Tex Avery's Rational Story Structures

Here's a very good copy. Thanks to Steve and Asifa!

http://www.animationarchive.org/pics/badluckblackie.mov

Here's a youtube low rez version.



here it is with a better picture, but in French.

Tex Avery - Bad Luck Blackie
Uploaded by robeu

Tex Avery's storytelling tradition goes back to American folklore -"Tall Tales" like Paul Bunyan.

He likes ideas that are based on impossible premises. Once you accept the impossible premise, he keeps building it to more preposterous heights.

This takes a lot of imagination to make funny, but it also takes a very rational approach to storytelling. Tex Avery at MGM became a master of story structure.

Bad Luck Blackie structure

Premise

The premise is that if a black cat crosses your path it brings you trouble.
A Bulldog is mean to a kitten. A black cat witnesses the bullying.
He tells the kitten “If you’re ever in trouble, just whistle and I’ll cross the bulldog’s path and something will come crashing down on his head.”

Is the premise funny?

Not if you just told it to someone.
Tex wants you to understand this premise, so he can get to the middle of the cartoon, which has a series of funny accidents happening to the bulldog, each time he bullies the kitten.


Setup

Structurally, the beginning of the story has to introduce the premises upon which the story is based on. Tex needs to have us understand what the cartoon is going to be about.

In some Avery cartoons, Tex gets the setup over with as fast as possible using exposition, so that you can get to the story part, like in his hilarious “Deputy Droopy”.

In Bad Luck Blackie, he instead chooses to make the setup really funny by not merely stating the story premise, but by giving us feelings about the characters.

Characterization

In less talented hands, a mean bulldog torturing a kitten would be very downbeat and depressing. Some of the gags are downright shocking and cruel! Like the kitten getting his tongue caught in a mousetrap.

Amazingly, this whole section is really funny. You feel sympathy for the kitten, but at the same time, the bulldog’s design and acting and his sheer glee makes you like him as well.

Introduce Twist

Once we’ve seen the setup and we feel sorry for the poor kitten, Tex introduces a way to save the kitten and thwart the Bulldog’s bullying.

A black cat tells the kitten to just whistle whenever he’s in trouble, and Blackie will walk by the bulldog and cause something to fall on his head.

Blackie himself is not just a black cat; he is a character too, a street smart city kid, like one of the Bowery boys.

Build The middle

The gags in the middle are mostly bigger and bigger and crazier things falling on the Bulldog’s head, but the setup, middle and payoff for each gag is funny too.
Most of the humor comes, not from the object that lands on the Bulldog’s head, but from his personality. His joy at torturing the cat, his change in attitude as he starts to realize the consequences of his actions, and his self pride, when he thinks he has figured out how to outwit the whistle gag.

So Tex leads us to believe that the gags are a straight build up of things crashing on the head gags (and those are all funny) but he tosses in some twists and thwarts our expectations here and there, just as we think we have it all figured out.

This is not only imaginative, it is extremely clever and took a sharp brain and serious structural planning to pull off.

Tex is in total control of our brains and our expectations.

Crazy Topper Ending

Once Tex has basically milked what you think is the most you could from this premise, he tops it all off with a fast climax as the bulldog runs away with huge impossible things falling from the sky. By this time, as Joe Adamson keenly observed in his Tex Avery, King Of Cartoons book, the premise is no longer needed for us to accept things falling on the bulldog’s head.
Blackie no longer needs to cross his path. We just have to hear the whistle and we totally accept the logic.

The Best Cartoonists Make Us Believe Preposterous Things

Tex took us on a ride that we should never have accepted if we stopped to think logically about it. Thank God he didn't have to get notes from today's executives!

He did it with utter control of his talent, skills, logical brain and our psychology.

Tex Avery is a genius in my books. Most cartoons day are plagued with time-eating explanations for things that don't need to be explained logically. The more that modern cartoons try to explain the ridiculous things that happen in cartoons, the more we are aware of how unbelievable they are. And these explanations are generally boring to boot.

