Dizzy Red Riding Hood

This is one of the great Betty Boop cartoons. It was done before they started tracing model sheets of her and stiffened her up. From 1930 to 1933 the cartoons are almost all really good.Does anybody know who this animator is?
I love the way he draws Betty and the way he moves things.

There's not only nothing realistic about this, there is also nothing Disney about it. Some people equate Disney with realism, but Disney is just a set of arbitrary rules or selective animation principles that many have come to believe are the only true attributes good animation must have.

Is this the same animator?

Disney advanced their own set of principles in the mid 30s and reached their peak with Snow White. Their mid to late 30s cartoons squash and stretch like crazy during movement, but the drawings when you can see them, remain pretty conservative and not very funny or cartoony.
When the Fleischers began to adopt the Disney tricks in the late 30s, their cartoons became less entertaining. They lost their own unique attributes along the way and absorbed Disney's negatives along with the positives.

Is it possible to be cartoony and have west coast principles at the same time? Wait for another post.


http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/BettyBoop/Dizzyredwalk01small.mov

I used to think of these Boop cartoons as primitive, because I too was used to judging everything by west coast 40s standards. They didn't squash and stretch much, had no weight and the inbetweening was evenly spaced which makes the characters seem to float.
These cartoons have something else that the more expensive and elaborate Disney cartoons don't. They are fun. They also sometimes have great design, depending on who the animator is.
And they are totally weird and imaginative. Dizzy Red Hiding Hood is a perfect cartoon fairy tale adaptation. It is not at all trying to be believable. We don't need to learn the characters' motivations. There are no multiplane camera fx trying to fool us into thinking we aren't watching a cartoon.
This glorifies that it's a cartoon. I love these animated backgrounds. It invites us into a surreal dream world of weirdness. I want a machine that can transport me into this surreal world. I want to visit Betty and Bimbo. I don't have any innate desire to visit Snow White's cottage. It's too normal.

I find that the closer animation tries to be real, the more fake it looks. Multiplane camera effects that use realistically painted bgs looks fake as Hell. You can see flat paintings of realistic trees panning at different speeds than the still background at the bottom of the mutiplane. Beowulf is the ultimate sinner of trying to be real and being more fake than anything ever made.

The Fleischers weren't ashamed they were making cartoons. They were all about the magic and fun.

http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/BettyBoop/DizzzyRedwalk02small.mov

Fleischer cartoons also differ from Disney's in how heterosexual they are.
This is a different animator than the one above and Betty's not as cute, but it's still very funny.

Bimbo and Betty have a happy ending!
I'm going to put more clips up that I think might be the animator in the walk scenes above. Help me out if you know who it is!

BTW, this is an 11x beat. 11x per step. 10 drawings per step with one drawing shot twice to make it 11 per beat.

The animator may have animated it as a 10x beat. (No animator would decide on his own to animate an 11x per step cycle). But the music sounded best at an 11x frame beat, so they chose to expose one drawing twice in each step to make it fit.

This suggests the music was written before the animation was done but who knows?

PAYPAL HTML

Korea Notes 4

Here's the last of my notes to overseas service studios. I hope they were helpful to someone out there!

On my last Korean show, the animators took our layouts and merely inbetweened them. The effect was that everyone floated from pose to pose. Nothing was favored. It was like the characters were underwater. It cost a fortune in retakes. We oughta just bring animation back to the country. Some of the budgets I've seen on modern flat shows could easily afford real animation. I see the shows and can't figure out where the money went.
Sometimes when people clean up animators' drawings, the characters end up fatter. That's because the clean up artist is drawing his lines on the outside of the animator's lines, rather than right on top.

Thanks to all these folks who donated. Did I miss anyone?

David Mackenzie

How to keep organized when doing storyboards...(for TV)


COMING UP...

A genius animator on early Betty Boops, unfettered by Disney rules.

1942 - the height of creative and skilled animation.

Toy Construction 2 - a Knickerbocker Jinks - drawn in flash layer by layer using wiggly flash tools

Creativity Magazine

Here's an article about my association with Hoytyboy, and they included my ideas about Direct Sponsorship.
here's the rest....

http://creativity-online.com/?action=news:article&newsId=122307

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2006/12/direct-sponsorship-1.html

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2006/12/direct-sponsorship-2.htmlHow The Web Will Be Advertisers' Best Friend

http://johnkpitch.blogspot.com/

Chuck Jones

I think Chuck Jones' best character design is Wile E. Coyote. Especially the early version. This is from "Beep Beep"... the second cartoon? From 2. I can't find the first one "Fast and Furryous" from 48 or 49 where he looks even better.
Chuck's style was an outgrowth of the general 40s animation style, and in particular, Bob McKimson's. What Chuck did to the pears and spheres style was add more complex shapes, inspired by anatomy. He combined the two types of forms and created an organic style with complex variations of the standard cartoon shapes.
The Coyote's head is actually the same basic construction as Bugs Bunny's, but with much more extreme contrasts and a long elaborately constructed nose with interwoven 's' curves.
I like this period of Chuck's work, before he got too angular. The angles in these designs are softened at the corners which makes them feel much more alive, as opposed to being graphic symbols.

CHUCK'S EXPRESSIONSChuck invented some expressions that are physically impossible, yet we instantly understand them and empathise with them when we see them. A great use of cartoon magic.

These expressions are more specific than say, Disney expressions. Disney expressions tend to be more general and much softer. These Jones expressions are much more like feelings actual humans experience.

Look at the beautiful asymmetry.
Constructed, complex shapes, human emotion and organicness.
Jones' great posing and expressions elevated the roadrunner cartoons that had pretty much standard cartoon jokes. The Coyote's reactions and his thought process made the physical gags funnier because of the irony in his plans.

Here's Chuck's smug expression. This was funny a long time ago, but I guess this eventually morphed into our modern 'tude expression. It was funny when it meant something.

Now we just paste in onto everything for no reason.

These frame grabs are from the Looney Tunes DVDs. Note the super skinny itchy ragged lines around the characters. On a TV screen they jitter and strobe and really flatten out the animation. What a shame, because these cartoons are so beautifully animated and once looked smooth as silk.

INVENTION AND VARIATION

Oh, remind me to tell you about the difference between invention and variations on a theme.

Chuck invented a few things, but he was a master at doing variations on ideas that he liked...

Nose Abuse

Flintstone really knows how to enjoy himself.