Words and Pictures: Nicholas Ray pt 1

"The celluloid strip is not made in the writer's studio"

to be continued...

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2007/04/real-dialogue-versus-cartoon-writer.html

The Racket - Great Story, Dialogue, Acting, Direction

Here is a clip from one of my favorite movies, directed by John Cromwell and Nicholas Ray. "The Racket" along with other Robert Ryan movies was the inspiration for my web series "Weekend Pussy Hunt".

This movie works on almost every level. It has a good story, great dialogue, brilliant direction and what I look for most of all in movies- wonderful interaction between rich personalities portrayed by distinct charismatic actors.


The Racket stars Robert Ryan and Robert Mitchum and they play wonderfully against each other. Mitchum is usually an underplayed character. He has such a strong natural presence that he doesn't really need to act much, although he fills these scenes with subtle amusing expressions that contrast and color Ryan's more active character. Robert Ryan is a methodical thinking actor who adds inventive quirks, expressions and actions to his own natural charisma. These distinct nuances make his best characters positively gripping - and ominous. Watch all the things Ryan does with his tongue-even with his mouth closed!

I'm gonna guess that none of these actors' touches that make the movie come to life have anything to do with the script - even though it's an excellent script. The directors may have helped the actors bring out their best, but at least they didn't hinder their performances as some other directors had. (I always wonder how anyone can make a boring movie with charismatic actors, but it's happened often.)

My favorite part of this sequence is the way Ryan violates a poor apple that he is munching. He turns a simple and innocent prop into an instrument of filth and horror.

This whole clip is full of ideas and is the opposite of stock generic acting. The rest of the movie is too.


*** The movie credits John Cromwell as director, but Nicholas Ray did a lot of reshooting.

Next...

Nicholas Ray on the relative roles of words and pictures in film.

Good Direction VS Turning The Furnace On and Off

WATCH THIS SEQUENCE OF FOGHORN ESCAPING DOG

I had thought that because this was such a frenetic sequence, there must be a lot of scene cuts in it. It turns out there are only 3.

A lot of story information is conveyed in the short sequence, and McKimson uses all the animation and film tools available to him. He doesn't use the same tool to tell each story point. He varies them and coordinates them to make it exciting. A lesser director could have merely conveyed the story information.

Scene 1 - ESCAPE DOG
Accents: McKimson separates the previous gag (beating up the dog unwittingly) from the next sequence with an accent. The accent is this big take showing Foghorn realizing that he was smacking the dog.
Posing and animation. These are the most obvious tools of a cartoon director. He tells much of the story through the drawings and animation. The director draws a lot of the key poses himself and then casts the scenes according to which animator he feels is best suited to a particular scene or sequence. He also gives the animator a good idea of what he wants.
Variety: The animator in this scene varies the amount of exaggeration for each action. The run is less exaggerated than the take that happens just before it.
Camera Pan: Foghorn runs in the opposite direction from where he was in the previous scene.
The camera pans with him and pans in another location-the barn.
Timing/pacing: The action pauses and changes pace. After a fast run (4x per step) Foghorn stops in front of a ladder long enough for the ladder to register with us. He looks around frantically.
The inbetweens are extreme smears and Foghorn's poses are far apart as he looks left and right.

Timing, Pause: McKimson has Foghorn turn around look up and pause again to reinforce the ladder and to tell us that Foghorn sees his method of escape.

LOOK UP, HOLD

STARTS CLIMBING

Cartoon Effects: To reinforce the speed and frenetic escape, Foghorn's feathers trail of in the opposite direction of his climb. This movement in the opposite direction helps propel the action with more force. This is the kind of thing that used to come natural to even conservative directors an animators, but would probably seem radical today. "Too cartoony" would be the note you'd get from the bland police that rule animation.

