Specific Heads, Specific Expressions, Specific Gestures and Mannerisms

At both upcoming animation festivals, they asked me to do a seminar and talk about and show some of my influences. Obviously I'm really influenced by classic cartoons and I love cartooniness and magic - the stuff that the cartoon medium does most naturally and better than other media.
But maybe the one thing I do differently than most cartoons is the acting. I'm not that influenced by cartoon acting. I find it too generic and restrictive.
My acting influences come mainly from live action actors and real people I've known in my life.
Real life is a lot more varied, subtle and nuanced than most cartoon acting.
Let's take Kirk Douglas as an example. He is one of my favorite actors.
First of all, Kirk has a really unique look, the equivalent of a character design in cartoons. Animation tends to reuse the same basic character designs over and over again. Everyone has the same eyes, the same mouth, the same square fingered hands etc.
Kirk as a general character design is the hero type. In cartoons most hero types have the same face and body and just wear different outfits. Kirk has a specific head shape, specific eyes, nose, chin, hole in chin and even the musculature of his face is completely unique to him. His teeth are recognizable and his lips are totally specific. Even his body - while generally being of the manly heroic type is a one-of-a-kind variation of it. He has a really wide back, skinny waist, skinny arms and legs and a giant head. So...not only is he built as a unique individual, he also moves all his unique features in original ways. For 2 reasons:
1) His anatomy physically has to move according to the way it's built.
2) He has extreme talent and is one inventive sonuvabitch.
In Detective Story, Kirk is a self righteous police detective who hates criminals and thinks they are scum. He is street wise but also has a very sarcastic side as you can see from some of his expressions here. Sarcasm is an emotion that is hard to draw and animate even in its most general form, but Kirk displays it with great charisma and confidence and in ways unique to himself.

When you watch Kirk in action, his changes from expression to expression are fluid; they go through intermediate transitions that are unique and fascinating. He doesn't just inbetween from happy to sad.






Look at that mouth shape! I like the one hanging tooth on the upper right and the group of teeth on the lower left. Who in animation would think of that? -especially for a heroic character?

Here's the Burl Ives all properly raised children know and love.
As a general type, he is the jolly fat guy, but everything else about him is totally unique-his face, his voice, his personality, his expressions and mannerisms. He's one of the most unique characters in entertainment I can think of.Even his hands are completely specific shapes.


You have to see how his tongue flops around in his mouth when he sings. If you come to one of my seminars you will.
...sorry for the cursor grabs...
Here's the evil side of Burl from "The Big Country" He's actually not evil, he's just a poor, rough hewn but ultimately noble character. That's the kind of character a writer can write with a handful of adjectives. But what Burl brings to the character is so much more - a lot of layers and specific nuances that can't be described in words. They can only be acted - and only by him.
Here's his son, played by Chuck Connors- another generally heroic type but with another completely unique character design. In this movie he plays the villain. Raised by Burl on a poor ranch he is huge, strong, handsome, a bully but ultimately a sniveling coward. Again, the adjectives don't begin to describe the gripping specificity of Connors' brilliant performance.



The chemistry between Chuck and Burl is wonderful! They should have spun them off into a TV sitcom because every scene they are in together is gold.
Here's Chuck trying to kill his loving Pop.
Here's that rough-hewn gruff powerful Dad cradling the beloved son he had to shoot down like a dog.
Kirk punch drunk. One of the most intense scenes in movie history.
Robert Ryan is another actor that I love. He is not quite as richly layered or talented as Kirk or Burl, but he is a completely unique character.
He oozes charisma and you can't take your eyes off him in his best films.
Here's a good comparison of two heroic types. Robert Mitchum and Robert Ryan are both big, burly and manly but still look completely different. They are both unique physical specimens. They also act completely differently.
Robert Ryan is a lot more active as an actor than Robert Mitchum. He really thinks about his performances and colors them with very specific second layers.
Here he is having a confrontation with Mitchum. He could have just read the script and made all the expositional story points, but instead he adds a really fun layer to the performance. He uses an apple as a prop and completely violates the damn thing in front of your eyes.

You have to see this in action to get the full effect. He makes you feel really sorry for that apple.


Peter Lorre has to be one of the very best actors in movie history. He has a million subtle things going on in his head. Both on top of the skin and underneath.

I'll show you the incredible wealth of expressions Peter can concoct for just a single scene and a few lines of dialogue.

Tomorrow.

Simpsons Interview pt 2: Models and Abandoning Inbetweens

CHARACTER MODELS

So I did some character models to give them an idea of how I would draw the characters as caricatures of the Simpsons and then explained that even drawing them that way wouldn’t be enough to achieve what I wanted to do.
I’m even bored with the pose to pose style animation we did at Spumco where the only control we had over the look of the cartoon characters’ acting was in the held layout poses.

My whole experience in TV animation has been to chase a production around from department to department to make sure the original storyboard poses don't get toned down.Which is why I always made sure we at least made lots of layout poses for the animators (across oceans and continents) and instructed them to not redraw them "on-model".The effect of that system was: the characters would strike a funny pose, then basically inbetween into the next funny pose, but between the poses, not much interesting happened. It was a compromise between the 40s cartoon system and the practicalities of Saturday Morning television budgets and schedules.

Bob Camp Layouts from Space Madness

The few episodes that were animated at Carbunkle had much better animation and they added visual interest in the way the characters moved but still based the actions on the held poses. –Held poses by the way that didn’t always work from pose to pose and Carbunkle had to invent some very clever ways to connect them smoothly.

On the Simpsons I wanted to try moving the characters in crazy fun ways, not just looking funny each time they come to a stop. I tried doing layout poses that looked just like this storyboard and the layouts kept looking like toned down versions of the original sketch. And when I began animating I couldn't make it work anyway. So I abandoned trying to interpret it literally and just animated the cycle straight ahead and let it take me where it went.
The intent of the action is the same as the storyboard but the details are different and took advantage of movement rather than just a basic pose with moving legs.
I loved animating Marge's hair so much that it kept threatening to take all the attention away from the walk. I had to fight to keep the hair action as a secondary supplement to the main action.
This project has given me a whole new outlook on hair personality, by the way.
Hair is a feature, just like the eyes and mouth. Hair can reveal intimate secrets of the character living under it.




WEIRD INBETWEEN TRANSITIONS

When you are animating you don’t draw the same kinds of poses as you do when you are drawing layouts. (Just like you don’t write the same kinds of scenes on a typewriter as you do when you storyboard them) You are using a different part of your brain; you are flowing from action to action. This is hard to put into words, but you just draw differently and you think of a lot of things you wouldn’t think of if you were merely drawing individual instances of emotions.

I try different paths to get from one place to the next – but I’m always aware of the context. I don’t change what the characters are doing, I just try to give more specific meaning to how they do it. The inbetweens are as fun to me as the bookended emotions you are aiming at.

No one is happy one instant and then mad the next without some kind of unique transition. Pure inbetweening makes the transition mathematical and cold (even with slow ins and outs and slick timing). In reality, a lot of indecision and emotional torture can happen between 2 different emotions or even just 2 thoughts. I learned this by freeze framing my favorite actors, in particular Kirk Douglas.

next...Kirk Douglas' tormented transitions...

This is Kirk leaving one emotion and on his way to another. It always seems to hurt him to move from feeling to feeling. A real man hates his feelings. Half his muscles try to hold them back, while others crawl towards the next intense one. There's a war going under under the twisting skin of his face. Some of his features resist longer than the others and it makes for wonderful emotional pain and distortion of flesh.