The same concepts that apply to individual drawings can also be used in actions - the differences between separate poses. Some differences are subtle, others are more dramatic. You need a variety of differences between successive poses in order to give focus and pacing to the different ideas you want to convey through the characters.
BTW, look how little space in the head that the face actually occupies. Most of your head is empty space. Mine too.
CHARACTER MODELS
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
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.
The inbetweens are as fun to me as the bookended emotions you are aiming at.
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.
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.
What I later realized was much more important were the poses themselves. If you don't have great poses to get to, the smears are wasted.
This whole cartoon is great: the gags, the timing, the design, the backgrounds, the voices, the music. The smears are really just an added cool trick.
Like other animation tricks, smears are hypnotically tempting and they can distract an animator from what is more important - the cartoon itself. Luckily, Chuck Jones had his whole cartoon working from top to bottom and the smears were tailored to the ideas, rather than the other way around. Animation tricks won't make a bad design, generic pose, bland characters or a boring cartoon any better than what they are in essence.
I love this character! Dan Backslide's design is funny - a specific variation (a caricature of Ken Harris?) of a generic villain - and Mel Blanc's voice acting is great.
These poses are very strong, specific and organic.
...and funny!
This is an early experiment in "limited animation". Once the character hits his pose, his head moves around while he talks and his body stays held - but in very dynamic poses. The way the moving parts look and move is very funny and creative and this separates this kind of limited animation from the kind that most people (even executives) associate with cheap crappy stuff.
The Dover Boys really influenced the way I used limited animation once I started directing. - not the smears, but the posing and expressiveness. If you can't move everything - at least you can make the poses fun and make what does move expressive and funny.
Again, the smears are fun, but the poses are way more important to the success of the film. I see a lot of young animators who discover animation tricks and get carried away by them - while neglecting the much more important aspects of the entertainment. The harder things to do - like drawing well and drawing specific or original poses and expressions that are tailored to the story.
The rumor is that Leon Schlesinger hated this cartoon, but I can't figure out why. It's one of Jones' first really funny cartoons. But he never did anything this extreme again.
The irony is that the Dover Boys inspired the founders of UPA cartoons and later Jones said he didn't approve of the UPA approach to animation.
Bob Cannon was one of those founders and he was one of Jones' main animators in the early to mid 40s. Some say The Dover Boys was largely his idea, but who knows? Which part of the "idea"? The story? The timing? The design? The smears? It sure has Jones' posing all over it. I think it's one of the best cartoons ever made.
1942 was a very creative year at WB. The competition among the directors must have been fierce."Idea". What a misleading word. I meet so many people who think all it takes to make a successful cartoon is a magic "good idea". People ask me all the time, "How did you get the idea for Ren and Stimpy?" It's hard to answer quickly because there is no single idea. It's a whole bunch of ideas that keep changing. Ideas are a dime a dozen. The execution is what makes things work - or not. Talent, skill, experience putting things together coherently and entertainingly, working with people who complement your talents - a lot of more important things than having an "idea". What's the idea for The Beatles? Long hair?
