Ballantine 2

Here are some more Ballantine illustrations with thoughts as to how his style relates to animation.Animation beginners tend to think of design mostly in terms of individual character designs. A really studied designer thinks of the whole canvas.
These characters look superficially a lot like UPA characters or even modern flattish characters.
The characters are good, but to me the design is in how they fit into the larger picture scheme. It's not so much in the individual elements that make up the picture. Simple-looking by itself is not inherently stylish. What makes style and design is the organization of all the elements into a whole visual statement.


All these pictures are carefully arranged so as to be readable and not cluttered, to get the point of the illustration across and then on top of all that to be artistically pleasing.
Some of the pictures evoke the graphic style of the cultures being illustrated.
Obviously, Ballantine understands real drawing, perspective, composition and traditional artistic skills, but he chooses to thoughtfully use some and bend the rules of others.
He is not applying the exact same style to each of his images. He experiments with levels of stylization and different influences.
It's interesting to me that a bunch of animators in the 1950s used their animation drawing backgrounds to aim at a graphic style that had already come about in more traditional ways and more naturally by illustrators.

I think the illustrators were way ahead of the animators, because they had been doing it longer, and in general had higher drawing standards to live up to. There were also many more illustrators than animators. The field was much broader. Let's face it, in general illustrators draw better than animators. At least 50 years ago.

Cartoons developed their more limited graphic tools functionally- simple forms that turn in space easily, lines of action etc. all with the purpose to save time drawing so that they could more easily move the drawings.

Gerald McBoingBoing's characters always fit into the whole graphic image (at least for the first 2 cartoons) but many of the "flat" cartoons that followed didn't see that aspect of the design.

When they came to do the more graphic, illustrative styles they didn't have the strong artistic backgrounds and traditions of the illustrators. Nor the huge talent pool and higher artistic standards.

In some cases, this led to some really great stuff anyway - like the Hubley commercials which combined bold graphics with inventive and appropriate animation movements. In many cases it just amounted to a superficial awkward imitation of magazine illustration, without the good animation to make up for it.

The illustrators started with more detailed, more realistic and more traditional drawing tools and gradually moved towards more simple, more graphic statements that kept intact the broader stronger fundamental underlying artistic sense of order.
http://www.animationarchive.org/2006/01/media-gustaf-tenggrens-small-fry-and.html

http://www.animationarchive.org/2005/11/media-gustaf-tenggrens-little-trapper.html

If you want to see some of the principles and skills Ballantine is applying to his compositions, click some of the labels below.

Hubley Commercial: Salt and Hawkins? Scribner?

Part 1

Here is an unbelievably cool commercial for something nearly as important in our lives as cigarette foil. Salt!

This commercial has everything you could want in an animated spot.

Great design, funny and inventive animation and really creative special effects.

Part 2

I'm not 100% sure, but my guess is this is Scribner too. It could be Emery Hawkins as I think Michael Sporn has suggested. Amid says it's Scribner. Anyone know how to tell for sure?
An animator who really observes life in its unfettered reality has a way of making every character have a little bit of retardation in him. Even cute characters have some primitive animal needs and this is always reflected in good animation.
Look at the animal pleasure of this child as he gobbles up and contemplates the succulent flavor of his salt sandwich.

A bit of evil retardation is good too.
The timing of all this animation is great. Lots of contrasts.
Funny walk. Of course it's not as brilliant as Gerald's little hop, but I like it.





Look how great these poses are! The kid pops from pose to pose with one smeared inbetween each time.
Even the inbetweens have design and fun.
These drawings are an absolutely perfect blend of classic principles and modernist style.






The kids' pose to pose "limited" animation contrasts against the bird's really fluid full animation. I love the stuff when the bird bounces up and down on his head. Scroll through it in slow motion!

This is great stuff to copy if you are teaching yourself to animate....JoJo!





Get a load of these beautiful special effects! I'll take this over Disney's "realistic" water and rain any day. This could only happen in a cartoon.




OK, kids, everybody pour a whole carton of salt on your head!
How great is this?!

Genius.

Makes me want to roll up a spoonful of weather proof salt in cigarette foil and chew it to bits in a hurricane.

What do you think?

