some treasures for collectors

I am bringing some original animation drawings from my sentimental tribute to the great Ralph Bakshi. These are from "Firedogs 2" where Ralph plays the fire chief. 

 Ralph with shaving cream.

 Ralph pinching one.

 Ren and Stimpy unstick the great one's zipper.

 Stimpy as Plungerman.

and more!!

Ralph Kickstarter

In 1986 I was working for Ralph Bakshi developing pitches for TV shows. One of them was called "Ralph Playhoel" and here is a page of doodles of Ralph and a puppet character from the show. In the segment that Tom Minton and I wrote, Ralph  would have sentimental moments talking to the puppet who he loved as if he were his own child. I forget the name of the puppet, maybe Tom remembers

but while we were doing this stuff Ralph came in one day and said Keith Richards asked him to do an animated video for the Harlem Shuffle:



We had an amazing crew for this

Bob Jaques - co-director/animator
Lynne Naylor - animator
Pat Ventura - animator
Gary (Gabby) Paine- animator
Jim Smith - layout
Phil Philipson -BG painting
Linda Gerlach - Ink and Paint

Did Bruce Timm work on it? Jim Gomez? Rebecca Reese?

If I missed anyone, let me know so I can add them.

I have lots of zany stories from that golden period, but am swamped working on my Cans Without Labels Kickstarter cartoon.

Speaking of Kickstarter, Ralph has his dream project up and you only have 5 days left to help him lay his most personal and intimate feelings out naked for the voyeuristic world to enjoy.

Last Days of Coney Island by Ralph Bakshi — Kickstarter

You get get some swell rewards too like original drawings of bums by the master himself!


...and if you are a young cartoonist animator starting out, I would strongly suggest you offer your work and soul to Ralph and help him out on the project. Working for Ralph is an essential character building episode for every cartoonist. We all need him to have an ongoing studio. It's bootcamp for quality cartoonists and benefits the whole industry.

Ralph is an international treasure, a true original. 

Strange Bedfellows

Mighty Mouse Pitch circa 1994?

Here is some presentation art from a pitch we did at Spumco in the mid 90s. I wanted to get Paramount to let me revive the Terrytoons characters. I would have shown some of this stuff earlier but it had all suffered water damage. But now, thanks to Alex, Jojo and Tommy, some of it has been restored through the magic of insufferable digital technology.

These guys here are "The Catnip Gang" who appeared in at least 2 of the original TT Mighty Mouse gang. I think that was drawn by Mike Fontanelli. Possibly inked by Shane Glines and I don't remember who colored it. Looks like water colors?...Hey I bet it was Rick Altergott! Famous creator of "Doofus".I added another character called "The Big Puss" (originally "The Big Pussy" but everyone talked me out of that). The Big Puss is the head of the crime syndicate in Catville. He is the Catnip Gang's boos and we never actually see all of him at once. Usually we just hear his gutteral grumbles from behind an imposing door in his office. Once in a while we will see just his face pressing against the frame of his open door. Jim Smith drew a hilarious storyboard about the Big Puss sending the Catnip gang on an impossible mission - to steal the shorts of Mighty Mouse. He figures that the shorts are magic and that is where Mighty Mouse gets his power from. I used this story idea later for "The Ripping Friends".

Richard Pursel had an especial fondness for these bedfellows and dubbed them "Gandy and Sourpuss: Wards Of The State". We wrote stories about them being on the dole and getting into tiffs with their unemployment officers and stuff.
Of course I included some of the characters we created for the Bakshi version of Mighty Mouse. Here's Petey Pate in his insane glory. In this story he steals all the eyebrows from the mice in mouseville and Mighty Mouse has to come save the day.
Here are his witless thugs who fear nothing - except insanity. The broken mind instills the fear of God in these poor crooked souls.
Here are my favorite characters from the Bakshi show.
These look like they also might be drawn by Mike Fontanelli.
I love the ignorant - and so did Rich. The original Deputy Dawg cartoons are pretty terrible, even for Terrytoons, but the characters are great.
Rich came up with a story about nearsighted Vincent Van Gofer marrying Deputy Dawg's pants. The set up was: Deputy, Musky and the gang are skinny dipping at the old swimming hole, when Vincent Van Gofer ambles up to the edge of the pond and sees Deputy's pants hanging over the branch of a tree. Through his blurry eyes he sees a beautiful apparition of female gofer loveliness and he whisks the pants away to the Sheriff's office for a quick wedding. Wedding bliss turns out to be less than he'd hoped for and the marriage soon sours. Meanwhile, Deputy Dawg has no pants and has to do his job while moving his hands back and forth really fast in front of himself to maintain the picture's family rating. That no-account egg-stealin' rascal, Musky takes advantage of the situation with zany-ass results.

