character designs made by group effort of functional artists, John Dunn, Ward Kimball, and whoever did the layout
I've noticed that character design is a popular subject here; whenever I write about it I get a lot of comments.
I don't think many people agree with what I have to say about it.
I don't think many people agree with what I have to say about it.I do understand why people are so obsessed with jumping on the character design bandwagon. It's the only creative job left in the business. Or at least it's the only fun job. We don't do the important jobs anymore: animation, layout, or real storyboards, so all that's left is designing characters. And executives in the last few years have seemed to take to designers. They confuse them with "creators", whatever vague concept that is in their minds. They think every cartoon has to have a brand new unique look, which is not only naive and pointless, but impossible. Each character oughta have a new look-not a whole new style, but unique visual characteristics that define him or her. That probably is possible - but we'd have to break away from all our inbreeding and re-use of existing generic designs.
Cartoon WritersThe irony is the public could care less about style and design.
"Oh PLEEEEASE give us some hip stylized cartooooons!"
"Whoa, Dude! Cut those finger tips off man! That's some funny s**t!"
The general public wants funny unique characters doing entertaining impossible things that can't happen in real life. The look is just extra dressing. Too much designiness probably turns the average Joe away. So who is it for?Character design is attractive to young artists because it's a lot easier to do than storyboarding, layout or animation. Especially today's character design. It might even be easier than being a cartoon writer, which a monkey could be. I know this from my own experience being an exclusive character designer for a while. It takes more talent to be a designer than a writer, but it may take less time and effort in pure man-hours. (Or woman hours).
I made a lot more money faster doing character designs than drawing layouts because there are so many more drawings to do in layout for the same amount of money - and layouts have to follow rigid rules. They need to function and have something to do with the actual production.
Yes, I had selfish fun designing characters, but I couldn't watch the finished cartoons that used my designs. Not until I actually got to direct my own cartoons - and then "character design" became a completely different job, and not so important.
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REAL CHARACTER DESIGNERS VS FAKE ONES
REAL CHARACTER DESIGNERS VS FAKE ONES
First of all, character design should never have been separated from the rest of the animation process.
The handful of artists from classic cartoons that are renowned for their character designs, were not really character designers at all. They were layout artists. Layout artists who who were also animators.
When they finally got around to designing characters, they knew the functional needs of the job - and they usually layed out the cartoons. 
They didn't just design characters in the abstract who existed only to float on white paper and look neat. They didn't pass them on to another artist to work out the problems in the designs. They themselves had to make them come to life in the scenes and would have to make changes as they went.
Here is a very stylish cartoon "designed" by Ed Benedict in the 50s modern style. Is the cartoon great because of the style?
I don't think so. It's great because it's really funny. I do think Ed's extreme stylization of the cartoon adds novelty to it, because Tex had already done this same story many times and it needed to be refreshed. But what really makes it work is the combination of Tex and Ed's terrific poses and acting - and of course Tex's timing. The great animation doesn't hurt either. It's all the functional drawings in the cartoon that make it work, not the design in the abstract. Ed was a functional designer and Tex was a functional storyteller, who drew all his stories, poses and acting on storyboards. These artists were not theoreticians like some of today's character designers. They had to put their ideas to the test every day. Deputy Droopy would have worked just as well if it was animated in this style:
Or in Mike Lah's drawing style:
http://inspiration-grab-bag.blogspot.com/2006/03/deputy-droopy-1955-mgm.html
They had to be able to pose the characters functionally and fit them aesthetically into their environments. How many character designers today can do that?
Now with most TV animation done in Flash, we just cut and paste stiff unbalanced flat rigid cutouts and line them up next to each other with no attention to actual function or composition or balance against each other. They sure don't make any expressions - except screaming. I see a lot of "Games-style" screaming poses in the comedy style cartoons.
The Character Designer Plague
So today we are overrun with character designers. Everyone and his rat wants to be one, and honestly I can't blame them with the situation being what it is now. People write me all the time and ask me how to break in at the top the business and skip all the steps of learning how things work in cartoons. They want quick answers to the secrets of getting a unique style and a top salary. When I disappoint them by recommending they learn the trade first, many roll their eyes and just go off and copy what the last 30 years of visual plagiarists have done and each year there is a whole new crop of individual stylists who are exactly like the last batch, only with more broken gene sequences in their DNA.
I see the same character designs in hundreds of cartoons, only they seem to get drawn worse with each new generation. Some character designs I'd swear are in every cartoon. I see Dee Dee from Dexter's lab in every cartoon, sometimes with gender reassignment, only with the top of her head or the bottom of her feet chopped off. Chopping off finger tips is also a good way to convince an executive you're hip. (It's much easier to draw hands that way too). There is some kind of one-eyed blob that's in a thousand cartoons. Cartoons get sold that are so primitive that their "design" consists only of the fact that the designers never learned to draw at all.