Hubley Commercial: Dog- More fun from Scribner

Dog.
I like how each dog not only looks different but has its own unique walk.

This is total custom made animation.









If only we could get rid of the modern cookie cutter mentality of stock animation, stock character designs and stock everything and go back to when animation was creative and fun!

Hubley Commercial: Bird

Bird.

The design in this is not too thrilling, but the animation is great!




















Hey, wanna see Scribner where he really belongs? With Clampett?
Go to the most thoughtful blog in the world and see Eddie's most sensitive raw and naked post yet!


EDDIE JOINS THE 21ST CENTURY

ROD SCRIBNER - THE MAN WHO DIDN'T NEED INBETWEENS

Hubley Commercial: Peas

Peas.

Here is some more funny Scribner stylized animation.


He figured out how to turn this guy's head around and see it from the back-hard to do with such stylized shapes...
he has really funny lip synch too.

Scribner likes to do accents that kind of jitter. You can see this in a lot of the McKimson cartoons he animated.





Funny, unique walks and runs as always.



















Scribner was a guy who tried to have fun when he animated. He never seemed to just take a job or style for granted.

Hubley Commercial: Baby - Rod Scribner animation

Hey, everybody. Kali Fontecchio has done a lot of work making these clips and uploading all the pics for you, so go over to her blog and check out her own fun filled drawings and paintings!

http://kalikazoo.blogspot.com/

Here is a Hubley commercial animated by Rod Scribner.
Baby.

For me, animation is more than just smooth movement. It's not enough to learn a bunch of stock Cal Artsy moves and gestures and then move formula designed characters from one stock pose to another.
Animation is movement of interesting and inventive drawings. The drawings that make up the animation are as important as the movements themselves. Maybe more so.
It's even better when the drawings are not preinvented on model sheets or in decades of stock expressions.
Here's a great combination of John Hubley's designs and Rod Scribner's animation.
Hubley probably did a couple of the main drawings and the composition. A minor animator would have taken those poses and then just animated stock lip synch and moved the heads and arms to the accents in the soundtrack.
An inventive animator like Scribner does a lot more than that. He adds to the "design" of the scene by designing original custom made expressions and poses that fit the soundtrack.
Scribner also makes up his own mouth shapes, rather than rely on stock mouth shapes like you see so often.
This is the kind of animation that made me want to be an animator.
Custom made animation that isn't a formula. That shows what an individual cartoon animator made up just for that scene. ...That looks like a living breathing observant human did it, rather than a machine.
Scribner must be the most creative animator ever. He's able to do all kinds of styles. When a lot of the Warner's animators couldn't make the switch to 50s graphic styles, he just jumped at it and created ways to move the characters that matched the graphic styles. His movements are as stylish (actually more) than the design themselves. He doesn't merely "squash and stretch" or "antic and overshoot".
These 50s commercials commercials are among the best use of the UPA style that I have seen. They are lively and better paced than the entertainment shorts-maybe because they have to get the message across in 30 seconds to a minute rather than drag it out to 6 minutes or more.
I can't figure out why UPA didn't use Scribner in their feature shorts. He understood how to move these designs better than anybody. The shorts are barely even animated. They are evenly inbetweened key poses.
You can freeze frame animation like this and find a ton of great drawings and original graphic thoughts. Isn't that why we animate? To create new pictures? I can't understand today's urge to repeat actions that someone else invented 50 years ago and that have already been copied over and over again ever since.
This animation is fun. and that's what it's all about isn't it?
Well I can't think up enough words to describe each picture, so I'll just let you enjoy them.






Cute and specific at the same time!




Amid On Scribner Commercials

Speedway 79 commercial John Hubley

Here's a Hubley cartoon that's designed beautifully but has kind of just adequate animation.There are some stylized commercials that are both designed pretty and animated cleverly.

I'll try to post some soon.









There is another of these speedway commercials that has great animation.





These obviously inspired LOG.

another EZ-POP commercial, John Hubley

all kinds of stuff: EZ-POP, little old lady in shoe, John Hubley

EZ-POP, little old lady in shoe, John Hubley

E-Z POP
Uploaded by chuckchillout8

I was a design freak when I was a kid. I loved all cartoons, but really thought a lot about style and design-which I don't recommend that you do until you learn basic drawing principles!

