Friday HappyTime with Mike Fontanelli

Erotic Cycles

Betty knows just how much Bimbo is turned on by cycles.
This is what I would consider not conservative animation. Grim isn't holding anything back. He's just doing what he thinks is naturally funny. He's not checking his rule book first.
You'd have a million people saying no to this kind of thing today - or even in the 50s.
Not just because it's dirty - but because it's too cartoony. It "doesn't make sense".
This arm wave is funny as hell, you better say no to it, quick!
And of course the rubber butt slap is the topper of it all.
The Fleischers had their own sort of "limited animation " techniques. They would animate a lot of cycles or bits of animation and repeat them a couple times. This could essentially cut their budgets in half. This is different than say, HB's limited animation of the late 50s - where they were trying to hide the animation. The Fleischers made the cycles themselves funny and worth looking at more than once.''


By the 50s animation was still professional, but outside of some commercials, was pretty conservative. "We don't do that sort of thing anymore".
I love this early purity.
To me, this is the essential part of animation- moving things funny.
Now you have to fight like Hell to get anyone to allow you to do what simply comes naturally to the medium.
Look what this is doing for Bimbo!
Don't you wish your gal/dog? would do some erotic cycles for you?



http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/BettyBoop/mysteriousmose/bettydance1slapbuttsml.mov

Next

Big House Blues - Spumco - "The Beeg Sleep!"

My whole TV system is geared to "pose to pose" animation. We draw the layout poses at Spumco, then ship them to overseas studios for them to connect the poses.
When I do animation myself, my more natural tendency is to go straight ahead, or if there are poses in the layouts-to sail right past them.
I don't have the patience to draw a lot of inbetweens that look very close to the keys, so I draw all the inbetweens for fun - even if you don't see them all in the actual animation, it's more fun for me.
It alleviates the boredom (for me) of doing traditional conservative animation.
I just like doing funny drawings.











http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/spumco/RenStimpy/1BHB/JohnBigSleep.mov

tomorrow

Good Conservative Cartooning 2

I think Harvey Eisenberg is a top-notch cartoonist and I collect his stuff wherever I can find it. He's one of my favorites.
He's a conservative cartoonist:
He doesn't draw wild extreme poses like Rod Scribner.
His comic panel layouts aren't as imaginative as Milt Gross'.
He does have style, but it's not overly self-conscious or dominating like say - later Chuck Jones cartoons.
What does he have instead? He has tons of skill. He has a beautiful sense of balance to his layouts and hierarchy.
His layouts are perfectly clear. He has enough style to make his cartoons appealing - they draw you into them.
Eisenberg has all his principles down. His fundamentals are completely solid. You don't see that in many cartoonists. In other words he's well-rounded. His drawings just look right in every way and there is an automatic appeal to just plain good drawings.
He is able to combine his own natural style with other styles - in this case with Ed Benedict's. Ed is a more daring cartoonist and that's why he is a character designer. His whole job is to think up striking combinations of shapes. Harvey's skills allow him to understand Ed's inventions and interpret them to make them functional in stories.
This is the kind of cartoonist you would love to have doing layouts on your cartoons. If he did the staging under an imaginative director, this would make the animators' jobs a lot easier. Your more imaginative animators would be freed up to think about the characters and take them to places Harvey wouldn't on his own.

But he can provide a solid backdrop for the stars. He makes it easier for the Rod Scribners of the world to shine in.

It's like a great singer being supported by a skilled band and a great arrangement. The whole band can't be going off in their own direction. They have to be tight and structured so that Frank Sinatra can meander a bit off the track. His stylistic meandering is noticed by the tightness of the accompaniment of the background. Also, he is highly skilled himself and knows all the fundamentals. His style came after his learning of how singing works.

This is why I love cartoon animation so much. It's a collaborative medium. There are so many skills and talents involved that no one artist could ever learn them all. Put a bunch together and find out their specialties, then let them grow together and the advances will be much greater and faster than any one artist alone.

Here's earlier Eisenberg - drawing in Hanna Barbera's Tom and Jerry style.

http://www.animationarchive.org/2007/02/comics-harvey-eisenbergs-foxy-fagan.html


When is the best time to use the power of conservatism? WHEN YOU ARE LEARNING A NEW SKILL.

Like in school. That's where you should be able to learn fundamentals. You should not be searching for a personal style. That comes with time to a rare few.

Any time you learn something new, you should learn it slowly and carefully - the way it was done best traditionally.

The trick is separating principles from stylistic habits.

Many animation schools preach Disney fundamentals but are really encouraging you to copy their style or habits instead (after being degraded by multiple generations of Disney clones). Their cliches.

It's better to look at a lot of styles so you can see what is style and what is form and structure. Otherwise you have the danger of becoming a clone of someone else's style only with a broken mutated gene.

The better you can draw, the better you can recognize cliched habits against fundamentals.

My kind of Conservative Cartooning

I don't want anyone to think I'm completely opposed to conservative approaches to cartooning. There are many conservative cartoonists I love.
I'll explain more later and maybe touch on why I think making cartoons with crews rather than alone leads to better results.


Well a lot of people in the comments did my job for me! thanks.

I'll add a little:

When I say "conservative" I don't mean in the political sense of the word. Most artists are by their nature more liberal than the average person in general.

I mean conservative in the sense that they are cautious, afraid to go beyond certain prescribed boundaries. There are only a handful of people in any field really capable and willing to break new ground and move things forward.

The difference between old type conservative and new is basically this:

A conservative cartoonist from the old days prescribes to a complex and sundry set of boundaries. It takes a lot of learning and skill to do this.

The new type of conservative is actually 2 types:

The conservative executive is afraid of everything. Anything at all that doesn't fit a mold, that hasn't already been done a hundred times - but even worse. They are afraid of the basics! Of pure skill - and of making a committed statement to anything. That's why so many animated movies never have their characters actually make it to a finished real pose or expression. It's as if they stop at an inbetween for fear of being too clear or entertaining. (Will Finn and I came up with this theory today)

Modern conservative cartoonists don't have the benefit of solid basics, good schools or high standards in new media to look up to. All they have to work from is superficially copying current styles and trends, without knowing their origins or original purposes - if they ever had any.

