Saturday, April 21, 2007

Bill Tytla - Terrytoons - Pose to Pose Animation - character with fly swatter

POSE TO POSE ANIMATION
I think this cartoon is inspired by The Dover Boys. The poses are extreme and graphic. The villain is very similar to Dan Backslide.

Terrytoons had a funny habit of copying what other studios invented and then misunderstanding it. Usually they waited a few years until after a west coast studio made a revolutionary cartoon before they would copy it, but this time they were right on the heels of The Dover Boys.
I'm pretty sure this is Bill Tytla. He is animating pose to pose, as the animators in The Dover Boys, but the way he gets to each pose is different. In the Dover Boys, the animators use big blurred inbetweens that have come to be known as "smears".

POSE TO POSE means you draw all the key poses first and time them so that they have the most frames on screen. The motion is less important than the held poses. That way you really see the poses, as opposed to "straight-ahead" animation which tends to keep the character moving constantly and you don't plan the poses ahead of time. You just go where your pencil takes you.

Here the inbetweening is more evenly spaced and the effect is softer than in Jones' pose to pose style.

It's possible that Tytla did the main poses and someone else did the animation.

The timing isn't as snappy as the Jones and Bobe Cannon stuff. Maybe that's because of Terrytoon's inbetweeners. Who knows?

It still looks really cool and cartoony and fun! I like this kind of thing a lot better than when animators try to imitate what they think is "realistic", because realistic animation looks corny and falls far short of actual real life acting.

These poses are purposely stylized and wacky. A real person would never strike these poses, but in a cartoon you totally accept them, because cartoons are supposed to be silly.

CLICK HERE TO SEE CLIP! (1.11mb)