I have lots more of this stuff if anyone else likes Terrytoons as much as I do.

Writing For Character, rather than plugging characters into a generic plot

Write For Character

_{I’ve always found that it’s much easier to write for characters that have strong distinct personalities – iconic characters.}

_{Some cartoon writers like to begin with a high concept, (“Let’s start the picture by shooting the protagonist’s mother and then the son goes on a magical adventure to search for a replacement mother figure, but then finds out through trials that he himself is an individual and thus important to the uncaring universe and can solve his own problems with the help of a nagging assertive female.”) “Who IS the protagonist?, some junior executive asks. Everyone in the room agrees that that will come later and isn't. The story is what’s important, not who it’s about.}

_{The writers then plug in stock animation character types, and randomly choose what species the characters are. These types of stories typically use generic plots and stock animated personality types. The last 25 years of animated features have largely been about finding and loving yourself. They are peopled by a wimpy ineffectual lead, the strong assertive liberated female, the wacky fast talking irritating sidekick, the evil hook nosed villain, etc. The creators just change the “arena” and the classes of animalia, but the characters remain essentially the same simple stereotypes, all out to find themselves and be OK with who they are.}

The message seems to be: it's OK to be an individual, just not if you work in our unfeeling corporate-owned monster of a studio.

Plots

The easiest (and I think most successful) stories I’ve written or worked on were the ones that directly evolved out of the characters’ personalities, rather than just taking the characters and plugging them into a plot or situation.

Stimpy’s Invention was originally pitched as a typical “Character A makes crazy inventions that backfire on character B. Hilarity ensues”
It was rejected on that basis and I reexamined it and thought that it needed something that took advantage of Ren and Stimpy’s personalities.

Ren is a psychotic highly strung nervous wreck and Stimpy is a trusting, dumb but empathetic guy who loves Ren despite Ren’s meanness.

When Stimpy realizes that his inventions are driving Ren nuts, he doesn’t blame his screwy inventions, he instead thinks Ren just needs a cure for his unhappiness. Inspired with a new mission, he decides to invent something to make Ren happy. He gets the idea for a Happy Helmet.

Once we came up with that, the story wrote itself. (Well Bob Camp and I did, but it came much easier once it wasn't about wacky inventions) Now the gags were all about the characters, not about the props.


In Ralph Bakshi’s Mighty Mouse, the best stories were the ones about the villains. MM himself didn’t have much personality, so I found it more rewarding to write about the bad guys or quirky new superhero characters we created.

Tom Minton wrote “The Littlest Tramp” which, on the surface was a satire of “The Little Match Girl” and other sappy 1930s cartoons. The satiric elements were funny, but what made the cartoon exciting for me to work on was the character dynamics between Mighty Mouse, the Polly Pineblossom (the poor flower girl) and the villainous Big Murray, whose sole motive in life was to make Polly’s life all the more miserable.

The drawings of the acting of the well defined personalities was really what sold the story.
We had other stories that kind of went nowhere, demonstrations of how weird we could be, but the episodes which most developed the personalities were the most fun stories to tell – and to draw.

STRONG CHARACTER INSPIRES PLOTS

Once you have solidly defined interesting and fun characters, you can “write” endless stories about them. Conversely, the types of characters created for “Arena” cartoons or what I call “Mom-killer cartoons” rarely outlive their first appearances.

There is also the modern vogue of random cartoon writing where everything is supposed to be a rebellious non-sequitur. No plot, no character, no structure. I don't what can be said for that. You can't teach random because everyone can do it. It's a lack of purpose or plan.



Sorry I have no pictures today, but click any of the labels below and there will be other articles with illustrations.