These striking images are from a John Hubley commercial for EZ Pop Popcorn from the early 50s.
I'm not a big fan of UPA cartoons, mainly because they are not very entertaining and the animation is stiff and limited.

For some strange reason though the "UPA Style" worked best in 50s commercials.

This commercial is not only designed beautifully (much better than UPA's "entertainment" shorts) but it has great bouncy animation, a really lively track, cartoony characters and movement, brilliant cutting, fun timing and crazy background graphics.



By contrast, UPA's theatrical shorts are sluggish, bland and depressing and they have horribly influenced the whole cartoon art form-even today, 60 years later.



The artists that drew and animated this cartoon all learned classic basic cartoon principles.
You can tell by the drawings that they understand construction, line of action, squash and stretch, silhouettes, clear staging, negative space and all the principles I have been going on and on about in my blog posts.

FORMS WITHIN FORMS

This frame above starts with a clear and simple COMPOSITION. There is a ring of popcorn heads framing the product.
All the heads within the ring are SPECIFIC DESIGNS-each a variation of a general shape-the shape of a kernel of popcorn.
The overall composition uses NEGATIVE SPACE to make the POSITIVE Shape (the ring of heads) read clearly.
Each individual head uses negative spaces to make the positive features (eyes, mouths, noses) read clearly.
The negative spaces between each head are interesting shapes.
The CONSTRUCTION of the heads is slightly played with and distorted-and that's what makes the images look to today's primitive eyes- "stylized".

LOOK UP ALL THE CAPITALIZED CONCEPTS IN THE BLOGGER SEARCH AT THE TOP OF THE PAGE TO READ BLOG POSTS EXPLAINING THE CONCEPTS.


Every scene in the cartoon has an overall design. The individual pieces-characters and props are carefully fit into a larger design.

Today's UPA copycat cartoons look like each piece is individually designed, then the pieces are thrown onto the stage in a haphazard cluttered pile.

Obvious LINE OF ACTION.

CLEAR POSE.
NEGATIVE SHAPES
ORGANIC SHAPES
ASYMMETRICAL DESIGN AND POSE.
CARTOONY

Just like this:

THESE IMAGES ARE DESIGNS WITHIN DESIGNS.
The group of kids is a shape- squint your eyes and look at them as one form.
Then that form is broken up into individual kids and then each kid is broken into his separate forms-but no matter how deep you go into analyzing the details and forms in the frame, they all fit into larger design statements.

Now, beyond how great the design is, the way it MOVES is perfect for the style. The animator had to find an appropriate style of movement that didn't distract from all the compositions and designs in the still pictures.

In the UPA shorts, the designers seemed to worry that the animators would distract from the design, so they developed a style of non-animation. Gerald McBoing Boing is basically inbetweened from pose to pose and is pretty boring to watch.

This stuff moves in an extremely cartoony, bouncy and fun way and it totally enhances the design.





The commercial is so fun and cartoony and to the point that it totally sells the product. It makes you want to eat the popcorn.

It also makes me want to see an entertainment cartoon that's designy-but with solid PRINCIPLES, not superficial wonky flatness- a cartoon that does all the things a cartoon can do that no other medium can.

This EZ Pop cartoon couldn't be done in live action or even CG and that is the main reason to doo it in animation. To use the magic that only real animators can make.


Thanks to Amid Amidi for the crisp images at the top of the page and for uncovering so much lost animation art and films and making the best animation magazine ever-Animation Blast. It's the only animation magazine that is actually about animators.

He also is the outspoken uncensored half of Cartoon Brew.
Amid has a book out all about 50s designy cartoons. It's full of great art (and some pretty awful art too-look at the damn cover!).

Of course, as in all art books, much of the art is way too small and there is a ton of wasted white space, but you have to buy the book anyway. Take the opinions with a grain of salt-it praises the movement that ultimately destroyed cartoons.

I'm gonna do more posts about designy cartoons. The main point I will make is that just drawing flat and primitive like so many Cartoon Network shows and others today does not make a good design.DISCONNECTED SHAPES, NO SILLOS, NO NEGATIVE SPACES WITHIN DESIGNS

GENNDY IS THE BEST