Combine these 2 types of modern conservatives and you get lackluster, unskilled and predictable generic modern animation, that with each generation declines (maybe unknowingly) another notch.

Harvey Eisenberg is a conservative yet highly skilled and somewhat stylish cartoonist of the past. More on him in the next post.

http://allthingsger.blogspot.com/2009/04/meet-flagstones-tuesday-comic-strip-day.html

Mighty Mouse by Jim Tyer

I like this gray version of Oil Can Harry.




http://comicrazys.com/2009/04/20/mighty-mouse-the-case-of-the-multiplying-villain-jim-tyer/

Kitschy Corporate Mascots - Before and After

BEFORE

Mike Fontanelli sent me these images from ebay as further proof that everything went to Hell after the hippie revolution. Even bad taste.
Corporate logos are cheesy looking by tradition. But they used to be funny cheesy.


Even poor taste was good at one time.

AFTER

I love the Best Buy package of lumps. A real collectible.
Someone said I need to get more up to date and reference stuff like this in my cartoons, and add a hip hop track. Then I'd be cool.

Unique Color By Mel Crawford In Touché Turtle

Kali scanned her whole book for me just so I could rave about how much I love these paintings.
Mel Crawford is my favorite cartoon book painter anyway, but this book is one of his particularly striking ones, just for color.
His colors baffle me. I don't know what theories he uses to pick and combine them with.
They are totally unique to him.

He never uses the actual colors that the characters are in the cartoons, which is to his credit, because that makes the books all the more fun. Like Hanna Barbera candy.

Everything reads perfectly, even with all the odd color mixtures.

Look at the neat colors in Dum Dum's butt. A dull grayed blue, and on top of that a sort of pee beige. Who would think of combining those 2 colors?

All this stuff is just too happy in its weirdness.
I just have to stare at this stuff because it's so original and surprising. Look at the colors of the bed covers and the bed posts. They give me a piss-willie.
You now, the cartoons these are based on are pretty bad, but they are designed by another genius - Ed Benedict. Just having good design sure does a lot for a cartoon - and its spinoffs like these kids' books.






All this cool stuff was made for the most pampered generation of kids in history.

Then they grew up and made everything bland, so no other kids could ever have as much fun again. Go figure.

Bonus

This one below is by a different painter - I think Paul Julian - also very nice.

Next - Mystery Color Theories Of Mel Crawford

Betty Never Looked So Hot - Mysterious Mose

To me, this is the cutest Betty Boop ever. It's animated by its designer, Grim Natwick.
These scenes are from "Mysterious Mose", a great early Fleischer cartoon.
The animation is early, before all the secondary animation principles were established and is done straight ahead through sheer talent and design. It's animated to the beats to a hot jazz track.
Great drawings, pretty cartoon girls animated to great music is my favorite art form. It's an unbeatable combination.
Each pose lands on a beat. I think it's a 12x beat if I remember correctly.
I love the imaginative lip synch. You gotta remember too, that they had only been animating mouths for a year or so! This was all new to everybody.



It's cool how Betty's part keeps moving from one side of her head to the other.



You can't beat Horseshoe Crab hands either.


Note the dog ears and nose!





I wouldn't wanna get caught on any of those fishhooks coming out of her head.





These are supremely stylish drawings - especially for 1930, when almost everyone else was drawing characters made of circles.








These would look great on t-shirts - whattaya think girls?




http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/BettyBoop/mysteriousmose/MysteriousMose_funnyMotion1.mov

http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/BettyBoop/mysteriousmose/MysteriousMose_funnyMotion2.mov

Next: Grim Natwick's Cutest Boop Drawings

Carbunkle 4 - Jasper - The Big Sleep - Bob

The system I designed in the 80s to try to improve limited TV animation was dependent upon having strong layout poses where we could control the visual acting of the characters. Before Ren and Stimpy, the overseas studios would take these poses and basically time them evenly from one to the next - which caused the poses to swim past each other, so then I started adding longer holds just so you could see each pose before registering the next one.

Layout pose above.

When we did the pilot for Ren and Stimpy we animated the whole thing in North America - between Spumco and Carbunkle, which gave us more control over the timing of the poses. This scene was animated by Bob Jaques and he used a variety of timing techniques to emphasize the layouts and the story. First, Ren turns his head fairly evenly as he starts talking. There is no formulaic antic/overshoot because it is a slow move and doesn't require one.

Here's another layout pose below. Ren is calmly speaking.

"Hey Jasper, where's Phil?"When Jasper starts speaking, the only action is his dialogue mouths. His head is held. "I told ya, they put him to..."
Then he pops into this Kirk Douglas expression...
"Sleep!"
When he pops back to the first pose, his head squashes for a frame and his nose and ears drag.
Back to the layout.

Now Ren speaks again, only this time with more energy, so he does a slight antic first.
From there he goes up into an extreme past the pose where he will settle into. "Soo...
and then his hand does a semi-circle action as it settles into ...Wake him up!"
...the final pose
Now Jasper leans forward softly to tell something to Ren.


"You don't wake up..."
Ren's head pans to the left slowly...
Jasper's eyes accent, looking at camera.
He pops to another pose and continues dialogue...
Then into another key layout pose "From the...""
Bob continued the action by having Jasper turn his head slightly away from camera... "Big"
Then he animates into this throbbing skull pose.and continues down very slightly in a moving hold... "Sleep"
and snaps back to the first pose...

His tongue comes out after the pop, which smoothes out the action.