Cartoons can completely convince us of impossible, illogical things...if they are highly structured and logical in their illogical premises. And the more fun they are, the less time we will have to stop and say "Why, that's impossible!"

The Kind Of Cartoons Dads Like

Avery is right up there with McKimson as far as being a Dad-pleaser.This cartoon is interesting because it combines 2 extremes of cartoon philosophy. The story is down to earth yet the styling is very designy. A seeming contradiction.
It's designed and layed out by my old pal and hero, Ed Benedict. This character even looks like him. I don't know if that was intended.
The funny part about this combination of talents is that Ed didn't really like his own cartoons. He loved the pure UPA approach. His favorite cartoon was that Wee Willie thing. He thought adding entertainment and good animation was debasing the whole idea of artistic style. He would get mad at the MGM animators for using timing and squash and stretch and all that "cartoonish action". You should have seen the face he would make whenever he squeezed out the hated word "cartoonish". He would lean real close to me just for the one word to make sure the steam from the disdain would melt my eyebrows.
I think that's the right attitude for him to have too. He's the designer. We need artists and we need cartoonists (but the cartoonists should be in charge, because they're the ones who will bring in the money that funds the artistic growth and pads the executives' pockets).

We need experimental cartoons as well as entertaining cartoons. The experiments seed the growth of the medium, the entertainers find practical uses for the new techniques. Sometimes, but rarely, you can find both those talents in one place. They were in great and precarious balance at Warner Bros. in the 1940s.
This gag really made Ed mad. He said he kept drawing stylized ducks, but every time Tex looked at the scene he said the joke wasn't playing funny. Tex eventually opted to do the scene using old fashioned 40s cartoon ducks because the joke worked better. I think Ed reluctantly agreed that that made sense, but it still outraged his pure artistic temperament.
Ed rolled his eyes at jokes this crass, which delighted me no end.

Silly Symphonies, UPA cartoons, early 40s Chuck Jones cartoons were all experiments in techniques. It's interesting that those cartoons are generally less entertaining than the cartoons made by cartoonists who used techniques they were already used to, but maybe that's the way it works.

How about this realistic dead deer on the hood of a car driven by stylized men? I bet that made Ed real mad.

I think this is what the cartoons studios are missing today. They need to spend some of their profits doing experimental shorts and then letting the entertaining talents find uses for the new techniques.

I think it's possible to achieve both at the same time, but either way we would promote healthy creative growth if we aimed at progress in both technique and entertainment possibilities.

This post was prompted by my Dad sending me this email:

John: Watch this fishing and hunting cartoon, this is what I call funny, especially if you are a fisherman or hunter.

dad

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSV7KNgT9Ho

Tex Avery Takes and a Sense of Design

Everyone knows what a "take" is, right? It's a startled or surprised reaction.
All animators use them. Most use them as simple punctuation, an accent that draws your attention to the a character's surprise or change of emotion. You're not supposed to really notice them.

It's just another punctuation tool, to help the audience follow what is happening in the story.

Tex Avery Turns The Tools Into The Art Itself

Tex Avery, on the other hand thinks the animator's tools are more than mere grammatical devices. He thinks the tools are funny and can be entertaining in of themselves.
He thought takes were so funny that he constructed a few whole cartoons around them.
Northwest Hounded Police is a cartoon with a story that is just an excuse to draw wilder and wilder takes.
It makes you wonder what Heck Allen's role was.



Here's a "double-take", 2 in a row.

I love this one.

THE TAKE THAT CHANGED MY LIFE

WILD TAKES DEPEND ON DESIGN

I first saw this take as a still black and white image in Joe Adamson's "Tex Avery, King Of Cartoons" book. I had never seen a Tex Avery MGM short before and just staring at pictures like these in the book made me completely rethink what was possible in cartoons. I had seen crazy images like this in Mad magazine - drawn by Basil Wolverton, and in Weirdo model kits and Nutty Mad toys, but never in cartoons. I didn't realize that this was being done at least 10 years before Mad and 20 before Weirdo's.