To me, the most fun in cartoons is actually bringing the characters to life. Whether you do it through storyboards, or layouts or animation doesn't matter. Challenging yourself to tell the story that's written by giving your characters the most unique specific poses and expressions and having a studio system that allows the drawings to make it to the screen - now that is rewarding. Watching people laugh, or groan, or sigh as they watch the finished cartoon play itself out as if it's really happening. Maybe I'm crazy, but that's why I think cartoonists want to make cartoons. Not to just do their own assembly line bit in the abstract, divorced from the rest of the production and then complaining when it doesn't somehow come to life in the finished product.
Do We Even Need Character Designers?
What is a character anyway? This thing that needs to be designed? The word denotes a personality first, not a design. Back when we animated personalities, the designs usually evolved out of the stories and events that the characters themselves helped create. All the artists contributed to the evolution of the characters, and this process created the most entertaining successful characters in history. Really, the animator (or in the case of TV, the layout artist) should be bringing 3/4 of the design to the screen in his poses and expressions.
The greatest character in history never was designed - or even created. He evolved out of looney protoplasm through the natural process of grouping extremely talented cartoonists together under brilliant directors and letting them do their thing.
You might look at some modern animated features that are so sinfully gruesome or bland in appearance and deduce that "Yes, we DO need some character designers", but I would say we just need people who don't design positively ugly, and a common sense production system that allows nature to take its course. We'd have well designed features if animators and layout artists and modelers just were skilled artists who happened to have appeal as one of their natural talents. Chuck Jones was less of a "designer" than a "redesigner". He merely applied his sense of shapes to classic principles and existing characters.
In the rare cases where we need character designers as specialists, they oughta be culled from the best draftsmen among the layout artists and animators. Good solid draftsmen, who also have the rare gift of appeal. Demanding all those attributes in one artist really narrows down the pool of potential designers.
"Cool Design" is anti-character
This kind of character design, which is popular among modern cartoons and misunderstood is intended to look cool for its own sake. It's great for commercials and instructional films where the characters are just symbols of types, but it isn't very effective at making characters seem alive or have individual personalities.
Even so, the originators of stylish character design were all schooled in functional character animation. They used skilled techniques they learned sweating it out doing things the "classic" way. Today we just imitate this stuff superficially and trick executives into thinking we are are the hip new thing, even though the hip new thing actually took tons of skill and a good measure of self-controlled conservatism 60 years ago.
What I think we need much more than teeming masses of character designers, are actual functional artists who can pose characters, keep them alive, solid and believable. We could use more animators, layout artists and real story artists. And directors who encourage everyone to bring ideas to the films, and then to have the balls and tenacity to follow them through and not keep saying "Gee, I dunno, it's not really within our style boundaries."
Animation is about magical characters more than anything else and magical characters have to be able to do things. That takes a lot more than just some abstract design floating around the screen.
The designs are purposely of stereotypical characters, because they were made for very short spots and need to get another message across, besides telling a character-driven story.
I absolutely love this stuff, but I'm an artist too and I can see all the thought behind the staging, posing, lines of action, negative shapes - all the real things that go into design, not just some superficial simple imbecility that you see on TV today in the guise of being cool.
These are all marvels of clarity, appeal and classic animation principles.
Except this one below. This is a mess of clutter.
I stole these all from Amid's great site. Buy his book too. I have it and it's wonderful. Just don't steal from it.
http://cartoonmodern.tumblr.com/
FOR ACTUAL PRACTICAL TIPS ON CHARACTER DESIGN AMONG THE RANTS
The handful of artists from classic cartoons that are renowned for their character designs, were not really character designers at all. They were layout artists. Layout artists who who were also animators.
When they finally got around to designing characters, they knew the functional needs of the job - and they usually layed out the cartoons. 
They didn't just design characters in the abstract who existed only to float on white paper and look neat. They didn't pass them on to another artist to work out the problems in the designs. They themselves had to make them come to life in the scenes and would have to make changes as they went.Here is a very stylish cartoon "designed" by Ed Benedict in the 50s modern style. Is the cartoon great because of the style?
I don't think so. It's great because it's really funny. I do think Ed's extreme stylization of the cartoon adds novelty to it, because Tex had already done this same story many times and it needed to be refreshed. But what really makes it work is the combination of Tex and Ed's terrific poses and acting - and of course Tex's timing. The great animation doesn't hurt either. It's all the functional drawings in the cartoon that make it work, not the design in the abstract. Ed was a functional designer and Tex was a functional storyteller, who drew all his stories, poses and acting on storyboards. These artists were not theoreticians like some of today's character designers. They had to put their ideas to the test every day. Deputy Droopy would have worked just as well if it was animated in this style:
Or in Mike Lah's drawing style:
http://inspiration-grab-bag.blogspot.com/2006/03/deputy-droopy-1955-mgm.html
DESIGN IS THE WHOLE PICTURE AND STORY, NOT JUST THE CHARACTERS
Ed Benedict, Tom Oreb, Gene Hazelton, Ward Kimball, John Hubley, Fred Crippen, Bob Kurtz, Bill Hurtz designed their characters only as part of the overall designs of the cartoons. They designed them in context of the backgrounds and stories. They bent and twisted and sculpted them within each scene. They didn't just cut and paste stiff model sheet poses and slide them around in 2 dimensions.
