Thursday, December 18, 2008

foghorn smacks dog - big antics for big pain

Here's something that's just plain funny and universal.Solid drawings, great staging, appealing (in a manly way) and speaks to real humanity.
To make big hits stronger, you gotta use really big antics and leave them on long enough to build up power before the actual contact which barely registers onscreen.



This is so well thought out and aims solely to give the audience the biggest entertainment possible. It uses the same principles as Disney, but doesn't overdo it to the point where the action distracts from the acting or the gag. When he uses secondary actions he focuses the action on the main action. A lot of late 30s animation used too many secondary actions happening all over the character and made it hard to see hat the main actions of the characters were. Some Disney animators continued this practice to the end. Pete offered an example of this kind of thing from the Aristocats a couple of posts ago in the comments.
Bob McKimson completely directs his animation and staging to make the entertainment point come across clearly -which makes him a great director.
He doesn't confuse your eye with a lot of extra superfluous overlapping action, or too much squash and stretch and general animator show off stuff. He knows how to communicate with the audience and does it with extreme precision.
I think maybe why McKimson tried to constrain Scribner so much in his cartoons was because he felt Rod would have too much going on in his actions that distracted from the main point. It kind of backfired though, because Scribner in McKimson's cartoons had his characters move around and twitch within McKimson's prescribed "legal area" as if they were trying to wriggle out of a straight jacket. - I have clips of that stuff too. Maybe I'll show that in a later post. It's funny and sad at the same time.


I don't know who animated this, but it's very direct, powerful, to the point and most of all funny as heck.
http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/McKimson/47/TheFoghornLeghorn/foghornsmackssmall.mov