Shortly after reading the book, I started to see the actual Avery cartoons and they blew my mind. I instantly started drawing crazy drawings of my own. Not as great as this below!

These kinds of takes depend not on story or even animation. They depend on design. The way the take works is to quickly snap to the extreme pose and then basically hold it (usually moving holds). Leave it on screen long enough for the shock to sink in and make you laugh.

It's not the event itself that is funny. It's how funny and well designed the drawing is. You could write, "His eyes bug out and his tongue jiggles", but would that make anyone laugh just to read it?

A lot of other cartoons tried to imitate Tex' innovation, but didn't always get it.
Famous studios was basically made up of Fleischer animators who'd abandoned their own style in favor of imitating Warner Bros. and Avery cartoons, but they never seemed to feel it. It's like someone did actually write, "Olive's eyes stretch out" and the animators just literally did it, without thinking about it having to look funny or pleasant. They drew what was required according to the story, and collected their paychecks.

I wish I had a Casper cartoon on DVD to show you some of the takes they animated. What they missed was the good design. A funny cartoonist needs to have a sense of design and balance. Held takes work best when they have beautiful shapes and composition. They can't just be ugly.

Other animators also did funny Avery style takes, including Clampett and Walter Lantz animators.

REN TAKE

Here's an Avery style take from "Man's Best Friend".




Next...

Clampett

Clampett did do a few Avery style takes, but also had a really unique way to do takes that I've never seen anyone else do.

Instead of just relying on a held funny design, he also did "motion takes". I'll explain tomorrow.

BONUS: "Ugly art" that is actually beautiful design

I'm sure this is all inspired by Tex Avery's takes.


Personally, I think all this stuff has a ton more design-sense and skill than any of the so-called "designy" cartoons. Plus, they are fun.

Heckling Hare: step-by-step construction lesson

ROD SCRIBNER LOVES WRINKLES!

Here is a really cool frame from Tex Avery's "Heckling Hare". It's a hilarious scene animated by Rod Scribner.

Scribner loves to draw lots of extra wrinkles and brow folds on his characters, yet he still keeps them appealing and solid. They are not just arbitray lines and details floating around on the head. They make sense.

They wrap around the structure of the head and they describe certain things-expressions, eyebrows.

At first glance all the wrinkles make the drawing look complicated, but if you break it down to its forms first, then it will help you understand the drawings better.

Scribner uses the same classic principles that Bob McKimson and all the old animators used, but he applies them to his own style.

HOW TO STUDY OTHER PEOPLE'S ART

You can learn a lot by copying frames and animation from old cartoons. But the way to do it is:

Don't draw straight ahead.

Build up the drawing using proportions and construction. The Preston Blair Book explains this method of drawing very well, but I will help demonstrate it for you.

STEP 1 - PROPORTION + ANGLES

First, I measured the proportions of the characters and copied the proportions. Then I sketched in the rough forms that make up the poses, and drew straight lines through the forms to check that the angles the heads and bodies are tilted on look like the film frame.

Bugs is made up of 3 major forms in the drawing:
1) Head
2) Neck)
3) Body

Download this zipped quicktime to your desktop:
JOHN K TUTORIAL, STEP 1 (20.8mb)

STEP 2 - 2ND LAYER OF FORMS

After breaking down your characters into their first level of forms, then take each of those forms and find the next level of forms.

Start with the heads.

Bugs has one head.
The one head is made of of 2 major parts:
1) The cranium -upper part of head
2) The muzzle- lower part of head

Each of those levels is then further broken down into sections.

Upper head is made up
1 eyes,
2 eyebrows and
3 space around them.

all these sub forms have to wrap around the larger form that they are stuck to.

Lower head (muzzle) is broken into
1 nose area,
2 cheeks and
3 mouth

Each of those layers is in turn broken down into more parts.

Get it?

If not, watch me do it.