CUT 2 REVEAL DOG WITH WATERMELON
Cutting, changing P.O.V: This is a strange choice. For some reason, McKimson decided to give away the punch line. He reveals to us that the dog is waiting for Foghorn with a watermelon. This seems to defy normal gag construction but I never really thought about it until I broke the sequence down to look at it. It's only on for 30 x and within the sequence somehow fits the rhythm. Rhythm is a lot more important to the emotional effect of a film sequence than strict narative logic. You can't write rhythm in words or even on a storyboard. It's the director's job.

CUT 3 - Climb Ladder

Camera angle mixed with frenetic animation: This dramatic angle combined with the way the animation flows just fits together perfectly. It is more dramatic than the straight N/S E/W angles before it and makes the sequence of cuts build steadily to a climax.

ACCENT END OF GAG: The building pace comes to an abrupt stop with the topper gag.
Pacing/contrast: Stop action, slow pace, conclude with calm dialogue.
After the fast paced series of scenes and Foghorn is defeated, McKimson eases us out of the scene with a line of dialogue. "Some days it don't pay to get out of bed." The line isn't funny on its own. It's just there to give us a breather and let us laugh at the end of the sequence.

WHAT DOES A CARTOON DIRECTOR DO THEN?

We still use the term director for various jobs in animation today but it doesn't mean what it used to. Many modern directors are merely timers. After an assembly line of writers, designers, executives and production coordinators take swipes at different ingredients of the animation process, then the director is called in to connect everything in order using preset timing formulas.

In the old days, "Director" meant total control of the creative aspects of the cartoon. What was funny about the sequence above was not merely the gags as written, but how all the elements of the performance: the cutting, the voices, the animation are put together to create the emotional and humorous effect of what is happening.

McKimson uses variety in his timing, animation, exaggeration to build the sequence to a big finish, not merely to tell us the events in order.

Compare this to modern cartoons which hang everything on the limited power of the written (or spoken) words alone. These types of shows don't seem to use direction. There is no personal point of view, nor is there any virtuoso performance. The stories just plod along at an even monotonous pace and one bit of information or gag never seems any more important than the next bit of information. I never know when to laugh when I watch modern cartoons because they are so devoid of pacing or feeling. Everything is timed the same way, the animation never varies. It's about as fun as watching a spoon stir soup. You also can't tell one artist from the next so there is no casting of the strengths of the artists. The voices all drone along in their repetitive digital rhythms, adding to the sedative effect of the robotic assembly line generic cartoon product.

EACH CREATIVE ARTIST IS A UNIQUE CUSTOM TOOL
A classic cartoon director is a choreographer. He has a specific set of tools and uses each tool for different purposes. All the creative staff are part of the tool kit. The director needed to understand the special abilities of each artist - including the voice talent, composer, layout artists and sound effects editor. He builds his stories around his specific talents-rather than forcing all the talents into some preconceived rules created for a story bible and production manual.

If each artist has some unique ability that the other artists are not as good at, common sense leads a director to take advantage of all those unique abilities. It makes less sense to me to make each artist lessen his special gifts so that what is left matches each of the other artists. That's what we do in most productions today- sand everyone down into softer blander replicas of each other.

In the 1940s, the directors created their entertainment around the special talents of their crew. If Mel Blanc could do a certain type of delivery, you wrote something to take advantage of it. You used your different animators for different types of scenes. You couldn't have just shipped your storyboard to a foreign land and expected the cartoon to come back with the scenes playing to the strengths of the artists.

Modern animation (meaning animation from the 1960s to now) has an opposite approach to creativity. Rather than using all the tools that are available to whoever is in charge and creating entertainment out of all the ingredients, we have instead made a system that depends on arbitrary preset rules and outright fear of creativity. We have a very limited and blunted toolkit. Modern cartoon makers tend to despise especially the tools that are most natural to cartoonists. The whole process is geared to dehumanizing the medium.

McKimson's Direction Toolbox

WATCH THIS SEQUENCE OF FOGHORN ESCAPING DOG

I always liked the way this sequence flowed, so I thought I'd see how it was directed by analyzing it. It turns out to be different than how I expected.

