Luske, Chuck Couch, Bernie Wolf, Al Eugster and Woolie Reitherman
(I don't know who did these scenes)

oh, here you go...This seems to be an amalgamation of Fleischer cartooniness with Disney timing and squash and stretch. It's not animation that advances the personalities. It's fun animation and exaggeration for the sake of itself wrapped around fairly mundane ideas.
I think it looks great and promises great advances to come.
But for some reason, the cartoony magic stuff soon disappeared from Disney's cartoons.

Acting:
http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog//Dis/magmick37/mickDonsml.mov

Magician Mickey 1937

Here's an acting sequence with Disney's top stars. Note that there isn't much acting. It's more like posing - using animation tricks and principles to make the poses read clearly.

Mickey stretches past his key poses to help accent them. The stretches aren't very extreme, they are just enough to draw your attention to the pose.

Disney was never very big on using facial expressions in the acting. They relied more on the gestures and poses to get the message across.
This animation is bouncy and rubbery seemingly for the sake of itself. Nothing in the gags or story points seem to be any more important than anything else. The animators are applying the same principles in the same proportions to almost every event in the cartoon.
The actual poses themselves are not that interesting, certainly not funny or specific, but the principles are strong.
I don't know why Disney never went past this stage of acting. Maybe he thought specific or funny expressions were ugly and not appealing, or maybe even cynical.
These cartoons are written and performed for juveniles and that makes it hard for me to be too entertained by them. As a cartoonist though, I can appreciate all the hard work and expertise in all these elaborate skills being applied to inane ideas.
It's odd that the animation at Disney's in the late 30s was so advanced yet what they applied it to was so outdated. The humor seems to come from the first silent films and 19th century circuses. Really simple slapstick and clownish antics presented with a sissypants veneer.
This is great stuff for young kids. When I watch this stuff I think "Imagine if Christians could do something professional." (If you watch TBN, you'll know what I mean.)
Disney seemed to need excuses in order to do what animation does naturally - like magic. This cartoon is written about magic, yet the actual magic tricks are not very impressive, especially since you know it's a cartoon and in cartoons anything is possible.

But only possible if you have the imagination and the permission to use it.

40s - Applying the tools to creativity

Action ending with acting:
http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/Clampett/Cuff/spiderruntalk.mov

It took Warner Bros. cartoons to find controlled ways to apply the new animation techniques. They combined early cartoon humor and magic with animation principles and their own advances in timing. On top of all that, they added something brand new - the idea of a personal point of view. And the audiences went nuts.

The Warner's directors had less money to spend on their cartoons than Disney and maybe that helped force them to have more restraint and control over their animation. Every action and every part of an action could not be equal.

Clampett focused the techniques around crazy stories, great acting, a richer assortment and variety of gags and swinging music (unlike the softer whitebread Disney scores). He gave all this new animation punctuation, but punctuation wrapped around the ideas, not just random punctuation.

Avery, Tashlin and Clampett also took the cartoons away from the juvenile Disney arena and aged them up to merely immature.

They mixed a kid-like optimism and sense of fun with adolescent misbehaviour, rebellion and sex.

These cartoons are much more human-friendly and that's part of why they have outlasted Disney's and are still very popular with all ages today.

More than anyone else, Clampett really upgraded the acting in cartoons. His characters have a much wider and more specific range of expressions than the Disney stable of characters.

For me, having strong characters who really portray human traits and foibles makes the magic and insanity of cartoons even more fantastic. It's like it's real and impossible at the same time. It's better than real.

Action ending with acting:
http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/Clampett/Cuff/beefightsmall.mov

Clampett's wild action is not merely wild. It's focused. This scene of the butt battle is hilarious and super fast. It's incredible that you can tell what's happening. The faces and torsos move less than the wildly flailing buttocks and that makes us focus in on the asses.

The Warner's directors, especially Clampett, allowed their animators more stylistic individuality. Here Scribner animates with an approach that I've never seen anyone else do. If you slow frame through the clip try to follow how one drawing animates into the next.

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2006/09/acting-bashful-buzzard-1945-baby.html

50s - Hiding the tools

Acting:
http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/Jones/bonnets/01BugsElmerArmyDialsmall.mov

By the 50s, all the animators that had at one time done lively bouncy animation were now slowly abandoning it in favor of walking talking cartoons. Characters would walk from one scene to the next, say their lines, react and then go on to the next. Jones called it "Illustrated Radio" and he did it best.

