Ren and Stimpy" height="265" width="400">
Ren and Stimpy" height="265" width="400">
Somewhere in between the storyboard poses and the animation we do layout poses as I showed in the Dave Feiss post. There are usually more layout poses than storyboard poses, because I get in there and fiddle with them.
In this case, Kelly Armstrong worked from the basic layout poses but added a lot of her own - without straying from the context of the scene at all. All her poses only strengthened the scene and made it more individual and more real.
Here's the basic layout pose above which only tells you that Ren is having a romantic dream and that he thinks Stimpy is a beautiful human woman.
Kelly, again listened really closely to the soundtrack and drew expressions to match every inflection in my voice. She also exaggerated far beyond what anyone was used to seeing at the time. Even me.
These are pretty close to the layouts.
Kelly added the lips and all the specific mouths.
Holy Cow! Any other studio would fire you for drawings like this!
Back to layouts.
Unfortunately this beautiful scene got cut when the cartoon first aired. It was deemed too "homosexual". Even though I think there were gay people working on both sides of the production.
It actually isn't remotely homosexual. If anything it's "homophobic". Once Ren wakes up and realizes he's kissing Stimpy and not a girl, he freaks out. It's also species-o-phobic, when you think about it.
If you wanna still frame through -it, you'll see a lot of amazingly crazy Kelly drawings.
I want to point out again that they aren't randomly crazy; not merely for their own sake. They all drive the point of the scene home, right down to its minutest details. This is entirely different than say a Jim Tyer, who can sometimes just be crazy for crazy sake, without regard to character or to what the scene is about. That's still more entertaining than blandness, but it's much harder to be creative and stay within context.
http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/spumco/RenStimpy/1BHB/KellyCucaracha.mov