Download this zipped quicktime to your desktop:
JOHN K TUTORIAL, STEP 2 (28.4mb)

STEP 3 - EXPRESSION
Expressions are made up of

Eyes,
Eyebrows
Mouth,
Cheeks,
Jaw

To get the eyebrow expression I usually just draw one line right through both eyebrows to describe the expression in one connected stroke.

Later I can erase the middle unibrow section. This way the eyebrows are related to each other in the final drawing and not just floating independently of each other.

When drawing the mouth expression, you have to make sure that the cheeks and jaw all relate to the mouth. They are all part of the same mechanism.

Once you have your basic expression wrapped around your head and muzzle, the last step is to add the details that help solidify the expressions.

Eyebrow wrinkles above the eyebrows. They follow the same direction as the main eyebrow line. They wrap around the head too, the same way the eyebrows do.

The mouth cheek area: The lower lip has to relate to the mouth shape and so do the cheeks.

Teeth: Draw them as blocks of teeth first, not as individiual teeth. Make the blocks be in the same perspective as the head.

Once the blocks look solid, them break them into individual teeth.

Download this zipped quicktime to your desktop:JOHN K TUTORIAL, STEP 3 (53.9mb)

Straight Ahead Drawing VS Constructed Drawing

Now I drew this first drawing without first constructing it. I already know how it works so it only looks half crappy. But compare it to the below that I drew with construction first. See how much more solid and convincing and powerful it is?

ALL THE DETAILS FOLLOW LARGER FORMS

When you know your principles of drawing well , then you will be able to draw with much more confidence and you won't be afraid of details and you will have a lot more creative choices you will be able to make in your own work.


Download this zipped quicktime to your desktop:
DOG - SPEED DRAWING (32.1mb)


REALLY IMPORTANT POINT! _Use Empty Space!

Look at all the empty space left in the drawings. The whole head is not filled with wrinkles and details.

If it was, you wouldn't see the expressions at all. You would just see a busy mess.

In order to see something important-you need to leave areas of space around the details that let you see the important stuff.

Make sense?

If you do this lesson, post a comment and I'll put it up in another post and critique it.

Thanks To Kali for making the films, and Marc for getting them in here.

A Story Of Rod Scribner

In the late 30s and early 40s, Tex Avery had a powerhouse animation crew that any director should die to have. He directed Bob McKimson, considered at the time Warner's top animator, Irv Spence for awhile and Rod Scribner, who no one had yet figured out was a total genius.

Tex had the #1 unit at Warner's but didn't really take advantage of them. The style he developed was a style of sarcastic jokes told with stand up comedy timing and delivery. This in itself was fresh and new for animation, a real innovation-especially for the west coast.

If you watch his Warner's cartoons the animation of course is great technically, but it isn't anywhere near as visual or exaggerated as what he would do a few years later at MGM. His animators seem uncast, interchangeable, because what he wanted from the animation was to get from one joke to the next smoothly and with live action comedy timing. The animators would inject some of their own styles into the scenes, as long as it didn't interfere with the joke.

Scribner's scenes are very solid and unless you are a fanatic like me, you would have a tough time telling the difference between his animation and McKimson's in Avery's cartoons. He started breaking out during the last couple years of Avery's direction.

Scribner's animation at the time actually feels a bit claustrophobic. It looks like the characters are filled with pent up energy. Their gestures now and then stretch out but are quickly pushed back as if there is an invisible force field surrounding them and stopping them from completing their motions.




Clampett took over Avery's unit in 1941 and the cartoons that the same animators were doing changed quickly. Clampett had already been directing for 5 years with the "junior unit", the younger "less experienced animators" as Clampett referred to them.


Even so, the most energetic and experimental animation happening at Warner's happened in the black and white "junior" unit.

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2007/05/pinch-and-outrage-bob-clampett.html

Chuck Jones and Bobe Cannon did some really wacky and expressive animation for him and then so did John Carey, Vive Risto, Izzy Ellis and a few other animators who are not as well known to history.

Bob told me that during the black and white period, he would have certain ideas he wanted to animate that he decided not to do, just because he didn't think his animators were yet skilled enough to pull them off.