There are at least 2 theories as to why the Warner's cartoons went in this direction. The history books explain that the budgets were cut. The directors themselves say they like these cartoons better than their 40s cartoons, so this less animated style is partly by choice.

This animation is expert and could only be done by artists who had learned the 30s and 40 principles. All through Chuck Jones' later cartoons, there are moments of fun animation, but it's usually squeezed in between Jones' own poses.

Action:
http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/Jones/bonnets/02bonnetsactionsmall.mov

50s cartoons are more controlled than 30s cartoons and even more controlled than 40s cartoons, but it's a kind of repressive control that to me, really undermines the potential of animation.

A chase scene like this would have been animated with humor and noticeable invention in 1942. Here it's animated almost to hide the fact that it's animated. It's perfectly smooth and clever, but to an audience it's merely running and shooting.

The drawings in this and other 50s (esp. Jones) cartoons are also expert. They have tricky and clever structures, are organic, have a variety in the shapes and forms and are extremely carefully controlled. Yet they don't say anything noticeable. It's just enough cleverness to make the story point, but not much more. There is no joy of the magic of animation. No extreme pleasure of performance.

The UPA cartoons have even less animation and certainly no joy.

So far, all these cartoons use the same basket of skills and principles, but apply them in different proportions and to different purposes. You had to be highly skilled and talented to do any of these styles.



Now here's a style that you don't have to know anything to be able to do.

50 more years of progress
Action or Acting?

A few commenters observed the same things I just wrote about. Noteably Amir, Ardy and Roberto. Good eyes, fellas!

Oh and Will Finn just posted an in-depth analysis. Thanks Will!

HB Holes and Ruff N Reddy

Hey Art, are these your BGs?

The ORIGIN OF HB's LOOK

http://www.animationarchive.org/2007/12/filmography-happy-birthday-ruff-and.html

If you wanna watch the original HB show, go watch it at Steve's site.

This episode of Ruff N Reddy has some great BGs with really imaginative techniques and colors.

They even stole Bob Clampett's Dishonest John character! I wonder what Clampett thought of that.

Ken Duncan animates the best girls

Drawing and animating pretty girls is really hard. Girls are much more complex constructions than general cartoon characters. They have more forms to deal with and the forms don't easily flow along simple animation principles. It's hard to get a good line of action.

You also have to keep a very delicate balance in the design elements. If you get a line or form just a fraction off, the girl will look ugly.
Ken Duncan is amazing because he can draw girls and move them beautifully while maintaining all the classic animation principles. Not only that but he has a very distinct style that isn't purely a Cal Arts Disney formula.
I stumbled upon a couple pencil tests of a scene he did of Jane for Tarzan. One test is his roughs and the other the clean ups.
You can see in the roughs that he is concentrating less on detail and more on the essentials-the construction, the posing, the expressions and the movement.
Watch the clip and see how smoothly and beautifully it flows. Jane has weight, form, balance, variations in timing all with a minimum of lines and details.

This is why learning your principles are so important! Construction, line of action, movement are all more important than having a lot of details that you can't control.






Ken has no problem with difficult angles like heads that tilt up and away. You can't do this kind of animation if you learn to draw in a flat style.
Ken is also original. He relies less on Disney formula motions and cliches. He makes up his own gestures and expressions. That must be especially hard in an environment that is so used to doing everything in a way that has already be done.

http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/Moderncartoons/Disney/Janeroughclipsml.mov
It would also be very hard to be an assistant animator on such a complex character. Ken gets a lot of strong expression in his roughs and that's hard to preserve when you start adding flesh and details. There is a natural tendency to tone things down.


Some of these expressions are not quite as broad as the roughs, but the assistant work is really good anyway. There is a lot of appeal in these cleanups and the construction is very well maintained. I've seen a lot of Disney animation that has some pretty weak cleanups.

Like they have all these fluid Disney animators do all the animation, but then send it to Dic to get the Ghostbusters crew to clean it all up in Saturday Morning cartoon style.




These faces are great. And the way she anticipates her arm gesture before she points is really cute and clever.

http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/Moderncartoons/Disney/Janecleanclipsml.mov

I wonder what Ken would do if unleashed on a more cartoony project. He manages to get a lot of life and originality in his animation, even within a corporate environment. I would love to work with him someday on my girl characters. I bet all you boys would have to keep your popcorn on your laps all through the movie.



I think I'm gonna have to break down and buy the Tarzan DVD, because I remember some unique acting scenes Ken did and want to show them to you.

