Animation School 14: Toot Head Construction

USE NEGATIVE SPACES WITHIN THE FORM!

Face is kept well to the front, with lots of negative space behind it. Top of face (eye area) is smaller than bottom of face (mouth area) for design contrast, Nose isn't in the middle. It's not symmetrical or evenly proportioned. If it was it would look mechanical.

Here is a common mistake in modern design. CRAMPED AREAS - No Negative Space
Dino's whole face is squashed together at the top of his head. Same with the top of his body where his arms are cramped together with no negative space. These are easy corrections if you are thinking about it.
A vertical line running down the top of the face. Horizontal lines under and at top of eyes. These construction lines follow the form of that part of the head. This is where today a lot of people get it wrong. They have the plane of the eyes contradict the plane of the face they are sitting on. (It came from a mistake in a Ren and Stimpy cartoon, and everyone thought it was on purpose.)
Disney eyes are very specific to them and their followers. You can always tell a Cal Arts animator by certain things they can't break out of - like Disney eyes. Sometimes the eyes have 4 corners. 2 subtle ones at top. But they always are thinner at the top, wider at bottom.Disney eyes and same head construction on all these characters.
From Mark Mayerson's site:
By the time of 101 Dalmations, the handful of stock Disney designs were all morphing into one. Every character in Dalmations has the same construction and eyes. Maybe Cruella has a very slight variation in head proportions, but the exact same eyes and eye expressions. This is the Don Bluth bible, and later in degraded form, the Cal Arts bible. Same character designs, same eyes over and over again.Slightly different jaw. Same eyes, only bigger. New nose! The Goth cartoonist's template.

Toot Whistle Plunk and Boom is on this set. Buy it.

These humans all have the same basic head construction with slight variations in proportions and details. They don't have Disney eyes. They have regular cartoon eyes. Actually Ed draws very unique eyes, but they are so tricky that the rest of us miss it when we try to draw his characters.

Animation is infamous for recycling designs. (And even more for recycling stories-but I'll save that for a rant)
Here's a much funnier variation on the head shape-and with original specific eye shapes. Try to catch all the subtleties. It's hard!

FLAT BUT FUNNY

Animation School 13: Classic Animation Principles and Hierarchy Applied To Stylized Drawing

Is this a rebellion against Disney from within? I don't think so.I think it reeks of Disney to the core. This may look like a simple easy-to-do flat hip drawing like you see in modern cartoons, but it's nothing of the kind.

This is the result of a decade and a half of honing Disney principles, inbetweening and animating on classic rounded Disney characters. It's a Tom Oreb layout and he uses all the tools he learned doing the uncool way of animation drawing. Thanks to Amid for this Oreb composition of an early version of the fairies from Sleeping Beauty-they should have looked this good in the movie!

He came to this style the hard way. Toot WP&B uses almost all the 40s cartoon principles, with a couple of them toned down - which makes it look rebellious or cool.

This style is actually dependent upon MORE RIGID rules than the more organic 3 dimensional typical 40s cartoon characters. It is the extreme conservatism that controls the style and makes it so wooden and soulless. It's like an artistic math problem, existing solely for the challenge of its own problems.

When most people today draw flat, they are starting from no foundation of knowledge or experience at all. They see cartoons like Toot Whistle Clunk and Boom and say "I wanna be cool and rebellious too. Only I wanna skip the hard work and study and just go right to the top and be a designer." Then they draw from the details out with no master plan of organizing the designs. They start by drawing an eye, then a nose, then draw a head around it and eventually get to a finished chaotic picture of geometric shapes all in cluttered opposition and contradiction to each other.

Oreb is instead designing from the big shapes down to the small shapes and fitting all the smaller shapes within the plan of the larger shapes. Starting with the overall composition.
The image is made of two major shapes - the group of cavemen and the girl. These 2 shapes are separated with negative space - a big hunk of it. The cavemen shape is then split into 2 groups of 2 cavemen each-separated again by a negative shape - this one smaller than the larger one between the girl and the men.
Within each group of 2, the men are carefully, thoughtfully balanced against each other using lines of action, negative shapes, overlapping shapes, organic curves....

