Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Tiny Toon's Ideal 1

Tiny Toons began with a blasphemous premise but some lofty ideals that I agree with. The crew - as Jorge pointed out, was put together mostly from the Mighty Mouse and Beany and Cecil crews. It was quite a star list of talent they had.

The cartooniest and most enthusiastic artist was Eddie of course. Here are some of his sketches of the Looney Tunes babies.This Bugs character looks pretty conservative for Eddie. They are really good, but I'm surprised he had to write "acceptable off-model". I wonder who needed to be convinced it was acceptable? I bet the model department wasn't!
I really like Eddie's Porkys. These show a special love for the character.
You gotta be a real cartoonist to realize the creative beauty and humorous potential of Warner Bros.' seemingly most conservative character.
These are some great poses below. It's weird to see Porky wearing pants, but somehow Eddie manages to draw him as if what's under them is aching to come out. He knows what people like about Porky.

You know somebody can really draw if they like to do back poses - and can make them funny! Many artists are afraid of drawing characters from the back - not Eddie. He embraces the backside. This Porky below is really appealing. Damn those pants!
Here is definite proof that Eddie can draw cute!
I love how he can get perfectly clear poses, construction and attitudes in just a few lines on a tiny thumbnail drawing. Eddie's storyboards are super fun to lay out, because he's done the hard part for you. I don't know how you can go wrong with storyboard drawings like this.
Story Artists No Longer Are Allowed To Tell Stories

Nowadays, they make the storyboard artists not tell stories anymore and do something totally irrelevant to the job instead. Guys who should be staging and writing the gags are too busy cleaning up their tiny drawings and drawing complete detailed backgrounds to have time to think about story. No job category does what it was invented for anymore, it seems.

Here's the Daffy character looking much better than I ever saw him on the screen
He had a really bizarre design in the cartoons. - a giant brain with a tiny little vestigial beak. (I did a bunch of giant brain tiny Toons drawings making fun of it)
Eddie was one of the first directors during the idealistic days of Tiny Toons' birth. (Or reincarnation) He was the perfect choice. He had a unique "voice", a strong individual drawing style and a really funny way of seeing the world - as you all know from his genius theory blog. Plus, he knew all the cartoons that they were basing the baby version on.

Tiny Toons (not the characters) came out of the Mighty Mouse and Beany and Cecil experiments. It was originally supposed to be a continuation of their ideals - the ideals I had been fighting for all through the 80s - which were to give cartoonists back the industry that had been stolen from us and let the cartoonists create the whole thing from beginning to end. They even started by packing the studio with MM and B&C artists and "writers" - who were actually artists in disguise. Mainly Tom Minton and Jim Reardon who wrote so many funny MM episodes.

Tom Ruegger told me he loved Mighty Mouse and had already imitated it in "A Pup Named Scooby Doo" for Hanna Barbera. Being once an artist himself and having some sympathy for us, he said he believed in the same things as I did, and he set up the studio for WB and Spielberg. Steven himself is a big cartoon fan and wanted cartoons done the way they used to be done at WB's original studio, not some crappy Saturday morning thing that was just like everything else.

Tom started with my adapted-to-TV unit system and doing layouts in-house (which everyone else was doing overseas) and having artists write the cartoons. I think they still used scripts like we were forced to on Mighty Mouse and that may have been the parasitic worm that eventually devoured the system.

This was all happening at the same time Spumco was starting production on Ren and Stimpy, and once we got into heavy production I began stealing many of my artists back from Tiny Toons and installing a more advanced artist/unit system. There was a lot of overlap between the 2 studios.

I'll show you some more takes on the same characters Eddie drew by other well known cartoonists.

...and tell more stories. Eddie, you can correct me if I get anything wrong. Or Tom or anyone else that worked on that first season in paradise.