He does a lot of really specific acting and expressions, expressions that you've seen real girls do, but never before in cartoons. He is a rare observer of life that is able to translate what he observes into caricature and entertainment without first filtering it through what he thinks animation is supposed to look like. That's what us animators are supposed to do...I think.

missing drybrush pics

Cartoon DryBrush FX VS Live Action Film Style Motion Blur

I love all the cartoony effects they used to use thousands of years ago.




http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/Clampett/WackyWabbit/1drybrushclip.mov




Drybrush was a tool old time animators sometimes used for speed effects. Here Clampett took it as far as possible and made a joke of it.



You had to be a really good inker to pull this off.


The effects style of many old cartoons were designed to match the medium, to look cartoony and appropriate to the graphic style.

Today we have major studios competing to see who can have the most realistic backgrounds and the most realistic film effects. (It's actually an imitation of the blurs that film creates when an object is moving too fast to photograph clearly. It's not realistic at all.)Why you would want "realistic" effects in a cartoon is one of the mysteries of the ages anyway.
Here's a carefully animated subtle scene of Bugs Bunny talking to a man's buttocks.

Note the hard-to-draw tilt of his head below. Here's where your toy construction! studies will come in handy.

http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/Clampett/WackyWabbit/drybrush02small.movThe animation is really great too. You can actually feel Elmer's weight bouncing around, even though it's all a blur. Go through the clip in slow motion and be amazed at the skill.

Bugs sure likes to access Elmer's goods.Look how alive Bugs is in the older pre-tude cartoons. He really was a wascawwy wabbit back then. Compare to just 4 years later

I think the idea is that film-style blur effects can add believability to computer generated cartoons. So you can hardly tell this cartoon image from real life.

I tried to get Macromedia to build in drybrush tools in Flash, but no luck, unfortunately.

Ed Love upside down curly mouths and Clinton Oafs

Ed Love is one of my favorite animators. He had a varied career. He worked on 30s Disney cartoons (I just realized some of my favorite Disney cartoons have his animation in them), 40s Tex Avery and Lantz and TV Hanna Barbera cartoons. He really has his own style of movement.

When I was a kid I recognized his style 2 ways:
1) Upside down curly mouths
2) His movements were more fluid than the other animators. -he did fully animated HB commercials too! I'll show some later

Upside Down Curly Mouths

Mixing different animators with different layout artists

Here are two animation drawings by Ed Love. They have different proportions. The one on top is more even and tastefully on-model. The one below is more awkward and dumpy.

The one above is probably layed out by someone like Dick Bickenbach who drew everything with even pleasing gentle proportions. The one below is by Walter Clinton who always drew Fred (and other men) dumpy and oafish, which is funnier to me.Above: Bickenbach

Below: Clinton

There is a ton more to be said about Ed Love, and I will in further posts. This was just to give you a quick superficial clue to recognize his work from the drawings.

Some Clinton and Love oafs to admire

Did Anyone Do Jinks?

These are pretty good. Let me know if you want a public critique.


Lynseyhttp://schazzpractice.blogspot.com/

Jojohttp://jojobap.blogspot.com/2007/12/jinks-construction.html

Charlie J.

http://hjfhjk.blogspot.com/

_____________________________

Here's one Kali did. I hope some young artists will do some of the other angles too. It really is a good exercise and will help your animation.

Remember when you draw these to be very slow and careful, especially with your first steps. If you get the basic shapes out of proportion or wonky, all the details will be too!

Leave all your construction lines on the drawing. Don't erase them after, ok?Old cartoon characters share the same construction as this well designed and sculpted toy. If you wanna aim to animate this well, you gotta start with learning construction.
This fellow is working hard, but maybe not following the instructions exactly.
Start by drawing the basic shapes-the oval for the head, and then add the overall muzzle shape. Get those right first, then break each shape into its smaller components.
Don't erase the construction lines.
Try again, and go slower and more careful!

________________________________

By the way, thanks to the latest contributors! (let me know if I've missed you!)

Stuart Mead

Jennifer Lewis

Chris DeCarlo

Mitch Leewe

Grant Beaudette

You guys make me feel like I'm doing something important. I can't wait to see your drawings and evolution!

Chuck Jones, Style and The Future - Bugs Bonnets

I remember when I first saw "Bugs Bonnets". It was in the mid 60s in a movie theater. They still ran shorts at some theaters then and they would run cartoons from a few years earlier. The big screen really is the best way to see classic shorts of any kind!