On the organicness. Here's the main key to the style. These aren't mathematical shapes. They aren't perfect circles, ovals, there are no straight or parallel lines as in today's flat cartoons. These are very organic but on a flattened 3dimensional plane - somewhere in between a 2 dimensional and 3 dimensional space.

The negative shapes exist both in spaces between the characters or in their arm poses, but they also exist within the characters. The negative areas are contrasted against the filled busy areas to provide readabilty and to make you focus on certain areas. If everything was filled up with detail equally, it would be a cluttered mess.

There are lots of contrasts of different types of shapes. Just compare each of their noses to start.

There are contrasts in texture - large flat colored areas against hairy busy areas.
All the characters fit into the larger shapes of the composition, but within each one all the features follow the construction or hierarchy of the overall structure of the individual character.

Next, I'll break down their head constructions and you'll see how they are well thought out and make sense. They aren't chaotic or random breakings of established rules. The eyes fit on the same plane of the head position;they relate to each other, they have direction.

When I first saw this cartoon (and the other handful of chapters of the Cal Arts Bible - Pigs is Pigs, Mars and Beyond and Paul Bunyan) I too wanted to be instantly cool. When I tried to draw in this style and make the characters look like they fit together and were doing something I quickly realized how hard it was to do. Now I know why.

I also realized the effort isn't worth it in terms of the ultimate entertainment value. I'll explain that later too.


This cartoon uses the same principles and more, but is far less restrictive creatively than the stylized Disney stuff.

Was this worth anything to you or did you already understand the style?

Duck Amuck - Daffy's Freak Out

Speaking of experiments...Jones continued to do experiments after the 40s, not so much with animation technique - but with concepts.
Duck Amuck questions the whole concept of animated cartoons and consciously dissects the absurdity of the rules and accepted logic (or illogic) of the medium. This makes the film loved by some and hated by others.
I'm somewhere in the middle. I loved the cartoon as a kid, not just because it was a neat concept (Heckle and Jeckle also did the same concept, but less artistically) but because of Daffy's extreme frustration and the expert animation of it.
Of course he isn't really "Daffy" Duck anymore; he's Arsehole Duck - a completely different character than the earlier likeable wacky version, and I think that too irritates purists. I just look at this guy as a new character and accept his personality as being really funny for its own sake.
Some of the ideas in the cartoon are really funny and abstract like this one where the frame melts and collapses all around him.
This could only happen in animation. I would love to have seen who or how the gag was conceived. Maltese or Jones? It sure wouldn't make sense written.



What really makes the gag work is Daffy's extreme indignant frustration and the beautiful design and animation.
There's those crazy Chuck Jones eyes.



This frenzied scramble is great, isn't it?
Mel Blanc deserves a lot of credit for the cartoon's effect. His Daffy performance is brilliantly funny.

I also love this pose and the way his chest heaves.
Of course the structure of the cartoon is perfect and it's that fact that the story is actually about. ...That the director inevitably destroys Daffy bit by bit, building the absurdity up an ascending slope of dramatic construction.
As much as I like and admire the cartoon, I can't help but feel sorry for Daffy, because he doesn't have a chance. He's at the mercy of his creator.
This is the complete opposite of Clampett's treatment of characters, where they themselves cause their own fates.


The pacing of the cartoon is also as close to perfection as I can imagine.
This is an interesting calm after the storm, a stark contrast to Daffy's previous frenzy.







Well I could probably dissect every scene of the cartoon and I'm sure I'll get around to it soon. It's definitely an important event in animation history and its development - for good and bad, depending on who you talk to. But everyone remembers it.

I would almost suggest that it purposely tries to end the period of classic animation by saying it's all been done and it's just an illusion manufactured by the director, but then you'd yell at me. I'm probably overthinking the whole damn thing - but then, so has everyone else who's ever written about it, so I figure I should get a crack at it.

http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/Jones/53/DuckAmuck/DaffyFreaksOutDuckAmuck.mov