I'll give you my thoughts later.

Barbary Coast Bunny 1

This is one of my all-time favorite cartoons. It has almost every good trait you associate with Chuck Jones:

Great layouts and backgrounds
Funny and mean gags
Specific acting
Beautiful solid and stylish drawings
Good timing
Clear Staging
A lummox

It also has very tight story structure and lots of little subtle extra actions - all the things the critics love. I appreciate those too, but those are nice secondary accessories to me. They can help support a big central idea if there is one. By themselves they are just technical details. What's really memorable about this cartoon is the characterization of the lummox. Chuck is the master of lummoxes and this Nasty Canasta is his finest. Usually Chuck's lummoxes have funny body shapes-a huge barrel chest, big head with tiny legs and stubby fingers. Nasty has all these traits, but on top of them he has a very specific face - unlike the more plain faced Little John and The Crusher.

Nasty Canasta is a very difficult character to draw. His face is full of careful twists turns and angles which would be hard to animate. Impossible for anybody who hadn't spent the previous 20 years animating pears, spheres and typical 1940s cartoon constructions.

When we were kids my friends and I always imitated Nasty Canasta. Not only is he hilarious to look at; he has a really funny voice too. It may be Daws Butler's greatest role.

Shane sent me this quote from Chuck Jones about BBB:

Chuck on Barbary Coast Bunny:

I just returned from recording a new picture: BARBARY COAST BUNNY. I used a new actor, name of Daws Butler, in the role of the heavy. He’s a very clever guy, hard working, intelligent and refreshing. He’s the one who worked with Stan Freberg on all those records, they wrote and acted in them together.

I must say that I learned a great deal from him. He gave a splendid and new angle to this character, a sort of Marlon Brandoish mushy-mouthed delivery that seemed very funny to me. In Streetcar Named Desire Brando was a troglodyte but with his speech dotted with completely incongruous delicacies. This effort to attain elegance was what gave the character its odd twist, like an orangutan in an evening gown.

So we rewrote the dialogue a little to fit this new conception and, as I say, it came off beautifully. Another thing I noticed is that Mel Blanc, who was there to record the rabbit, was well aware that he has some competition from Daws. He really worked today. I have never seen him evidence more interest in his work. I think I shall hire a sort of stand-by talent on recording days if this is what the goad of rivalry does for Mel. Like others, I suppose, he is likely to get a trifle smug occasionally. All in all, a good day.

Well that explains a lot! Maybe the voice session really inspired Chuck to go the extra distance and make this a one of a kind cartoon.

THE FILM NEEDED (and had) A CREATIVE PRODUCTION SYSTEM
This kind of creative collaboration could only exist under the open production system of "creator-driven cartoons". The director is a real director and can make changes and improvements all along the production. If he is working with great talents, like the Golden Age directors were, they can all influence each other and the director can improve things and make adjustments as he goes.


A FILM AS CAREFUL AND UNIQUE AS BARBARY COAST BUNNY WOULD BE IMPOSSIBLE TO MAKE TODAY
If Jones worked under our present system, he would never have been able to make such a unique film. Someone else would have directed the voices from a script, and Chuck and Daws would not have been able to play off each other. The storyboards would not have looked like Nasty's final design and Pierce would not have heard the voice track, so his board would not have reflected the great reading. The layouts would have been sent overseas to do, which means Chuck could not have drawn every pose to match the specific inflections Daws gave the character in the recording...etc.etc.





You don't hear much about Chuck's layout man Robert Gribbroek and I don't know why. I think he's brilliant. He not only has a modernistic style, but his drawings are solid and perfectly composed. Stylish, yet not in your face.

Bugs is actually active in this cartoon. He doesn't merely ride the direction to an automatic win. Chuck sets him up here and shows he's vulnerable, not completely magic.


Here's one of Chuck's patented joined-eye takes.




