Saturday, November 15, 2008

1984-85 layouts - Lynne Naylor Jetsons Crowds

Most animators dread crowd scenes, including me. Lynne Naylor jumped in and did these impossible tedious scenes and made them look great!
She designed all the characters too and made each one different. Not only that, they all have slightly different poses, yet all their poses balance well against each other.
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I could stare at these drawings for hours. Every litle detail, each leg, belly, face has such unique and subtle stylish shapes.



This is great cartooning and thinking. She not only captured Ed Benedict's style; she added a lot of her own style to it - she brought that kind of cute appeal that only girls seem to be able to do.
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Even her actions really fit within the Hanna Barbera style but come off as lively and fun. And in the 1980s!...the era of "don't dare have fun making cartoons".
These scenes show a lot more than mere raw talent, which Lynne has a ton of. They show knowledge, skill and a great deal of thought and planning. To be able to combine so much control and and so many elements, yet still have it come off as so light and fun and easy is pretty monumental.
I'm envy work like this.


Lately I've been a bit down because every year the whole idea of control, fun and skill seems to vanish further into the past. It gets harder to produce the simplest cartoons. When I dug these up the other day, I couldn't believe what was being done in the 80s - under the worst possible conditions. We should be much furher than this by today, but it doesn't look like control or clarity is ever coming back - let alone appeal.