(a Bob McKimson animated title)


My Dad would take me to the cartoons and then I would talk his ear off about them after. I was about 10 years old and Bugs Bonnets really made an impression on me. There was something different about it.

So happy in anticipation of the future that George Lucas and Neal Diamond would steal from me

I didn't know the word "style" yet. I thought of everything in terms of "old fashioned" and "futuristic". This looked like future cartoons to me (even though it was from 1955- I thought it was new). I didn't analyze it or anything, because I didn't know what that was yet. I did notice that everything was angular. All the rounded edges of the characters now had corners. Yet the drawings were still great. They weren't flat.

I imagined advanced cartoonists with big angular brains, tiny limbs from the far future of 1976 creating highly skilled 3 dimensional cartoons filled with hilarity and futuristic style and then transporting themselves back to 1965 to share their sensory delights with us primitive rounded creatures.

I think from then on, I was really aware of style and modernity. These terms have since come to mean different things than what they meant in the 60s (and earlier). Just as I was becoming aware of the futureness of style, the 70s descended and everything slipped into the dark ages Style and the future disappeared from the planet. Videotaped TV programs, Saturday Morning cartoons, soft rock and Star Wars cloaked the earth with a yellow ochre haze of blandness and the future died. Skill also vanished along with style.

I had to keep digging through the past from then on, to see what the future could (and I thought should) be.I was too young yet to recognize the danger of creeping gayness that can threaten too much application of style

Bugs Bonnets is on Looney Tunes 5.

Buy this set for everyone this Christmas!


Or get all 5 sets...

Cartoony + Principles - 1942 - Eatin' On The Cuff

Watch this pure cartoon fun:
http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/Clampett/Cuff/spiderlady01small.mov
Clampett combined Fleischer's cartooniness with Disney skills and added his own unique imagination and control to them.

I think Clampett's "Eatin' On The Cuff" is a landmark cartoon. It may be the first one where Avery's animators (now under Clampett) finally got what Clampett was all about. Clampett takes virtuoso animators' talents and pushes them to a new level. It's a near-perfect cartoon. It mixes all the creative elements that have been available to animators at other studios at different times. It combines Disney principles, great drawings, great gags and Fleischer cartooniness all together. This became Clampett's style and approach. He not only used all the available creative tools. He pushed them farther than anyone else and focused them and controlled them much more precisely. He gave them context.

Principles Turned Into Entertainment

During the mid to late 30s, Disney led the way in discovering and developing animation principles. Warner Bros.' 30s animation by comparison was actually pretty conservative, even Clampett's. The gags and held poses were funnier in Looney Tunes but the movement in the Disney cartoons squashed, stretched, bounced, overlapped and dragged to crazy proportions-while it was moving. They didn't ever settle on exaggerated poses, but getting from one pose to the next was wild - you have to freeze frame it to see it. The problem with the Disney cartoons was - it was all principles and not much entertainment. But they made some great cartoons this way and broke a lot of ground for others to find uses for it.

Clampett and his cohorts put the principles to use. They gave them a context. The principles are there, but they are in service of the story, character and entertainment. Each gag or bit of acting requires certain animation tools-but not every one every time. Classic Disney cartoons tend to use all the principles all the time with no control, no selection process. Everything deserves the same lush treatment. (I'll post some examples this week.)

Making A Gag Out Of Overlapping Action

The power in this animation is awesome. These are the principles of overlap and drag caricatured. The spider zips into scene and then her hair and clothes follow after-completely unattached. They hit her with a huge force. These drawings are not merely exaggerated-they are timed in a way that the impact of the action is maximum. It draws attention to the gag and the final held poses. Warner Bros. and particularly Clampett knew how to make some poses and gags more important than others and they used the principles of animation to enforce the ideas, gags and stories.
The drawings in some Scribner animation look like they aren't even connected. When you still frame it, it looks like it would never work, yet when you watch it at regular speed, it not only works, it's incredibly smooth and has impact and calculated control. It isn't simply wild and crazy, as opposed to Jim Tyer for example.
You can see the hierarchy of forms and details in the hair here. The hair is drawn as a form in motion first, then the forms have a few extra hair lines drawn within the forms.



Scribner slowed down.
http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/Clampett/Cuff/spiderrealslow.mov

Scribner Draws Gorgeous Girls
Scribner not only caricatured Veronica Lake's face, but also her body. Angular shoulders and thin arms and waist.

I like this blur effect for the eyelashes. There are only two drawings in the cycle and it looks sexy as hell.