Having all this variety of timing makes the scene seem more alive than if the same timing formula was used to connect each successive pose. These variations aren't at random either. You can tell that Bob really planned out the whole scene and customized each action to make the points of the story and the characters' emotions come across.

http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/spumco/RenStimpy/1BHB/BobJasperBigSleep.mov

tomorrow - variety VS formula timing

An Age Of Extreme Conservatism pt 2 - Cartoons Today

Conservative VS Liberal Cartoons Of The Past:

Disney's studio was extremely conservative in its content. Their characters and attitudes were wholesome and generic, never veering into the territory of the specific individual - because conservatives naturally distrust anybody that has a unique personality. Disney himself admitted it many times. He distrusted anybody that stood out from the crowd. On the other hand, the studio liberally experimented in the advancement of skills. They believed in "quality" - which in the 1930s partly meant extreme inhuman otherworldly phenomenal ability. Nobody before the mid 60s ever expected there would be a time when famous people would be average. We all took it for granted that if you were on TV, or in the movies, on radio, sold records, were a politician that you must be some amazingly gifted accomplished person. Whether you were a liberal or a conservative, you shouldn't be rich and famous unless you could do something that hardly anyone else can do.


Bill and Joe - Typical Conservatives From The "Great Generation"

Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera were extreme conservatives from the "great generation". They believed in skill, gloss, professionalism and - not breaking the mold. That was the general conception of a "conservative" before hippies arrived and destroyed everything good about both camps.

Bill and Joe took a couple years of mild experimentation (and politicking with management against more imaginative directors) with some different characters before they hit upon their one success - Tom and Jerry. Tom and Jerry is about as uninspired a cartoon series as was ever created. It's pure generic cartoon thinking of the time. What is a cartoon? Uh...it's where a cat chases a mouse and there is lots of hurt and noise and mayhem. It's hard to be more basic than that, so Bill and Joe didn't fix something that wasn't broken for 15 or 16 years. For that whole period they didn't even try to create new characters. As long as Tom and Jerry was popular and still winning awards, why waste brain cells thinking up something new that might fail? Now I like Bill and Joe as people and I admire their skill and professionalism and even their basic cartoony instincts, but where we depart is in this: I can't even imagine having to draw the same small handful of characters doing the same things for decades. I would go insane. Don't creative people want to create? In other words do new things? Apparently not all of them do.


WB Cartoons Much More Liberal Creativity - More inventive

Meanwhile over at Warner Bros, a lot of liberal creativity was going on - and the inventions and explorations being pioneered dragged the rest of the more conservative studios along with it. Obviously Clampett was the most "liberal" of the whole group and he himself dragged along a lot of the rest of the Looney Tunes group of cartoonists that in general were more imaginative than rest of the studios in the late 30s and throughout the 40s. Chuck was sort of half and half - he was cautious in his content yet liberal in his techniques. Friz was the most conservative of the bunch and reluctantly, half-heartedly followed behind the trends that Clampett, Avery and Jones set - grumbling about it the whole time.

Disney Animators Baffled By Looney Tunes

I've heard stories that the Disney animators would screen all the cartoons that every other studio was making just to see if they had any competition. I can just imagine them being dumbfounded when the latest rebellious individualistic new Warner Bros. or Tex Avery MGM cartoons came out. Can you see Frank and Ollie watching "The Great Piggy Bank Robbery" or "Uncle Tom's Cabana"? I know that even 50 years after those cartoons changed everything and were still popular, Frank and Ollie were still dumbfounded.

I went to a celebration and screening of classic cartoons in the 80s in L.A. and a lot of old timers were there. When Disney cartoons were run, there was polite silence throughout the packed audience. When they played Chuck Jones' "Pest In The House" the whole audience erupted in laughter and hysteria. They also ran a classic Tex Avery (I forget which one) and the same thing happened.

During an intermission, Frank and Ollie came onstage to be interviewed (by Leonard Maltin?). They right away admitted their astonishment that the Jones and Avery cartoons were received with such joy and hysteria - and then they explained it away. I'll try to paraphrase (if you were at this show and remember more details, please comment). It was something like "Well yes those cartoons certainly had energy and they got a lot of laughs. I remember when we first screened such brash cartoons at Disney's that we were worried that maybe our own cartoons would be too sedate and old-fashioned by comparison, but then when we saw the same cartoons played in the midwest where most decent Americans live, nobody understood the jokes. So these are good for sophisticated urban crowds on the coasts, but our more conservative wholesome cartoons were much more popular overall." Now that's conservatism. Warner Bros. characters cartoons have outlasted Disney's popularity by decades, Frank and Ollie witnessed it with their very own eyes, and still had the audacity to deny it.

Old Conservativism Different than Modern Conservatism

Boy do I miss the old kind of conservative - because at least they had a tendency to preserve some of the good things that the previous generations of liberals pioneered.

Forcing Conservatives To Break Habits

In hard times, conservatives are sometimes forced to be creative. When the cartoon studios collapsed in the mid 50s, Bill and Joe - after making the same 2 characters in cartoons for the last 15 years, were all of a sudden on the street. The times had changed and so had the conditions of production. There was no more big-budget slow moving theatrical cartoon production where you could spend decades polishing up the same tired old ideas. Now the only way to survive was to get into television and pump out tons of product for bargain basement prices. You couldn't just make one set of characters and expect to survive (not till the 90s).

So now Bill and Joe scrambled and were forced to find new ideas and characters. Being the pragmatic conservatives that they were, they jumped at the task and created more characters in a year than they had in their whole previous career. They also had no choice but to change drawing styles to keep up with the market. Now they had to write dialogue - they had never had to do this for Tom and Jerry. This resulted in way more interesting characters than a generic silent cat and mouse. Not as interesting as the best Looney Tunes characters, but quite an advance for Bill and Joe. They never had to create characters with personality before. So how did they do it all at once?

Conservatives Copy Successful Liberal Inventions

They basically copied a bunch of other more creative people's ideas and characters. Huckleberry Hound is the voice and personality of Tex Avery's southern wolf - but he has Droopy's design. The Flinstones are the Honeymooners living in cave times. Quick Draw McGraw is a watered down Red Skelton. Yogi's voice and outfit is patterned after Norton from the Honeymooners. Etc.

What made their cartoons seem fresh and unique were the individual star talents that created the style. Ed Benedict's character designs (after Joe had told him nobody liked that "UPA" crap) were striking and appealing and modern. Daws Butler's beautiful voice and rhythms and versatility gave the voice patterns he mimicked from already established radio and TV stars a new sound. A sound so appealing that it made you think the characters were actually brand new.

