Bullwinkle Shows Good Design Principles: 1 Asymmetrical Construction

How about if I use this drawing to do a few posts, each one pointing out a separate aspect of good cartoon drawing?

ASYMMETRY IN THE LARGEST CONSTRUCTED FORMS

These characters have good construction, BUT notice that the forms that make them up are not perfect ovals or circles. They are ORGANIC shapes, asymmetrical.

Not mirror images left and right, or top and bottom.
This is a hard technique do right. First you have to understand basic construction. Then you have to be free enough that you can draw shapes that are not mathematical, but still look convincingly solid.
The asymmetry has to be subtle, not wild and wonky, without any form at all.
Real things in nature have form, yet hey are not perfectly symmetrical, and a god cartoonist applies this concept to his drawings to make them feel natural. Warm and not clinical.

Humpty Dumpty Magazine - Dan Lawler Illustrations

Here are some paintings by Dan Lawler.
Not only is the technique beautiful, the character designs are great too!
I wonder if he had anything to do with animation.
Too bad some dirty little kid got ahold of these and scribbled all over 'em! He needs a little discipline to beget love.

1st Season Rocky and Bullwinkle - Great Design and Style

They had some really good layout artists and designers on the first episodes of Rocky and Bullwinkle.


Here are some images from the first and 2nd episode. I don't who the designer/layout artist is, but he is topnotch.

His drawings have all the classic principles -

PRINCIPLES OF GOOD CARTOON DRAWING

PLUS

Style

Design

Every pose he does of Bullwinkle is different in the details. They all follow the general idea of Bullwinkle-the basic shapes, the basic proportions, yet the artist experiments with the specifics in every single pose.

You can describe Bullwinkle's designs in general terms-with adjectives.
He is tall and thin
He has a long neck
short skinny legs
knobby knees
A furry peanut shaped torso
His head is made of two shapes, a small rounded cranium and a larger droopy nose and muzzle.
Goofy eyes

The exact dimensions of all these adjectives is not set in stone. A great designer can play with the proportions, angles and specific details and still make the characters recognizable.

There is no tracing of model sheets.

The artist messes around with the specific details to keep everything organic, alive....and artistic.

FUNCTIONAL FIRST, STYLE AND DESIGN 2ND

The variations on the general theme of Bullwinkle are not totally arbitrary either. The artist makes sure his poses are functional first-they tell the story, they show us the emotion of the character, they act and they are perfectly staged so we can tell what's going on.

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2007/01/functional-drawings1-draw-with-purpose.html

These variations from "model" are done with extreme control, guided by instinct and taste.
Today, this seeming freedom can be misinterpreted as having no rules. An amateur artist who considers himself a designer ends up drawing anarchic shapes that don't fit together, what we sometimes call "wonky". It's a misunderstanding of the 50s style of design.

EPISODE 1








Note that the characters evolve from the first episode to the second. The first episode drawings are fun and creative, but by the 2nd, the artist is comfortable with characters and is in "the zone" He now understands them intimately and is able to be a lot freer with the designs and poses.

EPISODE 2
Totally clear staging and silhouettes.

I love the way they drew Rocky back then too. He's so much more appealing and streamlined than the lumpy disjointed thing he became.The proportions of many famous cartoon characters tend to get evened out with time. They lose fun, spontaneity and life.Yikes!

The mouth animation is really creative and fun in this early stuff.

These 2 close ups of Bullwinkle have completely different proportions, but does the viewer notice?

His nose is turned down above, and up below. Why not?

I love the odd proportions-the tiny hands compared to the giant head. Great designers use strong contrasts in their shapes and sizes.
The shapes in this image are fantastic. So much thought! Look at the way Rocky's eyes are angled apart at the top.
His skull slopes back and the eyes follow that plane.
The interesting angles in his flying cap.
The organic cube.
The keys that splay outward at bottom.

This artist is very observant and creative at the same time.


How cool was Boris?
I also like the thick itchy lines. I wonder what they inked the cells with? It must have been done by an artist too, because it's done with such flair.

Genius!

I really like this UPA closed eye theory. It's abstract yet still drawn to wrap around the face.

Wow!

This stuff is pure cartoon candy.





You know who this artist reminds me of?

George Baker. It's a crunchy angular sort of style that still has underlying great drawing principles. I loved the covers of these comics when I was a kid. Still do!


Super crunchy!
Goddamn I like these drawings.

If you gotta do limited animation, use great drawings I always say. They don't cost that much. Just hire real designers and don't step on them.