Beauty gets crazy







Scribner Wild

Scribner exaggerates stretch, squash, overlap


Forms within forms- hierarchy
Great construction and exaggeration at the same time.




Look how damn sexy these drawings are!

McKimson

I love the way McKimson drew and animated these flames. They have solid hand anatomy, yet they still waver like flames. What control!








http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/Clampett/Cuff/Mckfiresmall.mov

The Switch From From The Junior to the Senior Unit

Clampett switched cartoon units in 1941. He went from a black and white unit that only did Porky Pig cartoons to a full color unit that had the top animators at Warner Bros and was free to make cartoons with any characters at all.

Tex Avery was in charge of this unit before Clampett took over, and so far hadn't really taken advantage of it on an animation level. His cartoons were basically strings of gags and he had his animators connect them with motion. If the animators put something of themselves into the cartoons along the way, fine, but they aren't cartoons that you would consider wildly creative. Not like what Tex did later at MGM.

Clampett had a mostly younger set of animators in his black and white unit. He said that while they were all very talented, there were certain ideas and gags that he wanted to try, that he thought his crew wasn't quite skilled enough yet to pull off. To tell you that truth, I find that hard to believe. I love his black and white cartoons. They have some great animation in them. Maybe some of the drawings were a bit cruder than McKimson's or Scribner's but I would love to have a unit of animators that skilled to work with.

Clampett's style is evident in his B and W cartoons.

The black and white cartoons are the most original and energetic cartoons Warners had done to date and they are full of Clampett's style and ideas.Here is a solidly constructed cat. It's so extremely solid that it looks like Clampett is making fun of construction.

There is a great variety of animation techniques in the cartoons. They go from really subtle careful acting to really wild experimental action.
You have to see this take in action. It's the craziest take I've ever seen. The way it moves is awesome. I'll post it later, but here is an article about the cartoon.

http://classiccartoons.blogspot.com/2007/07/sour-puss.html

1942 - Clampett and His New Animators Figure Out What They Can Do Together

http://www.davemackey.com/animation/wb/1942.html

The Henpecked Duck (30/8/1941)

John Carey born 4/6/1915
Vive Risto Born: 1902
Norm McCabe 10 February 1911
David Hoffman
Izzy Ellis

This cartoon is one of Clampett's last black and whites. It is full of subtle acting and lots of really weird and sick jokes, yet it's cute as heck. It's animated by the "young" crew. The animation is all very controlled and not as extreme as Disney cartoons.

(Hmmm...I just looked up everyone's birthdates, and it seems the age ranges are pretty much the same, so it's not really a "young" crew. Maybe just less experiencced? Or maybe just lower budgets. )

Cagey Canary (22/11/1941) co-dir: Tex Avery

Bob McKimson Born October 13, 191o
Virgil Ross August 8, 1907
Rod Scribner October 10, 1910
Charles McKimson? December 20, 1914
Sid Sutherland? 7 August 1901

Tex Avery started Cagey Canary then left for MGM. Clampett finished the cartoon, but it looks like it's mostly Avery. The animation is very down to earth, slow and mainly tells the gags. There are some Scribner scenes that look like Clampett handed them out and they are a bit wilder than earlier Avery cartoons. This is also the cartoon that was the model for the later Tweety and Sylvester cartoons.

Wabbit Twouble (20/12/1941)

This is a half and half transition cartoon from the way the animators animated for Avery and the way they would soon be animating for Clampett. It's like they are starting to get used to Clampett's direction style.

The story is very similar to Avery's "A Wild Hare" and "The Heckling Hare". It's the same easy going feeling and pacing but weirder jokes and more acting.

Clampett also brought his more musical approach to this Bugs Bunny template cartoon. A lot of the action is timed to popular songs, so it really swings, instead of having the music post-written to fit already existing gag timing.

Porky's Pooch (27/12/1941)


This was another black and white cartoon done by the younger crew. It is the first Charlie Dog cartoon. Chuck Jones turned this one-shot Clampett idea into a series.

Any Bonds Today (1942) trailer for the U.S. War Bonds*

This is a strange little war bonds ad. It's partly animated by Scribner and Virgil Ross, but something about it looks more primitive than their regular series cartoons. Clampett told me some of the animation was by beginners.

Crazy Cruise (14/3/1942) co-dir: Tex Avery


Here's another Avery cartoon that Clampett finished.