The other innovations in the first HB cartoons came from the fact that they were being churned out so fast, that Bill and Joe had to use a ton of cartoonists, painters and other talents that all had different styles and personalities. The haphazard mixing and matching of all these talents - unsupervised by the conservatives who wished they had the time to force everyone into a formula - created a freshness and collection of a lot of lucky accidents. The first 3 years of Bill and Joe's new life showed much raw promise for a very creative future - had they not been so conservative that they couldn't pick up on the lucky accidents.

Formula Sets In

As soon as they became established and successful and began to get a studio in system in place, they got more control over the whole effort and everything became a complete depressing formula. These cheaper formulaic cartoons allowed them to survive for decades, but they also ruined their chances for respect from their peers. With every year, the cartoons got less imaginative, less cartoony, less fun - but the networks would still buy 'em like that so - why fix something that ain't broken? Most of them got cancelled after the first year, and yet the networks would buy the latest batch of Godawful cartoons. There was no incentive to do anything even professional - let alone creative. Had they been more liberal thinkers, they could have taken the lucky accidents that happened in the first couple years of their TV careers (gifts from God!) and built upon then - while throwing out the parts that were boring or didn't work. Instead, being extreme conservatives, they threw out the fresh lucky innovations and built upon the formula.

Hippies Deliver The Final Blow To Any Kind Of Creativity

Once the hippies came along, Bill and Joe - like everyone else - threw out even the good part of the formula - and any pretense at all of skill and professionalism. Scooby Doo was born and a whole new age of the worst, ugliest, unimaginative and amateurish cartoons burst through the dam and we've never recovered.
The worst things about 70s cartoons still influence even the most expensive "quality" feature animation today. People much more conservative and less creative than Bill and Joe jumped on the bandwagon and took over the whole business. Filmation, Dic, Nelvana eventually influenced Disney in turn, then led straight to Dreamworks, the uber-conservative animation studio.

Bill and Joe Reap Their Sour Seed

The sad thing about this is that in their old age, both Bill and Joe admitted to me that they hated their later cartoons and really didn't enjoy the creative reputation they had earned as the guys who ruined cartoons. I felt for them, but they sure asked for it.


Modern Conservatism Doesn't Even Value Skill Or Preservation Of Tradition

Today's conservative animation leaders are very different than not only liberal creators like Bob Clampett, Chuck Jones and Tex Avery but even their conservative counterparts of the past - Bill, Joe and Walt.

Today's conservatism fears and distrust everything, not just NEW ideas, but even just barely honest HUMAN ideas. The moguls have zero respect for anyone creative - whether they are liberally creative or conservatively creative. They are so afraid of individual initiative and talent that they have to use closed distribution systems to keep out any competition.

Today's creative leaders may label themselves "liberals", may have voted for Obama, but the last thing they want is anything to shake up their safe system. "Change" and "Individuality" are curse words for this new type of ultra conservative thinking yet poltically affiliated liberal.

Experimentation by Chuck Jones on Looney Tunes Shorts - the "smear"

Technique 1: "Smears"

In my last shorts program post I talked about the value of experimentation and progress. This was built into many classic shorts programs, particularly Disney and Warner Bros.'

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2009/04/goals-of-shorts-program-8-developing.html

Chuck Jones was an interesting character. He seemed torn between extreme experimentation and conservatism. The things he chose to experiment with are mostly of secondary importance to the entertainment value of the cartoons - background stylings, and inbetweens.
For awhile in the early 40s you can see a lot of what we now call "smears" in the inbetweens. Stretched inbetweens that carry us from one layout pose to the next in just a couple frames.
Bob Jaques first showed me this stuff by slowing down old cartoons to study them - and he may have been the one to coin the term "smear" to describe it. We of course loved it because it was something unique to the cartoon form. Real people don't smear in front of you.
Chuck's drawing style in the 1940s was a slight variation of Bob McKimson's drawing style, only a bit softer.
In the slow scenes, the characters are drawn with pretty solid construction and conservatism.
Then they break into these wild smeared inbetweens to get to the next solid drawings. Chuck didn't invent this concept; you can see it even in 30s Disney cartoons. But Jones' crew took it to much further extremes than anyone else - to the point where you can actually see it in real time. He toned it down in the late 40s, but it was all the rage in his unit for a few years.
What's important to note, is that they didn't do it the same way every time. They had fun with it and tried to tailor each smear to the context of the action.
I find this bit odd. Daffy falls into scene without a smear. Instead they chose to use drybrush to add to the effect of the fast action.
...which brings me to another point: variation keeps things from becoming monotonous or formulaic. Jones didn't use the same technique for every action. His crew constantly experimented, studied and discovered new techniques and used them all according to which technique they felt suited a particular action best.
http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/Jones/43duckornottoduck/1DaffyFallsDogSmears.mov

Technique 2 - Bobble Head acting from Chuck's Layout Pose

Here's another technique you see a lot of in Jones' cartoons, a much more conservative technique.Jones usually posed out the cartoons for his animators. For example, here's Daffy in a basic layout pose talking to the dog.
This would be a good place for the animator to use multiple facial expressions to get across his acting, but instead he uses head bobs and actions to mildly punctuate the accents in the dialogue. I don't think Chuck wanted his animators to put too much of themselves into their scenes. Not where the audience could notice it, anyway. The animation tends to stay within the framework of Chuck's layouts. This animator didn't even try to animate lip-synch for the dialogue.
When young animators first discover smears, they tend to have the urge to do everything using smears. I think it's important to remember that it is just one trick in a huge potential bag of animation techniques. When you use the same technique to bridge every pose to the next, it becomes a formula, monotonous and predictable....and DEAD.




http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/Jones/43duckornottoduck/2DaffyTalksNoSmears.mov

Experiment to discover and practice new techniques
Vary your techniques
Apply Techniques in context wherever possible

Does Construction Work? 2 - A Self Critique From a Student

Here's another student who thinks so.Geneva says...."I was pleased with how much easier crazy, seemingly complex drawing is when you start to practice construction and hierarchy! It felt good. BUT..."The best way to improve fast is to learn some basics from a common-sense no-bull teacher, and then to learn to analyze and critique yourself.