After a short period of finishing some of Tex's cartoons and getting used to his new crew, his cartoons just exploded with imagination and most of all - a new energetic style of movement.

Eddie, Milt and I pestered Clampett for stories about all the animators all the time when we knew him and we would ask the most about Scribner. How did he get that crazy loose style?


George Lichty
Bob said Scribner came to him early on and asked if he could try a new looser style of animation - inspired by the loose finish of one of his favorite comic strip artists, George Lichty.

MORE GREAT LICHTY HERE!

http://www.animationarchive.org/2007/07/comics-george-lichty-grin-and-bear-it.html

Lichty was one of my favorite cartoonists when I was a kid so this story really interested me.

Lichty is great for a number of reasons. He was an extremely skilled technical artist who happens to draw cartoons. His compositions are great. He draws difficult and interesting perspectives in his cartoon panels. He can organize and compose crowd scenes.

He has a very hard bitten street-smart sarcastic outlook of life which I, as a hard-bitten sarcastic 8 year old kid really took to.

But what Scribner was alluding to in Lichty's work was the finish. The brush lines are very loose, organic and fast. To the untrained non-artist's eye it might even look sloppy. A non artist won't see the great solid drawings underneath the superficially loose finished line work.

Check out the beautiful natural poses of the girls in the panel on the left.


Looney Tunes morph from the McKimson Style to the Clampett style

TheWarner Bros. cartoon drawing-animation style was basically Bob McKimson's making. Very very tight, solid and careful and volumetric. Less squashy and stretchy than Disney's. More weight and power. Conservative. Earthbound. The rest of the Warner's animation staff strove to emulate McKimson's skill-but didn't think to leave out the conservatism.Scribner wanted to break through the safe logical membrane that the Warner's house style confined him in.


Clampett was all for it. He was already experimenting and wanted more and more life and energy in his characters. He was already able to get more of that from his animators than other directors could, but here at last was a kindred soul that didn't need to be pushed to let go.

BEFORE LICHTY

AFTER LICHTY

He gave Scribner the go-ahead to try out his Lichty looseness and he got this:
The combination of Scribner's new breakthrough animation with Clampett's understanding of personality and his wildly inventive direction cemented the revolution of Warner's against Disney's. Scribner and Clampett not influenced the other animators in their unit, but also the rest of the studio - many against their wills. Friz hated what was happening but got swept along in the inexorable gushing current.

Warner's was no longer a cheap, less animated imitation of Disney. It was a force that everyone else now had to scramble not only to catch up to, but to even understand. To this day, not a lot of people realize what an explosion of creativity and power those few years in our history were.

I wonder if the animators knew at the time how big this revolution was. I get the feeling they really didn't and I'll tell you why in a later post.

SCRIBNER DOES AVERY - 1940

SCRIBNER DOES CLAMPETT - 1943

Interesting side note: After Clampett abandoned Warner Bros. in 1946, McKimson shoved Scribner back into a smothering force field again and when you watch Scribner's characters twitch and agitate, it looks like they are trying to bust their limbs through but never quite can.


MORAL OF THE STORY: GET SOME INFLUENCES FROM OTHER FORMS OF CARTOONS! NOT JUST DISNEY

Let's have animation evolve again!

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2006/09/importance-of-having-lot-of-influences.html

When Cartoons Evolved 2- Bugs Bunny prototypes

Thanks to Marc Deckter for the images!

A beautifully acted subtle scene by Warner Bros. top animator, Bob McKimson From Falling Hare

What's Bugs Bunny's personality?

I'll list the traits I can think of.
His most general trait is that he's a heckler.
He also is a magician-he can drag his hole around, drop in it and then appear behind the antagonist.
Then - he is a specific kind of heckler-mostly calm and cool when in control of the situation-but when he sometimes is not in control, he becomes really irritable and his pride is sorely wounded which just makes him lose even more control.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nt8rgPgRHo8

He is aware that he's the star of the show and confides with the audience about the situation. A ham performer. (Even when he loses!)
He's sarcastic.