Horton Hatches the Egg (11/4/1942)

This cartoon is the first Seuss cartoon and sticks fairly close to the book, with some added gags. The animation is superb and really gives the book a reason to be animated.


The Wacky Wabbit (2/5/1942)


This cartoon, according to Clampett is him experimenting with material and ideas he didn't think he could have done before. He has long subtle acting sequences in it, like the scene where Bugs is following Elmer through the desert singing "Oh Susanna".

Nutty News /23/42

Another from the B and W unit. Some of the last cartoons have slower timing than Clampett's earlier cartoons. My theory is because maybe he left the timing to someone else as he transitioned to the color unit.

Wacky Blackout 7/11/42

Bugs Bunny gets the Boid (11/7/1942)


Clampett proving he understands Bugs Bunny's classic character better than anyone else before or since. He also introduces Beaky Buzzard, patterned after Mortimer Snerd. Hilarious Clampett-only type gags and great acting and animation.

Eatin' on the Cuff (22/8/1942)

I'm having trouble pinpointing exactly why this cartoon stands out from Clampett's previous work, but it just feels like something completely new. The last few color cartoons are great but feel like transitions. It's interesting that this is a black and white cartoon, even though it was made by the color unit.

This whole cartoon is paced like Clampett's musical sequences in his earlier black and white cartoons. It's not just a story told in animation. It's an experience, like listening to a good song.

After this Cartoon, Clampett has a 4 year run of genius and takes animation to new levels and shows the world what animation and cartooning can be if you have the talent and the will to explore and entertain.

The Hep Cat (3/10/1942)

Clampett makes a cartoon with his new animators, but in the style of his musical black and white cartoons. Great backgrounds by Johnny Johnson.

A Tale of Two Kitties (21/11/1942)

The first Tweety cartoon has brilliant experiments in direction and pacing. I could do 20 posts on this.

Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs (16/1/1943)

Clampett's masterpiece.

Tortoise wins by a Hare (20/2/1943)



Funniest Bugs Bunny cartoon ever. Virtuoso pacing and directorial control.


1942 was a pinnacle in animation history and this was Clampett at the top of the art form.

Here's your reward for plodding through some awkward sentences.

________________________________________________
Eatin' On The Cuff is on the latest Looney Tunes DVD collection, and it's a great print. It also has a wonderful commentary by Jerry Beck.

Buy this set for everyone this Christmas!


Or get all 5 sets...

Toy Construction 2 - Advanced -Knickerbocker toys - Jinks

Knickerbocker toys are more detailed than the cartoons they are based on. This is Jinks the cat. Draw him and reap the rewards of a better understanding of cartoon construction.

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2007/09/top-cat-turnaround-toy-construction_19.htmlIf you have already constructed Top Cat, you are now ready for a Knickerbocker toy.
The Knickerbocker toys have more elaborate forms than the Top Cat Toy we drew. The same general construction, but more complicated, so don't start with this exercise if you haven't done Top Cat yet.



I'm forcing myself to learn to draw in Flash. It's hard. The drawing tools suck. Yu can see how wiggly my lines are. Doing this in Flash though has its advantage. I can draw each level of construction on a separate layer, so that I can show them to you.
Work your way through each level, by drawing the biggest forms first. With each new level add the next biggest forms.
Note the perspective. The eyes curve around the round face and get smaller and thinner.

Each form, in turn has sub-forms-the muzzle is split into two balls in front and a wrinkle between the muzzle and eyes.

Here's the top layer of details, without the construction underneath. Sorry about the wiggly lines. Anyone have a secret to tell me how to get better lines in Flash?

Here are some more angles of Jinks for you to practice on.

Don't Take Betty's Boop

Here's another great Betty Boop cartoon from 1932.
Again, I don't know who the animator is, so if you do please tell us!
This was made before the Hays Office clamped down on Hollywood and cartoons were still allowed to be randy.
It was a cartoon staple in the early 30s to have a near-rape at the end of each cartoon. In most cartoons, the hero would show up and save the girl from the big bad man, but sometimes in the Betty Boops, it would actually happen and she would then like him after! Amazing times.

http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/boopoopdooop/rublegsmall.mov

I really love the way this animator draws and moves Betty.
Look how cute her little feet are and how voluptuous her legs are.

The movement is very careful and completely un Disney. Disney in the 30s developed a style of motion that in effect hid the motion. They animated in a very rubbery style that squashed and stretched so much that the actions usually shot past the poses. It looks great, but it avoids showing you the action. You can't see how you are getting from one pose to the next without freeze framing it. This is what most feature animation does today. There is a place for it, but I think there is also a place for this kind of beautiful fluid action that you can appreciate without having to slow down the action.