This story is very carefully set-up. Like Tex Avery, Jones spends a couple minutes preparing you for what the cartoon is going to be about. He does it in an entertaining way too, not with verbal exposition, but with characterization and suspense.
Structurally this story is very much like a Tex Avery cartoon. Where it differs is in the types of gags that come after the carefully prepared setup. In an Avery cartoon, once you know what the cartoon is about, the gags are mostly physical and they get bigger, crazier and more preposterous throughout the cartoon. The characters in turn react to the crazy gags. In Barbary Coast Bunny, after the setup, the gags come from 2 main sources - the personalities of the characters, and the ridiculous events that follow Bugs' natural luck. The gags aren't as physically extreme as in a Tex cartoon, but they are ridiculous in very clever ways.
I love Nasty Canasta's lips. Chuck really put his animators to the test with this design. It's fun to watch all the funny ways they made Nasty's mouth animate during dialogue.

Nice suspense here.

Goddamn is that a beautiful drawing! I've heard critics and historians poo-poo the "Preston Blair" constructed drawing approach of 40s cartoons, but without it you wouldn't be able to make such a great specific and stylish drawing like this. All the general principles are here, but they are wrapped around very specific forms and then candy-coated with varied curves and angles.
The cartoon has a lot of typical Jones pose to pose scenes where just the head moves around slightly to keep the chaacter alive, but there are some scenes where the animation is really clever and adds to the gags. I'll make clips of those.

Don't be fooled by all the lumps and wrinkles in Nasty's design. They are all small and tightly wrapped around his line of action and his major forms.
The details also react to gravity. They don't just stick out evenly in all directions.



Personally, you can have your Toot Whistle Plunk and Booms and your Pigs is Pigs and Gerald McBoing Boings. This cartoon has tons of style and cleverness, yet it's all subject to the total entertainment of the film and it cares about the audience.




Of course you know, every Jones Bugs Bunny cartoon has to motivate him to revenge.

I think this cartoon stands out as one of the finest ever in history, but it's especially stunning that it was made in 1956, right about when everyone in the business had run out of energy. Barbary Coast Bunny is one of the last gasps of the Golden Age of Cartoons.

There were a few gems in the cartoons made in 1956, but for the most part the cartoons seemed pretty tired by then.

1. Friz 1956
   
2. Two Crows from Tacos (1956)
3. Yankee Dood It (1956)
4. A Star Is Bored (1956)
5. Tugboat Granny (1956)
6. Napoleon Bunny-Part (1956)
7. Tree Cornered Tweety (1956)
8. Rabbitson Crusoe (1956)
9. Tweet and Sour (1956)

McKimson
1956
# The Honey-Mousers (1956)
# Wideo Wabbit (1956)
# The Slap-Hoppy Mouse (1956)
# Raw! Raw! Rooster! (1956)
# Half-Fare Hare (1956)
# Stupor Duck (1956)
# The Unexpected Pest (1956)
# Mixed Master (1956)
# The High and the Flighty (1956)
# Weasel Stop (1956)
# Too Hop to Handle (1956)

http://www.davemackey.com/animation/wb/1956.html

UPA Films of 1956

"Gerald McBoing! Boing! on Planet Moo" 2/9/56

Starring Gerald McBoing Boing.

"Magoo's Caine Mutiny" [MR. MAGOO] 3/8/56

"Magoo Goes West" [MR. MAGOO] 4/19/56

"Calling Dr. Magoo" [MR. MAGOO] 5/24/56

"The Jaywalker" 5/31/56

"Magoo Beats the Heat" [MR. MAGOO] 6/21/56

"Magoo's Puddle Jumper" [MR. MAGOO] 7/26/56

"Trailblazer Magoo" [MR. MAGOO] 9/13/56

"Magoo's Problem Child" [MR. MAGOO] 10/18/56

"Meet Mother Magoo" [MR. MAGOO] 12/27/56

MGM was out just about out of business in 1956.

Anyway, BBB is a genius cartoon and I'm going to analyze the crap out of it over a few posts if you don't mind.