Wednesday, July 22, 2009

Baby Bottleneck Sitting on Eggs - scene cuts and animator switches -1

This is full of ideas.It's a scene animated by Izzy Ellis who had a primitive drawing style that was very angular. It works perfectly here.
Look at the difference between the way Daffy is drawn compared to Porky. Porky is very rounded, constructed, old-fashioned, conservative and "on-model", as opposed to Daffy's almost abstract angular poses.
Was this an "idea" specifically and consciously thought up to draw our attention to Daffy? Or was it merely a lucky accident. Either way, it took Clampett to encourage both fresh ideas and lucky accidents, both of which occur non-stop in his cartoons.
Another "idea": There is no background. How weird is that? Where are they? By this time in the cartoon, you don't even care. The whole story is so preposterous that by now, you're ready to accept anything.
The story idea at this point: Daffy has to sit on an egg to hatch it out, but he doesn't want to. It's too undignified for him. Everything about that is wrong, but again by this time, you just accept it.


Another idea: When Daffy turns around, the inbetween is a black sillhouette. It's only on for 1 frame, so why bother? because every frame is worth creativity. Clampett has millions of ideas - from the big picture of the whole story concept, all the way down to individual frames. He is an idea machine.
There are all kinds of weird cuts through the scene too - for no apparent reason, and they should be jump-cuts. We should notice them, but for some reason we don't until we actually still frame the scene.





This is only the beginning of the scene too. In the next post, the scene does something extra strange. It keeps switching from animator to animator. Clampett does this a lot too - he breaks up individual scenes into different animators. Supposedly to cast individual types of gags and actions according to who he thinks will do them best. Talk about picky control! But it sure works.
http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/Clampett/46BabyBottleneck/DaffyIzzyEgg.mov