Big House Blues Spumco 2 - Why Ren no longer Has a Tail

I had to explain that ring around the toilet in an executive meeting. Maybe they had never seen one.
Some people have asked me why Ren had a tail in the pilot and not in the series.
This scene is the reason why. I was always trying to combine limited animation techniques with bits of smooth animation. This was one of those scenes that kinda failed.
I got this dialogue theory from Bob.
Before hitting a big vowel mouth, anticipate it with a tight lipped consonant that is trying to hold back the energy of the loud vowel building up.
then explode into the open mouthed vowel

Insect Ren

This was part of Ren's character from the beginning. He would have moments of lucidity and emotion, but then would revert to insect instinct as he ventured dutifully to his next emotion.
Ren turns his body all the way while leaving his Mantid head in the same position.


This walk was a bugger to animate. I wanted him to be all floppy in the feet and to have his insect head bob up and down as he walked off stage without emotion.
The tail drove me nuts. I was trying to do an old style rubber hose wave cycle on it, and it just kept popping and jerking on me.
Wave cycles are supposed to be simple, but it baffled me this time.
I got so frustrated with this walk that I swore to never animate another tail again.


And that's why Ren had no tail in most of the series - even though I had always drawn him with one in presentations and story pitches.
http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/spumco/RenStimpy/1BHB/JohnToilet.mov

A Critique For John

John asked me to take a gander at these studies and give my opinion.They are pretty good. John has a good eye. I only have minor criticisms:

1) The contrasts in the proportions have been toned down a bit.

The faces take up a bit more space in John's heads than they do in the originals. Angles and lines of action are slightly less extreme than Harvey's.

2) The finished drawings are less organic - less flowing.

the lines and shapes should wrap around the forms more gracefully and less stiff.

3) I can't really see the constructed forms underneath the first one and that leads me to suspect that John might have just copied these by eye using the negative shapes as guides, and not constructed them first. And then drew in the construction lines afterwards. I could be wrong; that's just what it looks like.

I wouldn't think that if the details flowed more around the bigger shapes.

I should be able to see the head shape all the way around under the hairs, ears and shoulders.

same with body shape, feet, anything that is a form.

Next: How the Insect Lost His Tail

Carbunkle 3 - Bob's take and zip out - building up energy

If I had sent these layouts to a typical overseas studio, they would have come back with no emphasis or punch. Instead this was animated by Bob Jaques, who used some unique ways to punctuate key actions and make them stick.

From this layout pose above, Ren has to let go of his tongue so it will flop back into his mouth.Bob animates it in a designy wave pattern and times it so it starts almost even, but then snaps into his head.
Wham! You really feel the impact of the tongue driving all the way back into Ren's skull.Here's another thing Bob excels at. He can take a pose, and build up a ton of energy into it, before letting it loose into the next pose.
This is the basic layout pose above, but if you still frame through the clip, you can see that not every part of Ren makes it to this pose at the same time. There is also some very subtle overlap and tight inbetweens. All this adds up to tremendous built up energy.
Then Ren just pops off screen and there are no drawings of him. The contrast between the built up energy and him disappearing in the other direction gives the illusion that we saw him exit the stage. The smoke dissipating adds to the illusion.
Stimpy needs to look to the right after Ren, so Bob goes past the layout key ...
and then pops back into it, thus giving it an accent and helping draw attention to this tiny move that might otherwise be missed.



http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/spumco/RenStimpy/1BHB/BobRenTakeandZip.mov

Mel Crawford Tom and Jerry

Kali was swell enough to scan her copy of this Mel Crawford cover so we could enjoy more detail. She also included this really appealing drawing of Ludwig Von Drake. I don't know who drew it. There's a great Goofy over there in the corner too.

And one last treat from her...http://kalikazoo.blogspot.com/

Eisenberg Principles - Tom and Jerry Cover Art

Speaking of high standards... Here's more art that the average Joe wouldn't think was easy to do.


This guy could sure draw. These old Eisenberg comics are great to study good principles from.
You can see his style change over the years - getting simpler and more angular - like animated cartoons did from the 40s to the 50s.
But his basics remain the same despite the superficial stylistic changes.
Everything is well constructed and clearly staged - using negative spaces, line of action and all the rest of the useful stuff.

These have it all!

Bonus:

Mel Crawford cover - another guy with a unique style, but all the basics underneath.

Goals of a Shorts Program 8 - developing new techniques

TO DEVELOP NEW TECHNIQUES - TO PROGRESS

Shorts Can Build In Technical Progress (Silly Symphonies model)
Cartoons in the 1930s and 40s advanced every year noticeably. On purpose.

Which company today can say their cartoons are more advanced than any other company's? None. The TV cartoons actually get more primitive every year at a steady rate. Even obscenely big budget CG cartoons barely change from year to year. They may grow more hairs and pores but remain primitively designed and acted within the context of the same old stories, puns and cliches retold a thousand times.

Is this an expensive one or a cheap one? I can't tell the difference.

There is no progress built into the system, no competitiveness built into it.
Walt Disney actually made a science out of progress. He built it into his studio system by creating a series of cartoons just to discover and develop new techniques. He instituted art classes and created "action analysis" to improve his animators' understanding of the way things move.

His Silly Symphonies almost seem boring on purpose, because they are so intent on pushing new techniques forward. I don't think you have to make boring cartoons in order to advance. I prefer the Looney Tunes method of trying out a few "one-shots" every year: highly entertaining cartoons that don't necessarily use the star characters but allow the directors to put more money and time into a couple of cartoons to try new things out. What they learn, they in turn can apply to their more formulaic star vehicles and in the process the cartoons get better and better overall at a noticeable rate.

At MGM, Tex Avery was an experimenter, while Bill and Joe's more conservative Tom and Jerry series was a beneficiary of Tex's (and Looney Tunes') bold inventiveness.

ONE SHOTS as well as Star Vehicles

AIM HIGH RATHER THAN LOW

Besides trying to discover appealing star characters, part of a shorts program should be devoted to progress: to developing new techniques to make your cartoons obviously better than your competition's.