Next: a bit about how to write strong character dialogue.

Gandy Goose's Sandwich Trauma

Here's a clip from a story Tom Minton wrote for Bakshi's Mighty Mouse. This scene foreshadowed some of what was to come in Ren and Stimpy.It's one of the first domestic squabbles I ever directed. It takes place in Mighty Mouse's apartment (where Robert Mitchum is praying in the hallway). MM has invited homeless Gandy to stay with him until he can find a job and get his own place.

There's one of those beautiful double frames I love on some modern DVDs.

Gandy is doing his best to be a doting companion to Mighty Mouse. Sound familiar?
Mighty comes home through the trap door. A lot of the visual gags like that were added either in the storyboard and some in the layouts. Jim Smith storyboarded this episode and you can see some of his boards in the supplemental side of the DVD.
MM looks around to see what Gandy has done to his apartment.

This was the first cartoon show in decades where the bosses actually encouraged specific expressions that weren't on the model sheets.
I stole those tit eyes from Chuck Jones. Couldn't resist.

When you watch the animation clips you can see that the execution is pretty crude - kinda like the first few Ren and Stimpy episodes. Part of it is because the layout drawings had to be sent overseas to animate and assist. Those 2 steps tend to lose something in translation.
Partly the crudity just came from the fact that we didn't have much experience drawing functional drawings that told a story visually and we were teaching ourselves. A lot of this scene was drawn by Lynne Naylor and I who at least had some practice on the new Jetsons.
Just for context...here's what was going on in the mainstream animation world around us:

Nothing was allowed to be remotely cartoony, let alone expressive

It was an era of pink and purple, and flesh colored eyes and bobbing heads

believe it or not, these 2 frames (above and below) are 2 different shows

There were a hundred shows with the exact same characters in them
Doesn't this look like fun stuff to animate?

Ralph Bakshi rescued the cartoon world from this stuff.

It took me awhile to get rid of the pink and purple color schemes too...one challenge at a time...
Here's a a little butt slapping action.
We had a lot of fun doing the layouts on MM because we did get to create at least some expressive poses.

An early stab at emotional tension

This kind of scene was not actually inspired by other cartoons as much as by my love for classic sitcoms like The Honeymooners and intense melodramatic live action movies from the 30s and 40s. It doesn't totally come off yet, even though we killed ourselves drawing very specific emotional poses. I realized that you needed more than just story and drawings to make emotion totally work in film. I had to squeeze some extra angst out of the voice actors who were not all used to doing anything but the driest formulaic 80s style Saturday morning cartoon acting. Luckily they all liked trying this new approach and were good sports about doing extra takes and having me act everything out and grab them and yank them around the recording booth to try to get them in the mood.
Here's an idea I'm pretty sure we added in the layout stage. I thought it would be funny to have MM try to restrain himself from beating his companion by rolling the sandwich back and forth on the table, while speaking patiently to him through gritted teeth. This is the kind of thing that would normally prompt executives to say "I didn't see that in the script." But Ralph somehow kept us from ever hearing that.
The other thing the scene needed beside stronger animation and execution was appropriately emotional music. Music that matches the mood of the scene. I didn't get to try anything like that till Ren and Stimpy. The music scores on Mighty Mouse were scored with a lot of purposely off-key parts, I guess to be wacky because everything in a cartoon is supposed to be wacky and grating. It irritated the crap out of me, but that wasn't my department.
Believe it or not, though it might seem mild now, drawings like these were completely radical in 1987.

This was totally my fault. I drew the mouth charts for MM, and for the "L" mouth, I drew the tongue sticking way out. The animators used it and never inbetweened into or out of it, so tongues are always popping and vanishing all through the series. Later, on Ren and Stimpy we added many more mouth positions, but after awhile I just drew lots of them right into the layouts because the whole idea of stock drives me nuts.





Here's a slight irony. Ren and Stimpy lettering on the DVD menu.
COMING HOME TO WITLESS BLISS

THE SANDWICH THAT RESTRAINED ITSELF

More Saturday Morning treats:this was what the cartoon world was

the funny thing is that while MM and Ren and Stimpy chased this look away from kids' TV, it soon found a new home in fully animated cartoon features
that's some lively stuff, ain't it?