I recommend this dvd with a big warning:

It has some great drawings here and there.
The Fractured Fairy Tales are generally good design and well animated.
Some of the bumpers are really clever and beautiful

BUT!

The people who put this out really did a number on the cartoons.

DVNR
Different voices! - In some cartoons the voices have been changed!
Rerecorded music
The wrong title sequence-it's not the first season title sequence which was really cool.

I can't understand the logic of messing with classic film and TV. Especially when they market it as "original" - "The complete First Season" which is a flat out lie.

If they know that collectors want the films untouched by executives, why do they waste the money changing everything?

Huck Magic Bumper Animation

http://cartoonthrills.org/blog/HB/Huck/bumper/huckmagicsml.mov

There are lots of these on here!

Design 2- Style - Chuck Jones' Scaredy Cat

Chuck Jones is one of my favorite cartoonists and a huge influence on me.
I sometimes think of him as two people:
1) The entertainer that made really funny regular folk type cartoons from roughly 1945-1950
2) The stylist/designer who made beautiful soft cartoons from 1938-1945, and then again from 1950 to the rest of his life.

As an artist, I like his experimental and artsy cartoons.
As a regular type guy with normal man needs, I like the 1945-1950 period when he made hilarious cartoons like Pest In The House, Long Haired-Hare, Rabbit Punch, My Bunny Lies Over The Sea and one of my all time favorite cartoons, Scaredy Cat.

Jones is in his finest form in this cartoon. You can tell he really thought about it and worked hard. The drawings and poses are all really strong and solid, the acting is great and he uses a lot of imagination in one particular area of the cartoon-Sylvester's takes.

Jones did his best cartoons-at least in my opinion- when he had a good structure figured out and he could spend his time concentrating on one main creative aspect of the cartoon.

Mike Maltese wrote Scaredy Cat. It's a very funny idea and a funny story, so that part is well taken care of. Now Jones can concentrate on what I believe he thought was the most important part of the cartoon-Sylvester's reactions-his "takes".


Here's a take (above) that's only on screen for a very few frames. Jones' direction in this cartoon is so masterful and confident that he can draw and time his takes with such clarity and power that he barely leaves them onscreen for you to register them - but you do and it's perfect! Some of the takes-like the one above are arrows that lead your eye to the following scene of the mice doing some ghostly gag. He uses the device throughout the cartoon. Very clever indeed.

Jones was a master at drawing poses that really tell you how the character is feeling, in ways that are hard to describe in words. Look at the funny attitude Sylvester has above and below. These poses aren't arbitrary, they tell you more than one thing at once.


If you remember from my post "Design 1" I said Jones was mainly a stylist but sometimes used his design ability. (Design and Style are 2 different things)

He didn't often use it to create new types of characters (he did sometimes and I'll post about that later) but he would use it for funny reactions. For most of this cartoon, Porky and Sylvester are pretty much "on-model". Jones always felt he needed a strong reason or excuse to break from model-or create something new.

Sylvester's extreme fear is a really good reason to create some funny new faces. These use Chuck's design ability.


Go see all the great poses from Scaredy Cat that Duck Dodgers made for us at:
http://classiccartoons.blogspot.com/2006/04/sylvesters-takes-from-scaredy-cat.html


Chuck had an odd habit. Whenever he made an outstanding and original cartoon, he would make it again. Sometimes a million times, like The Road Runner Series. Usually the other versions of the same story don't turn out as good as the breakthroughs. I'm not sure why. Maybe, once he made something that really worked, he figured he could turn it into a "stock" idea and every time he made it again, it would be easier and faster and cheaper.

That way he could spend more time on his next firsts. I have no way of knowing, but his firsts tend to have more life and more elaborate animation and lots more custom poses drawn by Chuck himself.

Here are some frames from Claws For Alarm-a remake of Scaredy Cat. Note how the characters are drawn by comparison with Scaredy Cat. It seems like the main creative part of the cartoon is now in the backgrounds instead of the characters. It is still well drawn and funny, but Chuck (rightly) doesn't seem as inspired to make a cartoon that he's already done.





http://classiccartoons.blogspot.com/2006/04/sylvesters-takes-from-claws-for-alarm.html

Incidentally, have you ever noticed that every other director's Sylvester is generally funnier and drawn better than Friz'? That's very odd, considering that Sylvester is associated mostly with Freleng.