The faster you advance, the more primitive you can make your competitor's work seem.

Our business frowns upon this and builds in safeguards against progress. It values "consistency" over experimentation and advancement. Model sheets, story bibles, pages of catch phrases for each character and on and on...

The result of the philosophy of "never change" is to actually degrade consistently year by year, because it is physically impossible to stay the same. You have to move in one way or the other - forwards or backwards.

Many TV cartoons today look like still images of stick figures. Childlike frozen stick figures that only move in the sense that they are being pushed and pulled around in flash like paper puppets. But no one knows it or cares because no studio is trying to outdo anybody else. It's like each studio looks at the others to see how low it's safe to aim this year. (The same applies to stories, but I won't get into that here)

THERE USED TO BE HIGH STANDARDS EVERYONE AIMED FOR

What happened to the idea that entertainment had to be amazing? That entertainers had to have obviously rare and astonishing abilities? When my parents see a modern cartoon, I've heard them say, "I don't get it, I can draw as well as that." That whole generation expected to be amazed by anything that was called entertainment. Athletes have to be strong, fast and coordinated. Singers used to have to be able to carry a tune and have beautiful rare voices. Cartoons and illustrations used to attract and impress the average person by their rare visual skills, humor and inventiveness. The average viewer didn't think "Well, hey I can do that." Today, big studios aim down to compete with "user-generated" content. Is there a point of spending a lot of money doing what just about anybody else can do cheap?




If there was a studio devoted to progress, within a couple years no one else could compete with it because the other cartoons would look so primitive by comparison. Today unfortunately, amateurism is the trend. I don't even think the people in charge know it. I think they actually believe that the more primitive a cartoon is the more advanced and hip it is, but maybe I'm missing some work of genius out there. I remember when "good-for-you" cartoons like Caillou and Arthur looked primitive to me. Now they look like standard professional network cartoon fare - or even better in some cases.

Dick Briefer

Now here's some great cartooning! Dick Briefer combines huge contrasts with beautiful compositions, high individual style, cartooniness and a keen observation of the real world.


Well I can find a million things to like about this guy. The way he draws hands kills me, his love of shapes, his dynamic combination of cartooniness with tall proportions - a very hard combo to pull off!
God, every little shape is interesting, yet they all fit into a great hierarchy of an easy to read bold composition.




I don't know much about him, except for these Frankenstein comics and that he's some kind of super cartoonist - a genetic experiment, the Fedor of cartoons.


http://greatestape.blogspot.com/search/label/Dick%20Briefer

http://pappysgoldenage.blogspot.com/search?q=dick+briefer

Carbunkle 2 - Ren's Romantic Dream

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

Big House Blues David Feiss - Good action and Beautiful Graphic Style

Here's some very stylish animation by Dave Feiss.
Dave was a child prodigy.
He completely figured out how to animate on his own by trial and error when he was a kid.
He reworked his film camera so it would take still pictures on movie film, then started experimenting.
He started by shooting a new frame every 12 x or so and then saw that that looked too static. He kept doing more and more frames per second and shooting it until he came to the conclusion that shooting each drawing twice, generally looked the best. (On "2's")
He's a complete natural and seems to be good at anything he tries to do. He animated a few scenes in BHB.
He worked from our layouts and my direction but added his own touches like the bulldog throwing punches at the boys.
He was one of the first of the 80s bunch to have a combination angular and organic style at the same time.
His poses are beautiful, aren't they?


Ted sent in a couple of the layouts from the scene. These are what we give the animators. Thanks Ted!
The voice of the bulldog was done by none other than Henry Porch, the guy who picked a lot of the music for Ren and Stimpy.
Here, he read the line a little strange so I posed it out to match and Dave animated it.






Dave went on to create and produce "Cow and Chicken" a couple years later, which I thought was the best drawn and animated cartoon of the 90s.



http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/spumco/RenStimpy/1BHB/FeissBulldog.mov

Johnny Hart - Mangle Master

Johnny Hart used to do Sunday pages that were all about an excuse to mangle.
Pure senseless violence.
Maybe that's why my Mom didn't like B.C.
She preferred Hi and Lois because it was "just like real life". She said I was exactly like Chip because I wouldn't clean my room and my hair was in my eyes.
Maybe I would have liked Hi and Lois better if they had mangled Chip once in awhile.
I love Hart's poses! Again, his crude finish makes you think he's not really doing anything, but these are very difficult poses to pull off.


I wish I had the original color Sundays to post. Maybe if we're lucky, Ger will find 'em for us.

http://allthingsger.blogspot.com/

Big House Blues - Spumco 1 - fluffing Stimpy Pillow

Here's a scene that I posed out in layout and basically had inbetweened. The poses were designed on the storyboard and then polished in the layouts. Then I added charts and had 'em inbetweened.
The mantid nabs the soft pulpy object, without emotion, only intent.
Here's a famous early example of a Ren and Stimpy jump cut. It's theoretically not supposed to work and I'm sure we got notes from Scary Marrington over it.
I had to reposition Ren to make this scene of him fluffing Stimpy like a pillow read. I also painted the cheesy color card.
The fluffing was done basically straight ahead as a cycle. I anticed by stretching Stimpy first,
Then squashed him all the way, and eased him out of the squash back to the antic, and repeated the action a few times.

Note that there is rough timing (the "slug") written on the storyboards.

Since Stimpy is a pillow, of course feathers have to fly out of him. Cartoon logic.
It's also an example of what I call "insect Ren". It's Ren asserting his instinctive rights upon his symbiotic partner and showing absolutely no emotion about it. Stimpy, of course goes along with it out of pure obedience to the insect life form higher on the evolutionary scale than him.
Antic....
swing right
stretch and add a streaky Anime type BG to help accentuate th quick motion....
This section looks like it might be Lynne's, I can't honestly remember; it's been so long.

Swing Stimpy up into another antic and cushion the antic...
Then squash him down and press him into resistance. The more Ren presses Stimpy, the more Stimpy's nose expands like a balloon filling with air...naturally.
When the insect lets go, Stimpy recoils and wobbles to a stop.
Ren rubs his hands as if doing a professional job.

Then Stimpy slides down the wall into final pillow position.
Ren antics 3 times in a row here. 1 above
2, into layout antic...
3 Into jump antic...

Jump up fast - 1 drawing only
Float in an arc above Stimpy,
Then fall fast and sink into Stimpy's soft underbelly.
The BG btw, is another one of my cheats. Simple and gray, the easiest way to make characters read well.
This is played like it happens every day, so the characters don't show any surprised reactions to it. I like having some scenes where characters merely function by brute instinct. It's what's funny and cute about animals and dumb relatives.

By the way, try to imagine writing this scene in script form. It could only have been storyboarded to make any sense. If you wanna see the original board, go to the Asifa Archive and flip through it. It has many more scenes that we had to cut for time, but the cartoon looks a lot like the poses in the board. I wish I had saved the layouts, because there would have been more poses there than in the storyboards.

http://www.animationarchive.org/2006/10/media-ren-stimpy-big-house-blues-seq.html



High rez that you can step through...

http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/spumco/RenStimpy/1BHB/LynneJohnFlopPillow.mov


Next...a Dave Feiss scene, then more Bob and Kelly treats.

Oh, and check out Kali and Nico's Devo video:

http://kalikazoo.blogspot.com/2009/04/nico-and-i-present-jerkin-back-n-forth.html

CG Weiners and Lips

It all makes sense now.



Thanks to Becky for alerting me to this great movie.

Big House Blues - Carbunkle Animation 1

The best animation studio I ever worked with was Carbunkle in Vancouver Canada. BHB was the first thing we did together. At the time the studio consisted basically of Bob Jaques and Kelly Armstrong. (They can correct me if I'm wrong)

BOB JAQUES

I think I probably gave Bob just 2 layouts for this scene. It looks like it was drawn partly by Jim Smith and partly by me. Each character that moved - basically just did the same thing left and right in the layouts, and Bob added overlap and smooth timing and something else that made the scene really come to life.

I liked it so much in fact, that when I saw it I added cuts of close ups of the animation so that the audience could really appreciate it.
I won't presume to try to explain just what he did to smooth it all out and give it such a swingin' feel, because I really don't know. I'm just a big fan of it. He's obviously using classic animation principles, but he's placing the details in beautiful designy motions. They don't just "work". They move gracefully. He combines design principles and motion principles in a unique way. Maybe this comes from Bob's stylish caricatures.
Stimpy has toes!
Somewhere in there I added this shot from a later David Feiss scene just to add a musical accent.

It was all just supposed to be one scene happening on the long shot, but when I saw how well Bob animated the dancing to "Der Screamin' Lederhosen's" "Dog Pound Hop", I dragged the sequence out to enjoy more of the music and animation. When those 2 elements work together, I feel you should milk it. If the animation was crappy and had no punch, I would have cut away as fast as possible to the story.


For hi-rez clip:

http://www.cartoonthrills.org/JKE/01MoreBlog/Spumco/BigHouseBlues/BobDanceRSCycle.mov

KELLY ARMSTRONG

Here's a couple layouts I did for a scene that Kelly animated. She has a style all her own, as if she just reinvented the wheel to suit her own purposes.

Yes, I stole Jasper the Pup from Milt Gross back when I was trying to promote him to all my animators and cartoonists - many of whom hated him! I also wanted to animate his mouths all crazy, sort of like Jim Tyer, so I drew a couple mouth positions off to the side of his head, making no sense. Here's one.

Kelly took this idea much further and really exaggerated the heck out it, even adding a "shrink take" - also inspired by Jim Tyer.

My layout for Ren stretching to yawn looked something like this, and again...
...Kelly kept going, taking it further. This was something I just never expected from anybody. I was so used to everyone toning down the drawings that they got from the previous department, that it was really a shock to see someone take my poses and go way further.
She did another amazing thing that you would never expect from a studio that is animating from your layouts. She listened really carefully to the voice track and added her own custom-made poses to match exactly all the subtleties in the track. Usually you would get fired for that. "If it isn't written on the ex-sheets, don't do it."
I probably drew one yawn pose, but when I recorded the yawn, I broke it up into 3 or 4 pieces, without thinking about the animation. "Ahh...ah...ah...ah...
So Kelly made up different faces in sequence that really added a lot of realism to the scene.
Even though a lot of the cartoon is theoretically "limited animation", Carbunkle's additions and nuances made the characters really come to life in a way that people just weren't used to seeing in cartoons from the 1980s.





Ren and Stimpy would not have looked or felt anything like it did had I not completely overturned the whole TV animation system for it to happen. Had I just sent these layouts to Asia - like I was advised to do, they would have come back basically evenly inbetweened and traced horribly. The effect of this is to make the characters just float through the scenes. You never focus on anything important, because all the poses have equal time on the screen. There are no accents. I've had this happen to my cartoons many times, and end up begging for retakes and explaining what "animation" is as opposed to "inbetweening".

What Bob and Kelly did on the Ren and Stimpy pilot (and the later cartoons) was to treat each scene as if it were unique and happening right now, caused by various factors - the story, the personalities, the emotion, etc. There was no obvious formula timing. Everything was accented hierarchically and added drama and punctuation to the cartoon. They added their own poses to punch it up even further.

I'm gonna put up a bunch of scenes from Big House Blues, relatively in order. Another thing that happens naturally among talented artists (if you let it happen) is - they evolve. They get better with each scene and with each cartoon. In Big House Blues, all the animators got better by the end of this very short cartoon, just because there was no one standing in their way feeding them arbitrary rules to hold their development back. No Ranger Smiths!

Carbunkle animated part of this cartoon and we did the other part at Spumco. It was a healthy way to work and we spurred each other on to see who could do the wildest stuff. - but there is a lot of subtlety too; it just gets lost among the wackiness.

http://www.cartoonthrills.org/JKE/01MoreBlog/Spumco/BigHouseBlues/KellyYawn.mov



See lots of Carbunkle animation on these two box sets.

goals of a shorts program 7 - Create experience in house by bringing animation back

Sorry that I haven't done much writing lately. I have been madly putting together a George presentation for a pitch tomorrow, so have only had time to put up some pictures.