Bugs Bunny hams it up in Corny Concerto-animated by Rod Scribner

This is a pretty well rounded character for the times-when you consider that most Disney characters had one trait only-a really general one, with no specific quirks: Donald is an Asshole, Goofy's a retard, Happy is - guess...! Sneezy is...and then Hell, their biggest star, Mickey, doesn't even have one trait!

Bugs and his Warner Bros. cohorts were a revolution in cartoon personalities and are still leagues ahead of any other cartoon characters in terms of mere richness of personality alone.

Bugs is a few revolutions in one:
The first heckler cartoon I can think of-(if anyone else knows of one before this let me know!) is Porky's Duck Hunt made by Tex Avery in 1937.

Trait 1-Daffy Duck is unfazed by a hunter's gun and dog

This cartoon introduced a prototype Daffy Duck who was also a prototype Bugs Bunny, Woody Woodpecker and the myriad of other heckler characters to follow.

Tex Avery loved hunting cartoons-he made a zillion of them. In most of them the befuddled hunter is pitted against many ducks or rabbits of creatures of the wild. In this cartoon Tex' idea was to have Porky outwitted by a flock of ducks. One of his animators, Bob Clampett, suggested they boil it down to 1 duck and make the duck have fun outwitting Porky and be completely unfazed by the threat of the hunter's gun. This gave the animators a chance to spend time seeing what they could do with the new duck character.

(This calm character was inspired by a hunting trip that Rudy Ising once described to the crew at the Looney Tunes factory in the early 30s. He kept acting out scenes of him trying to shoot this rabbit, and the rabbit kept disappearing behind bushes and then sneaking up behind Rudy and completely outwitting him. Clampett and the other cartoonists drew gag cartoons depicting Rudy versus the wacky wabbit.)


Avery's unit tried a couple different takes with the new duck character. Daffy is calm in some of the scenes and he becomes loony at the end of the cartoon in a crazy scene animated by Clampett of the duck spinning and flipping and yelling Woo Woo, Woo Woo!

Clampett's animation of the crazy darnfool duck

The cartoon was a huge hit in theatres and Leon Schlesinger came into Termite Terrace and told the gang that they were really on to something and to make more of those screwball duck cartoons.

Shortly after Daffy's Duck Hunt, Bob Clampett was promoted to director of his own unit and took some of the Termite Terrace animators with him-including a young Chuck Jones. This unit carried on the crazy stuff from Tex' unit and took it even further. It also took the personality stuff a lot further while it was at it.

Avery's style was always sarcasm, parody, wacky gags and high concept story premises. Clampett's cartoons were more varied in theme and concentrated more on the performances of the characters. There were really wacky gags too, but they seem even wackier because the characters were richer and the characters, rather than the the director motivated the gags.

In his first cartoon, Get Rich Quick Porky, Clampett experiments with the calmer type heckler character-this time a gopher who looks and acts a lot like the early 40s Bugs Bunny.

He does magic tricks from halfway out of his own hole.

Clampett himself was a magician and a practical joker, and this gopher seems almost to be an animated caricature of the guy I knew well.

A wiseacre gopher plays practical jokes on a mutt

The gopher does wacky show off spins into his hole

The triumphant spin into the hole became a staple of Bugs' routine later.

He remains calm and sarcastic

More to come...! The first Bugs Bunny cartoon!

A lot of this historical information I got directly from classic animators but another great resource was Mike Barrier's Funnyworld magazine in the 1970s. It was the first magazine and animation history source to really seriously look at cartoons other than Disney's. Mike and his partner Milt Grey interviewed dozens of old time animators and shared much of their new-found knowledge with rabid cartoon fans like me.


Here's a great interview with Bob Clampett:
http://www.michaelbarrier.com/Funnyworld/Clampett/interview_bob_clampett.htm
Barrier has more interviews on his site:
http://www.michaelbarrier.com/interviews.htm