Walt Quote Of The Day

"All cartoon characters and fables must be exaggeration, caricatures. It is the very nature of fantasy and fable. "

Walt Disney
Walt said a lot of smart things, and this is one of the smartest.

The rise and fall of Construction in cartoons Pt 3 - 1950s - Undertures and corners

This is part 1 of the Disney 50s: Undertures
Part 2 will be: stock "cartoony" construction
part 3 will be: UPA influence/ Tom Oreb/Ward Kimball-The Cal Arts New Testament
Part 4 will be: combining UPA with rubber hose-the most successful use (to me) of UPA influence at Disney.

Undertures:

Disney continued making their main characters "undertures", that is - designs that are less cartoony, interesting or individual than live humans. This Prince from Cinderella is the worst of the type, because there is no visible construction in it. The facial features just float inside the inspecific silhouette of his face. This inspecificity of construction makes it very hard to animate. It means the features will have a tendency to float around, because they are not clearly set into specific forms.
Alice is an underture, but her construction is still mildly visible. She is still based on Elmer Fudd/ Preston Blair baby construction.

You can see her cheeks bulge out and her eyes fit into them.

There is no specific individual design to the character. She is pure generic. She is construction alone, with no individual variations on the basic Disney forms.
Wendy is the exact same design (or lack of design) as Alice. She still has a bit of visible construction. She has a definite chin, jaw and cheek. (Today's Disney designs don't. The mouths and eyes just float around independent of the silhouette of the head and jawline)
Aurora is sthe same design as Alice and Wendy, with taller proportions and a slightly more anglular finish. The angles make 3-dimensional sense unlike today's wobbly pointy copies of this style.

She is animated beautifully, with the help of rotoscoping and Marc Davis' fantastic skill, but the most you can say about it is that it is smooth and solid. It's a hell of a lot of trouble to go to for the mere result of not looking clumsy.

No one today could animate humans without the features floating all over the place and the construction shifting and melting as the character tries to turn in 3 dimensions. I don't know why anyone even tries, since the best you can get with "realistic" design is merely: "It didn't look awkward." Unfortunately, today there are no Marc Davis' at studios that spend a lot of money and 20 years training you to do extreme solid animation that isn't clumsy.

Here is an extreme underture animated by the great Milt Kahl. Even Milt himself hated animating this and complained all through the production. He wanted to go back to the old sensible days of animating cartoony characters like Br'er Rabbit.

This is the only male realistic character I have ever seen that is animated smoothly, without melting all over the screen or looking completely awkward. Yet much less capable animators than Kahl in eras that are much less disciplined than mid century America keep attempting it.This looks like Dic took over Disney.

Can someone explain why?? No one likes to animate stuff like this and it only worked the one time-and didn't work at all in the context of the film itself:
Next installment: 50s construction of "cartoony" characters at Disney's. Using the same stock construction for countless characters.

Caricature VS UNDERTURE

Walt Disney

"Animation is different from other parts. Its language is the language of caricature. Our most difficult job was to develop the cartoon's unnatural but seemingly natural anatomy for humans and animals."

CARICATURE

A caricature is a drawing that is based on observation of something's specific distinct features. A caricature artist has to have a good eye for what makes something or someone look different than others of its kind. What makes this man unique from all other men?
What makes a rabbit unique from a skunk?

These caricatures are by Marlo Meekins. She really has a gift for this ability.
When you caricature, you have to abandon your preconceived notions of how things look. You have to be let your model show you what a nose looks like, or whether the space between the eyes is close or far.


A caricaturist should really be wary of developing a style.
Or worse, to steal a famous caricaturist's style. How many Al Hirschfeld and Mort Drucker clones have you seen? Are any of them as good as the originals?


When you try to emulate a famous caricaturist's "style" you are undermining the usefulness of doing a caricature. Now you have to filter what your subject looks like through "Gee, now how would Al interpret this person?" So you are not really getting the most of what you can from the subject. The subject is the style.

Of course there are tons of bad caricaturists-you see them at the theme parks usually. They draw everyone to look the same and just change the hair. These aren't really caricatures.

Caricature is really important in animation because animation tends so much to reuse designs from the past and the whole assembly line process of animation allows a succession of artists to retrace the first artist in line's initial pose or expression. And each time it gets traced it gets toned down a bit until the actual drawing that appears on the screen doesn't reflect the animator's idea. How many animators have complained about getting a bad assistant who tones down her or his work? I even hate tracing my own rough drawings because I myself tone down my first sketch.

UNDERTURES

An underture is the opposite of a caricature.

It takes out specific features. An underture is a drawing that says nothing about the character it portrays. It is the absence of opinion or definition.

Undertures are less interesting than real life.

Here are some famous undertures from animation:

These are considered subtle and "realistic", when actually they are neither. Real people have distinguishing features and subtleties. Nobody looks like this. It's neither cartoon, nor real. It's just nothing. It's no ideas, an excuse for not having to create anything.


Now, I'm ready for the few of you who will rush to justify characters like this. There'll be some reason like, "Well, John those are the HEROIC characters! They have to be subtle and bland and have no distinguishing features."


Milt Kahl would disagree with you. He hated animating the Prince and any kind of "realistic" characters. He wanted to go back to fun stuff like Br'er Fox and I agree with him.

Now, here are some real life heroic characters from the movies.None of these characters (well maybe the last one) are bland-either in look, or in personality.




Do they have distinguishing features? Would you rather watch a movie with stars that you can't recognize because they have no faces?

Even heroic or "handsome" characters can have distinguishing features:






Here's an underture of the most beloved leading man in the movies. It's less specific than the actual man himself in real life.
The same thing applies to female characters. Here are some undertures.
Here's Mary Blair's version of Alice. It's still bland, but a lot more interesting graphically than what they settled for in the movie.
Sleeping Beauty is very well drawn, but has no distinguishing features. The angles give her some graphic interest, but as a character she is not remotely interesting. Every girl you know in real life is more interesting than this.
Maleficent has some mildly specific features, at least compared to the average animated humans. She has a pointy chin and a hooked nose and big heavy lidded eyes.

Here's a real life beautiful person.


Our real lives are filled with potential inspiration for our cartoons. We don't have to have bland characters if we choose not to. I mean, why are we cartoonists in the first place? To tone down real life?

Even general types can be caricatured.

Here's what babies look like:
http://uncleeddiestheorycorner.blogspot.com/2007/02/baby-anatomy.html

Here's an "animation baby".
It's as if the artist had never seen a real baby. He just copied some other animator's baby who copied a previous one who copied a previous one.....

I used to caricature babies all the time because they are so funny looking. I wish I had some to post. Maybe Eddie can find a couple for me.


Here are some Undertures to collect and trade: