What's Not To Love About Insanity?

What is it about insanity that so delights our every pore and follicle?

Insanity works great in entertainment.

Whether we are talking about actual clinical forms of insanity like schizophrenia, solipsism, amnesia or made up ones, they all make for great fun on the screen.

EVERYDAY COMMON INSANITY - Losing Our Wits

But then there are the common every day forms of insanity we all experience: when we argue about politics, deal with executive logic, fall in love, get jealous, have road rage, practice religion, try to discipline the kids and expect them to obey us. The kind of normal common sense we apply when we use tools to fix a faucet or solve simple problems goes right out the window and we become irrational chemically controlled lunatics.

This is considered offensive today. Insane or what?

Everyone can identify with the crazy intense emotions these normal everyday human experiences grip us with.

Modern cartoons don't tend to exploit intense emotions or insanity, but I always thought the animated cartoon was the perfect medium for it.
Mike Lazzo (CARTOON NETWORK GURU) called some of my cartoons "Psychodrama" about 12 years ago and that was the first time I heard that label, but I liked it when I heard it. (I'm not sure whether it was a criticism or a compliment!)

My own life has been filled with psychodrama and I have taken real events that I've witnessesd (or caused!), and adapted them in my cartoons. Whenever someone goes nuts in front of me, instead of being scared, I usually zone out instead and go into intense study mode, so I can use the material later.

CLICK HERE TO SEE REN THREATENING STIMPY AND SVEN

This scene in Sven Hoek was inspired by a real life event. Ren's line delivery is an imitation of someone who had an episode in the original Spumco studio - in my office. After it happened I ran to get my Sven Hoek storyboard and changed a whole scene to make it more intense and real. That's what real life events are for! Many of them are much crazier than anything you can imagine in a cartoon, so I take advantage of them when they happen.

One complaint I get from many executives is that my cartoons are too unrealistic. They don't know how wrong they are.

INSANE CLASSICS

Here are some great movies to go insane with if you ever get the chance:

Beware My Lovely

Beast With 5 Fingers

MAD LOVEKISS OF DEATH
DETECTIVE STORY
THE ENEMY WITHIN

STRAIGHT JACKETNIGHT OF THE HUNTER

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TOMORROW'S MIGHTY MOUSE PISS-SHIVER-PACKED EVENT: Go Insane with cartoon psychos John K., Ralph Bakshi and Tom Minton!

Maintaining Guts from Department to department

Did you ever notice that when you clean up one of your own drawings, it loses some guts?
This is a problem all artists face, but it's even a bigger problem in animation because each drawing passes through so many different artists' hands.

Especially in this day and age when everything is so departmentalized.

If it's hard for an artist to clean up his own style without losing something, imagine how hard it would be for someone in another country who is seeing your style (after it's already been traced a few times) for the first time and really doesn't care anyway.

In animation, an idea gets copied over and over again before it actually makes it to the screen. The natural order of life seems to be that copies are inferior to the original, so that the more something gets copied, the crappier it gets.

And unless your studio has a system designed to combat this problem, you are going to end up with bland cartoons, where none of the artists who contributed to it recognizes his or her own work.

Here are 4 stages in an animation production that all use the same poses. Many studios have more stages than this. Each stage tones down the previous stage.

Storyboard
Layout
Animation
Cleanup

TRUE TALES FROM ANOTHER DIMENSION

For the last 40 years or so, we have been plagued with an assembly line system based on a misunderstanding of the term "on-model".

Ever since I got into the business, I realized that no matter what you drew in your scenes for a cartoon, it would never end up looking remotely like that in the final cartoon. The system is geared to erase all the artists' specific and original contributions to the film.

Even the few artists I knew that actually tried to put some life in the cartoons would always be disappointed when we screened the finished cartoons. It was as if we never worked on the cartoons in the first place. As if it had all been done by a crappy computer.

All our work had been smoothed out, planed down, straightened out. Most young cartoonists come into the business all eager and optimistic that they are going to be the ones to breathe some life into the art again. But after a year or 2 of experiencing this blanderization process, they quickly lose their ambition, sell out to the man or go insane.

No matter how talented or skilled you are, you need a system that is geared to the creative process and understands practical realities. I have always been plagued with this problem of how to get creativity to happen in an environment that is completely designed against it.

That's why I am so analytical - why I have to figure out solutions to so many problems. I would rather just get a bunch of creative folks together and do what we do naturally, but there was no place on earth designed for that when I started. No Looney Tunes or MGM or Fleischer studio that has a logical production system.

I had to recreate one and then pass it on to all the studios that worked with mine. Most other studios - service studios that do the animation and ink and paint have been trained by the American or Canadian assembly line studios and cannot bring themselves to change their ways to accommodate originality and fun in their work-even when you send them the finished drawings.

They are so used to blandness that they don't believe that you actually want them to use what you sent them, and they take it upon themselves to fix your work for you. That was happening to Spumco on The Ripping Friends, so I had to put manuals together to show our service studios how to use our drawings without completely toning them down or changing them.
Unfortunately, they never gave our manuals to the artists, so we got blanderized despite our efforts to save them money and time.

Maybe you can benefit from some of the tips in this "maintaining guts" manual. If you ever work for me, you will have this same problem - to not tone down what you are handed from the previous department - which is not an easy thing to do.
For months, I kept asking the supervisors in Canada on the Ripping Friends whether they were using our layout drawings or not, and both studios would constantly assure me that they were. When they finally sent me xeroxes of their layouts we saw that they didn't use any of our drawings and had redrawn everything from scratch. Then I sent this manual and called them to go over it page by page.

We were looking at these closeups of Crag that Jim Smith drew and I cleaned up, and the supervisor said: "Wow. You really did want us to use your drawings exactly!"

Then I asked why they didn't after saying they were.
"We weren't doing it because your and Jim Smith's drawings were 'off-model'."
Jim and I designed the show, but our drawings were off-model I found out.

I have plenty more of these manuals about maintaining guts if you are interested.

Mike Fontanelli Sends Me Rude Pictures

Mike doesn't have his own blog, but he should, because he has such a sophisticated and unique view of the world. Eddie, Kali, Steve and I always try to convince this highly educated cartoonist to share his insights and clever observations with the rest of you but he refuses, so it's up to me to do it for him.I can just hear his eminence giggling like a high school girl as he send me these things.

Mike studied literature in University by the way and has a deep understanding of the classic writers.

Please beg Mike to start his own blog and let him enrich your lives as he does ours.

Some great Mike topics:

Are Rap Artists "artists"?

What he loves about modern "culture"

How "THEY" even ruined girls.

The I.Q.s of executives.

Who is more talented between Dane Cook and Buster Keaton.

His favorite version of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

Scarface

What am I forgetting, disciples of Fontanelli?

Is a Good Line Important?

Yes, I think so.

I'm just going to touch on the subject because there are so many things I could go on about, so let's just start with an overview.


HERE ARE 2 TYPES OF LINEWORK: A PENCIL ROUGH AND A CLEANED UP INKI think an animation drawing should be tight enough that a cleanup artist or inker can preserve what the animator wants. The animator should not hand in vague scribbles and then expect an assistant to figure out where the drawing is. Both these artists have some responsibility to use lines to convey distinct drawings that have a commitment to an idea.

GREAT LINE WORK CAN ENHANCE GREAT DRAWINGS
Jack Kirby is considered the king of comics and for good reason. Many of his classic comics have unfortunately suffered from sloppy inking. Joe Sinnott (who inked these 2 pictures) really worked to bring out the best in Jack's work. He made his characters look solid, organic and made them stand out against the backgrounds.

A lot of other inkers tended to flatten out Jack's work and make the images harder to read. To me, the work then looked too stylized, less alive. Some people like that better, though.


LINES DON'T EXIST BY THEMSELVES
A line isn't important for its own sake. There are some artists who think having a big bold clean line is practically the art itself, and the drawing it describes is unimportant - as in many modern fake-UPA style cartoons.

If you have an uninteresting or ugly drawing underneath, no amount of thick clean lines can hide it-at least not from me.

On the other hand, great drawings can also be ruined by poor line work. Each animator, layout artist and cleanup artist should all understand and feel how to do warm descriptive lines that draw attention to the good qualities in the drawing they are bordering.

LINES CAN HURT DRAWINGS AS EASILY AS THEY CAN HELP THEM

Then there are styles that purposely use wiggly
I'm not even sure if this is for real. Maybe it's someone's idea of satire.

or scratchy lines-maybe to make you know you are looking at drawings, maybe to be ugly on purpose, I don't know.


Many artists, as they get older lose their line quality. I know I can't draw as "clean" as I could in my 20s. That's why I rely on younger inkers and clean up people-but I train them to know where to put their clean lines without "losing the life" of the original roughs.
In the 60s, Disney introduced the xerox process. This was a way eliminate the cost of doing all the beautiful hand-inking they used to do on their cartoons. They sold the concept to the animation community as a way of preserving the spontaneity of the artists' drawings -maintain the liveliness.
To me it looks terrible. When I see scratchy lines boiling and shimmering at 24x per second, I can't help but be aware I'm looking at individual drawings, rather than animated characters.
Plus, the xerox line itself loses a lot from the pencil drawings. It's a cold, harsh itchy look.

By the 1980s, sensitive artistic line work was a thing of the past.COMPARE POPEYE IN THE 30S TO POPEYE AND EVERYTHING ELSE IN THE 80S

I had to fight the whole industry to bring back thick and thin organic lines to cartoons. You would never believe how hard everyone resisted. I was a dirty radical to want the lines around cartoons to look good. Not only did I want thick and thin to come back, and organic lines, I even wanted to have some color lines - and everyone thought I was insane! But that's a whole other story.


LINES ARE YOUR DRAWINGS' SERVANTS

If you have a grasp of your drawing principles, then your lines can do a lot to bring out the elements of your drawings.

Like Pete Emslie

http://cartooncave.blogspot.com/2007/09/angry-girlfriend.html

His lines are very appealing - but not merely appealing for their own sake. They make sense. They are there to help describe the drawing underneath. They are slightly loose and rough, but a cleanup artist would have no trouble knowing where to put the final lines, and how much weight to give them.

His lines are artistic, but they are subservient to the drawings they are describing.

They aren't just one skinny even line that travels around the outline.


Preston Blair also has beautiful flowing lines.They are drawn quick, but perfectly describe the forms underneath. These aren't quite clean enough for a final cel, but the inker knows exactly where everything goes from the clean up.

Many animators work very rough. That's fine, but I think it's their duty to go back and tighten up the drawings to the point where an assistant or inker knows where all the details go, and how the forms actually work solidly. As I've said before, smooth motion is only part of good animation. The drawings you define with your lines, the specific expressions and details are also part of the equation, and I can't see why an animator would want to give up that layer of fun and control.
I think some Disney features in the last 20 years have suffered from cleanups that don't reflect the animators drawings very well. I've seen many scenes with underlying loose animation, but stiff Filmation-style cleanups that undermine the motion. It seems like somewhere between the animator and the clean up department, something is not connecting.




From a rough but defined sketch like the Sody one above, a good inker (like Brian Romero) can work his magic and give you a smooth, alive, organic being. HIERARCHY OF LINES DESCRIBE HIERARCHY OF FORMS
Lines, like forms obey a hierarchy of importance. Some parts of your drawing are more important than others and need thicker lines. Details are less important, get thinner lines, but still have to flow in the same directions as the larger forms.

It's not quite that simple and not completely a science. There are some general rules to help out, but then part of it is instinct.

SHANE GLINES

Shane Glines used to ink a lot of my stuff and he knew exactly how to enhance what the drawing itself was trying to say.

You admired his lines, but you saw a character first, not a bunch of disconnected details.



***Note to Mitch- when you copy the old cartoons, try to get a feel for the pencil lines animators used to use. Your lines can help give your drawings more form.