Here's a truncated version of the next installment of the shorts program series:

To Give Cartoonists Real Experience

A sensible shorts program wouldn't be sweeping the nation looking for the next inexperienced kid who has a an executive worthy idea. Yet this is what the networks do over and over again and never learn from it. They purposely look for people with little to zero experience. They think that these young prodigies will be untainted by knowledge so will therefore be more freely creative.

I say Hogwash! Let's do the most sensible thing, the THING that we have been avoiding for the last 35 years. The thing our business is called: Animation

Bring Back The Goddamn Animation

People in America need to learn from the ground floor up. They need to assist, then animate, then do layout, storyboards etc... until they gain enough experience to know how cartoons and their various departments work together.

And I don't mean animating it in flash. I mean drawing the stuff. For real.

The argument against this is that it's too expensive, and that may be true at some small places, but not at the majors. They have tons of money that doesn't ever make it to the screen. They just toss it out the window by spending it on too many execs, market research, bureaucracy, development departments, executive trips around the world, retreats, indecision, rewrites, too many department heads etc. etc.

Take that money and start a unit system. Put it directly on the screen with no waste and into the crews so that they can learn to make cartoons well.

Hell, HB made shorts for $3,000 when they started. With the budgets the big TV studios have today, they could do much better than that (although with less experienced animators). But that's the point!

Let's give them some experience. The shorts program IS the development budget. Start with the funniest most experienced director you can find and let him hire the artists he wants and start making cartoons. This is pure logic. There is no mystery science to this. No Hippie thinking. It's the quickest cheapest road to success and domination of the field.

Build Crews and let them get used to each other (Director's Teams)
Experiment Through Trial and Error, and Learn from mistakes and successes.

Crews should be able to remain together for stretches of time and over a bunch of cartoons as they try out assorted characters, not just one set.

More to come...

more?

Here're some more Kali renderings...

You should smell this room...
And here are some photoshop collages.

Here's a baby in progress...
Inked by Mitch and Harmke

more Pitch boards

Bjork In Tub Animation

As I've said before, model sheets tend to be stiff, so should just be used as jumping off points rather than law.
As you get used to drawing a character, you also loosen up, and should be allowed to take advantage of it, rather than be shackled to stiff first impressions.

In most productions, I try to reserve the odd scene to animate myself. Naively, I tend to pick the harder ones that have too many complicated levels to deal with.
In this one I wanted to have Bjork bounce up and down to the beat like early rubber hose cartoons. Unfortunately I didn't design her like Oswald the rabbit, out of circles. She's very difficult to draw for 2 main reasons:

1) she's a sexy girl
2) she's a specific design of a sexy girl.

I also had to control the bubbles going up and down, and then reacting to her movements.
It also had to match the singing on the track and I tried to get some of her individual mouth shapes and expressions that she actually makes while singing.
I think the scene almost killed me.
It was assisted overseas at my friend Bin's studio, supervised by Eric Weise who has hilarious stories to tell about the working conditions there. Maybe if we're lucky he'll share them with us in the comments.
I had to undo many habits I had drawing stock Spumco pretty girls, and that was another element of constant frustration.

In this complicated process I lost some timing punch and ended up with some jitters, but was still somewhat pleased that it at least looked different stylistically than what we were used to doing. I'd rather have a couple technical flaws with some guts and invention than perfect and smooth formula, but of course would like it even better if it had both.
I imagine that's how fans of Jim Tyer, Rod Scribner and Grim Natwick feel.







There were a few different animators on the Bjork video and they all drew her somewhat differently. Sanjay Patel did the cutest version, and I'll show you his work next.
http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/spumco/Bjork/bjorktubsmall.mov

Sanjay:

Fun Cartoon Posters

more George Specific expressions

George Gets Wet

George is the responsible adult.

Hryma Does It Again - Spumco Chibi Pencil Enhancer Action

Check out these latest Spumco Chibis. In limited supply we can sell them at 15$ ea. plus shipping. I know that's high, but that's the best we can do as a collector's edition unless there is a big enough demand to drive the price down. Right now, Anthony has to make each one by hand.

So let me know who would buy these little pencil enhancers!

Where Rex Gets It From

Where does Rex get his striking talent from?
Was it just a miracle from above?
Don't you love the chix he draws?
What is the general opinion on gaps between some girls' thighs?: "open windows". Do only cartoonists dwell on that? Peekaboo Puckers.

Well Rex is not a miracle from Jesus. It's the simple science of genetics! Probably a eugenic experiment gone haywire actually.
Here's some of Reinhard Hackelberg's cartoon studies from when he was a young man intent on becoming the Führer's own personal Walt Disney.
Look at the discipline of the man! He comes from hardier stock than our modern young cartoonists.
He was doing these comic covers long before I started suggesting it as a decadent capitalistic exercise.
Grids and the whole nine yards! This man wants to get it right, and will give his life for perfect construction - as should we all.
You'll be happy to know (as I am) that Papa Hackelberg still lectures his kid about discipline and how to make cartoons right. Isn't that what Dads are for? And to watch Foghorn Leghorn with.
Rex' Dad made him watch "The Phantom Tollbooth" with him the other night. "Sit down, son und maybe you'll learn zomezing!" After it was over he said: "Achtung! Haben Chucken Jones made dot schtinker ven he vuss a younger virile man, it vould heff ruined his career!! Vass he ein dekadunt Homozexual?""

Whoa, I've heard that he did this Bambi freehand, without even constructing it first! That's how a man draws a cute helpless animal of the forest before he blasts it into oblivion.

Damn, it looks like he is selling out to fine art and dentists' waiting rooms. What has the West done to his values?

Seriously, let's all commend Herr Hackelberg for his own talent and for bringing a young genius into the world! And for trying to grind some discipline into the easy living Western youth.

Reinhard today is a retired automotive engineer living comfortably in Toronto, Canada shaking his hard head at his young lad.