They had to be able to pose the characters functionally and fit them aesthetically into their environments. How many character designers today can do that?Now with most TV animation done in Flash, we just cut and paste stiff unbalanced flat rigid cutouts and line them up next to each other with no attention to actual function or composition or balance against each other. They sure don't make any expressions - except screaming. I see a lot of "Games-style" screaming poses in the comedy style cartoons.
The Character Designer PlagueSo today we are overrun with character designers. Everyone and his rat wants to be one, and honestly I can't blame them with the situation being what it is now. People write me all the time and ask me how to break in at the top the business and skip all the steps of learning how things work in cartoons. They want quick answers to the secrets of getting a unique style and a top salary. When I disappoint them by recommending they learn the trade first, many roll their eyes and just go off and copy what the last 30 years of visual plagiarists have done and each year there is a whole new crop of individual stylists who are exactly like the last batch, only with more broken gene sequences in their DNA.
I see the same character designs in hundreds of cartoons, only they seem to get drawn worse with each new generation. Some character designs I'd swear are in every cartoon. I see Dee Dee from Dexter's lab in every cartoon, sometimes with gender reassignment, only with the top of her head or the bottom of her feet chopped off. Chopping off finger tips is also a good way to convince an executive you're hip. (It's much easier to draw hands that way too). There is some kind of one-eyed blob that's in a thousand cartoons. Cartoons get sold that are so primitive that their "design" consists only of the fact that the designers never learned to draw at all.
To me, the most fun in cartoons is actually bringing the characters to life. Whether you do it through storyboards, or layouts or animation doesn't matter. Challenging yourself to tell the story that's written by giving your characters the most unique specific poses and expressions and having a studio system that allows the drawings to make it to the screen - now that is rewarding. Watching people laugh, or groan, or sigh as they watch the finished cartoon play itself out as if it's really happening. Maybe I'm crazy, but that's why I think cartoonists want to make cartoons. Not to just do their own assembly line bit in the abstract, divorced from the rest of the production and then complaining when it doesn't somehow come to life in the finished product.
Do We Even Need Character Designers?
What is a character anyway? This thing that needs to be designed? The word denotes a personality first, not a design. Back when we animated personalities, the designs usually evolved out of the stories and events that the characters themselves helped create. All the artists contributed to the evolution of the characters, and this process created the most entertaining successful characters in history. Really, the animator (or in the case of TV, the layout artist) should be bringing 3/4 of the design to the screen in his poses and expressions.
The greatest character in history never was designed - or even created. He evolved out of looney protoplasm through the natural process of grouping extremely talented cartoonists together under brilliant directors and letting them do their thing.
You might look at some modern animated features that are so sinfully gruesome or bland in appearance and deduce that "Yes, we DO need some character designers", but I would say we just need people who don't design positively ugly, and a common sense production system that allows nature to take its course. We'd have well designed features if animators and layout artists and modelers just were skilled artists who happened to have appeal as one of their natural talents. Chuck Jones was less of a "designer" than a "redesigner". He merely applied his sense of shapes to classic principles and existing characters.In the rare cases where we need character designers as specialists, they oughta be culled from the best draftsmen among the layout artists and animators. Good solid draftsmen, who also have the rare gift of appeal. Demanding all those attributes in one artist really narrows down the pool of potential designers.
"Cool Design" is anti-character
This kind of character design, which is popular among modern cartoons and misunderstood is intended to look cool for its own sake. It's great for commercials and instructional films where the characters are just symbols of types, but it isn't very effective at making characters seem alive or have individual personalities.
Even so, the originators of stylish character design were all schooled in functional character animation. They used skilled techniques they learned sweating it out doing things the "classic" way. Today we just imitate this stuff superficially and trick executives into thinking we are are the hip new thing, even though the hip new thing actually took tons of skill and a good measure of self-controlled conservatism 60 years ago.
What I think we need much more than teeming masses of character designers, are actual functional artists who can pose characters, keep them alive, solid and believable. We could use more animators, layout artists and real story artists. And directors who encourage everyone to bring ideas to the films, and then to have the balls and tenacity to follow them through and not keep saying "Gee, I dunno, it's not really within our style boundaries."
Animation is about magical characters more than anything else and magical characters have to be able to do things. That takes a lot more than just some abstract design floating around the screen.
_____________________________
This is all great stuff and it sure has its place, but it doesn't lend itself to storytelling character-driven animation.
The designs are purposely of stereotypical characters, because they were made for very short spots and need to get another message across, besides telling a character-driven story.
I absolutely love this stuff, but I'm an artist too and I can see all the thought behind the staging, posing, lines of action, negative shapes - all the real things that go into design, not just some superficial simple imbecility that you see on TV today in the guise of being cool.
These are all marvels of clarity, appeal and classic animation principles.
Except this one below. This is a mess of clutter.
I stole these all from Amid's great site. Buy his book too. I have it and it's wonderful. Just don't steal from it.http://cartoonmodern.tumblr.com/
FOR ACTUAL PRACTICAL TIPS ON CHARACTER DESIGN AMONG THE RANTS