Friz

Clampett- This is the first Sylvester model drawn by Tom McKimson for Bob Clampett. Below is my favorite Sylvester cartoon ever: Kitty Kornered

http://classiccartoons.blogspot.com/2006/01/100-greatest-cartoons-of-all-times.html

Robert Mckimson.

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.

Chuck Jones Transylvania 6-5000, 1963 Clever

I love this cartoon. It 's very clever.
It's one of Jones' last WB cartoons.
I wonder how Maurice Noble co-directed this? Did he do rough BG designs and turn them over to Givens to do finals?
This is a cartoon that really uses what cartoons can do that other mediums can't compete with.

GREAT LAYOUTS BY BOB GIVENS

I love the BGs in this. Not merely because they are stylized, but because they are also really well drawn, composed and moody.

Bob Givens used to say "You would think Chuck was a Goddamned *#% from the way that he draws, but I've seen him with girls, so I guess he's not."

This cartoon is very stylish, but it's not so much so that it becomes too cloying as some other Jones' cartoons do. Instead, it's very handsomely designed and drawn.

DRACULA IS THE STAR, NOT BUGS

This design of Dracula is really good. It's a combination of animated cartoon forms, human anatomy, Ronald Searle and Chuck Jones all in perfect balance.

This would be really hard to animate, because of all the complex organic forms and stylized angles and curves. But since it is made up of real cartoon principles and the animators have been animating for 20 years or so and learned the classic techniques, they are able to pull it off.
Today, when many cartoonists try to be stylish, they don't have the solid drawing and animation background that Jones did, so it just comes off looking like bad drawings or collections of drawing mistakes.
To do this takes extreme control. And lots of careful decisions.

EXPERIMENTING WITH DESIGN AS YOU GO - Designing by organizing a group of concepts

Here's something that you don't see much of anymore: Chuck designed the character but didn't stick exactly to his first conception of him. Instead of being a model sheet design with every exact incremental shape and size carved in stone, it's a collection of design concepts and ideas, left open to constant tinkering throughout the cartoon.
His proportions and details keep changing, not only from scene to scene, but from pose to pose. Does the audience notice this? Of course not, but today's executives and show runners would seem to think that they do and will get mad if you play with the character designs as you go.
This method of creation opens up the creators' pallete and allows for a much wider assortment of entertainment possibilities.
It isn't uncontrolled ignorance like much of today's stylized stuff. It's highly controlled sophisticated visual concepts. Each character is designed as a combination of general concepts, rather than specific mathematical proportions and shapes.

DRACULA'S HANDS

Aren't these hands great? Inspired by real hands, but just stylized enough to give him a gothic evil flavor.

THE SKIN TOOTH

I know some cartoonists who hate the Chuck Jones patented skin tooth, but I think it works perfectly here.

The animation in 1963 has lost a lot of the 40s punch and dynamics, but what Jones' animators did here is still very skilled and clever and has subtle contrasts in the timing.

The Bill Lava music kind of slows the pace down, but it's so visually stunning that I almost don't notice.

http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/Jones/63Transylvania65000/Dracintro.mov


Dracula's Floating Cape
Chuck Jones being clever again.

BUGS' DESIGN

Bugs changes all through the cartoon too. I loved the way Jones drew Bugs when he was using his "handsome style" rather than his fruity style. I used to always notice the bumpers he did in the original "Bug Bunny Show" from 1960. The Friz and McKimson bumpers looked bland and lifeless by comparison.

Here's a strange design, almost looks like Friz.
Some of the animators are drawing Bugs too tall.
One weird thing about the later Bugs. He has tiny hands.

Here, he has the gift of human arms.

Just to compare with classic 40s Bugs...







There are lots more good things about Transylvania 6-5000 - like the gags, and I'll get to 'em soon.

BTW, this is also one of the rare remastered cartoons that hasn't been significantly altered by engineering wizards. The colors are mostly still subtle and the lines haven't been thinned to where they are all pixellated like in so many other Looney Tunes DVDs.

More Great Milt Gross

Wow. Just a couple years ago, you could barely find Milt Gross comics anywhere.
Now thanks the the Animation Archive and collectors like Marc Deckter, all this killer stuff is being made available to all us lucky cartoon fans.

Gross is amazing. He never seems to run out of funny shapes and designs.

What's that middle balloon attached to?

If only crazy people really wore hot dogs on their heads instead of starting wars, we'd all be much happier.

This silhouette is a work of art just by itself. It's almost psychedelic. I'm getting a flashback...