Gorgeous drawings!

I love the arms and hands. Her hands are like horsehoe crabs. Don't you want your stubbly face to be softly stroked by primitive crustaceans?


http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/boopoopdooop/donttakesmall.mov

In this next scene, all of a sudden her anatomy turns into Jack Kirby's style. Is it a different animator? Or is the same animator just experimenting as he goes? Trying things spontaneously as he thinks of them.
It's really cool that the anatomy keeps breaking down into rubber hose in between certain actions.

From rubbery to solid flesh.
She runs out in total rubber hose action. Was this on purpose, or is it the animator giving more work to the assistant to finish?

Either way, it's a great idea to animate back and forth between different approaches. It keeps things surprising and alive.


http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/boopoopdooop/sing2small.mov

Someday I should do a post about the differences in taste of ass appreciation between Disney and the other studios.










I just love this style of animation. Weird, sexy, cartoony, silly, innocent and dirty all at the same time.

This is an art form all its own that can't be matched by any other.

Donald's Diary

I'm a sucker for great color and it's very rare when you find it in cartoons.

Disney has had amazing color in many of their cartoons, and I would have been doing posts on them earlier, but unfortunately most of the remastered dvds of Disney cartoons have changed all the colors and contrasts to make them appeal to more "modern tastes".I finally found a digital copy of one of my favorite color cartoons and here it is. Yeah, the colors have been pumped up, but I took down the saturation a bit to get them back to the way I remember them.
These colors are very original and intelligent. There is an overall scheme to the color ideas in the cartoon.
Most of the colors are mixed down with a milky gray.
There are areas of related colors in the scenes-like the yellowish area next to the grayish area in the street pan above.

All the colors in Daisy's room are related, but not monochromatic which would make it look dull. Brown is the main color, but some browns are reddish, some are yellowish, some pinkish and each have different percentages of mixes.The rendering technique is very rough and fast. This is pretty unusual for Disney. It would look sloppy if it was rendered realistically this way and with the typical cartoon colors, but these colors are so unusual and striking that you don't really notice until you look close.


A nice balance of textured areas next to flatter areas.


These park scenes knock me out!
Nothing is the "logical" color. No blue skies or water. Even the greens are very unorthodox.


I will post more from this cartoon in a few days, but I'm in a rush to go do a CG movie pitch if you can believe that...

Dizzy Red Riding Hood

This is one of the great Betty Boop cartoons. It was done before they started tracing model sheets of her and stiffened her up. From 1930 to 1933 the cartoons are almost all really good.Does anybody know who this animator is?
I love the way he draws Betty and the way he moves things.

There's not only nothing realistic about this, there is also nothing Disney about it. Some people equate Disney with realism, but Disney is just a set of arbitrary rules or selective animation principles that many have come to believe are the only true attributes good animation must have.

Is this the same animator?

Disney advanced their own set of principles in the mid 30s and reached their peak with Snow White. Their mid to late 30s cartoons squash and stretch like crazy during movement, but the drawings when you can see them, remain pretty conservative and not very funny or cartoony.
When the Fleischers began to adopt the Disney tricks in the late 30s, their cartoons became less entertaining. They lost their own unique attributes along the way and absorbed Disney's negatives along with the positives.

Is it possible to be cartoony and have west coast principles at the same time? Wait for another post.


http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/BettyBoop/Dizzyredwalk01small.mov

I used to think of these Boop cartoons as primitive, because I too was used to judging everything by west coast 40s standards. They didn't squash and stretch much, had no weight and the inbetweening was evenly spaced which makes the characters seem to float.
These cartoons have something else that the more expensive and elaborate Disney cartoons don't. They are fun. They also sometimes have great design, depending on who the animator is.
And they are totally weird and imaginative. Dizzy Red Hiding Hood is a perfect cartoon fairy tale adaptation. It is not at all trying to be believable. We don't need to learn the characters' motivations. There are no multiplane camera fx trying to fool us into thinking we aren't watching a cartoon.
This glorifies that it's a cartoon. I love these animated backgrounds. It invites us into a surreal dream world of weirdness. I want a machine that can transport me into this surreal world. I want to visit Betty and Bimbo. I don't have any innate desire to visit Snow White's cottage. It's too normal.

I find that the closer animation tries to be real, the more fake it looks. Multiplane camera effects that use realistically painted bgs looks fake as Hell. You can see flat paintings of realistic trees panning at different speeds than the still background at the bottom of the mutiplane. Beowulf is the ultimate sinner of trying to be real and being more fake than anything ever made.

The Fleischers weren't ashamed they were making cartoons. They were all about the magic and fun.

http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/BettyBoop/DizzzyRedwalk02small.mov

Fleischer cartoons also differ from Disney's in how heterosexual they are.
This is a different animator than the one above and Betty's not as cute, but it's still very funny.

Bimbo and Betty have a happy ending!
I'm going to put more clips up that I think might be the animator in the walk scenes above. Help me out if you know who it is!

BTW, this is an 11x beat. 11x per step. 10 drawings per step with one drawing shot twice to make it 11 per beat.

The animator may have animated it as a 10x beat. (No animator would decide on his own to animate an 11x per step cycle). But the music sounded best at an 11x frame beat, so they chose to expose one drawing twice in each step to make it fit.

This suggests the music was written before the animation was done but who knows?

PAYPAL HTML

Korea Notes 4

Here's the last of my notes to overseas service studios. I hope they were helpful to someone out there!

On my last Korean show, the animators took our layouts and merely inbetweened them. The effect was that everyone floated from pose to pose. Nothing was favored. It was like the characters were underwater. It cost a fortune in retakes. We oughta just bring animation back to the country. Some of the budgets I've seen on modern flat shows could easily afford real animation. I see the shows and can't figure out where the money went.
Sometimes when people clean up animators' drawings, the characters end up fatter. That's because the clean up artist is drawing his lines on the outside of the animator's lines, rather than right on top.

Thanks to all these folks who donated. Did I miss anyone?

David Mackenzie

How to keep organized when doing storyboards...(for TV)


COMING UP...

A genius animator on early Betty Boops, unfettered by Disney rules.

1942 - the height of creative and skilled animation.

Toy Construction 2 - a Knickerbocker Jinks - drawn in flash layer by layer using wiggly flash tools

Creativity Magazine

Here's an article about my association with Hoytyboy, and they included my ideas about Direct Sponsorship.
here's the rest....

http://creativity-online.com/?action=news:article&newsId=122307

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2006/12/direct-sponsorship-1.html

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2006/12/direct-sponsorship-2.htmlHow The Web Will Be Advertisers' Best Friend

http://johnkpitch.blogspot.com/

Chuck Jones

I think Chuck Jones' best character design is Wile E. Coyote. Especially the early version. This is from "Beep Beep"... the second cartoon? From 2. I can't find the first one "Fast and Furryous" from 48 or 49 where he looks even better.
Chuck's style was an outgrowth of the general 40s animation style, and in particular, Bob McKimson's. What Chuck did to the pears and spheres style was add more complex shapes, inspired by anatomy. He combined the two types of forms and created an organic style with complex variations of the standard cartoon shapes.
The Coyote's head is actually the same basic construction as Bugs Bunny's, but with much more extreme contrasts and a long elaborately constructed nose with interwoven 's' curves.
I like this period of Chuck's work, before he got too angular. The angles in these designs are softened at the corners which makes them feel much more alive, as opposed to being graphic symbols.

CHUCK'S EXPRESSIONSChuck invented some expressions that are physically impossible, yet we instantly understand them and empathise with them when we see them. A great use of cartoon magic.

These expressions are more specific than say, Disney expressions. Disney expressions tend to be more general and much softer. These Jones expressions are much more like feelings actual humans experience.

Look at the beautiful asymmetry.
Constructed, complex shapes, human emotion and organicness.
Jones' great posing and expressions elevated the roadrunner cartoons that had pretty much standard cartoon jokes. The Coyote's reactions and his thought process made the physical gags funnier because of the irony in his plans.

Here's Chuck's smug expression. This was funny a long time ago, but I guess this eventually morphed into our modern 'tude expression. It was funny when it meant something.

Now we just paste in onto everything for no reason.

These frame grabs are from the Looney Tunes DVDs. Note the super skinny itchy ragged lines around the characters. On a TV screen they jitter and strobe and really flatten out the animation. What a shame, because these cartoons are so beautifully animated and once looked smooth as silk.

INVENTION AND VARIATION

Oh, remind me to tell you about the difference between invention and variations on a theme.

Chuck invented a few things, but he was a master at doing variations on ideas that he liked...

Nose Abuse

Flintstone really knows how to enjoy himself.