Favorite Off Model Friends

Here's Mickey with his hunk of cheese that he is never without.
Fred with a glandular condition.
Yogi to blow on - with hole.
Swedish gay porn Donald.
Yogi in his Sailor's hat and Mickey Mouse overalls and sexy bare chest.
Dino with eye pimples covered with primeval ooze.
Fred and his bitches.

Wilma's Dad is Gumby.
Popeye lets his hair grow out and dumps Olive for a normal looking girl.

Donald with jaundice and a wounded bleeding hat.
Donald with water on the brain. I use this one for toy drawing classes because it is so useful.
Here's what Donald looked like when he was yanked prematurely from the warmth and security of his yolk.

Fred with a piece of Barney's nose stuck to his club.

Rubber Buddies

There are some characters that have such an inherent iconic quality that regardless of whether their cartoons are hilarious or not, they just look good in rubber.
Doesn't this Peabody toy make you imagine it must be from a fantastic cartoon?
This Tom looks good too, but is not quite so distinct or iconic as the Jay Ward characters - even though the cartoons he's in are much more animated.
Some fans wonder why I make so many posts about toys and partly it's because I don't always have time to do anything elaborate so I just put up the stuff Mike Fontanelli sends me in his immature glee. But there is kind of a serious point in them: One of the most important qualities in a cartoon character is its inherent iconic appeal. Ionic characters make good toys. It's a quality that is completely non-existent today. Cartoonists used to aim for designs and personalities that had an instant appeal. Rather than this:
Somehow, about 40 years ago cartoon aims turned upside down and now characters seem to be designed to instantly depress you. Big time Hollywood producers think that if they make the audience puke, we will be curious enough to want to watch the cartoon to that makes our stomachs churn so.
Like I said, iconic quality is separate from whether the cartoon is fully animated or even funny. It's just a spark that some cartoon designers and creators had and others strove for but never achieved.
Here's the character who made for some of the best toys ever and the more off model and confused they were, the better.


I bet girls love Fred's iconic veiny club.

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.

Jinks Is Iconic - a Real Character

A lot of animation fans, particularly of my generation, were mad at Hanna Barbera's limited animation cartoons and blamed them for ruining animation. I admit they sure had a big part in that.
But they also created some iconic characters, which is not an easy thing to do.
When they started limiting their animation, they must have figured they had no choice but to find some new creative aspect of cartoons to focus on. Tom and Jerry depended on lush full animation for its entertainment value and they didn't have to worry too much about personality. All of a sudden they couldn't rely on lots of action, so instead turned to character.
I've been watching a lot of Pixie and Dixie cartoons lately and studying Jinks. He's really an amazing personality and I'm trying to figure out where it's coming from.
It's a pleasant design, but not too far removed from Tom.
The animators - even without full animation, do a good job of conveying his personality, but aren't creating it. They are following a clear, distinct idiot-proof guide.
Is it in the writing? Not so much even there. Lines like "Now to have myself a ball" could be read a thousand different ways. Today it would be read completely generically. The way Daws Butler reads that line is hilarious. It's something you would never expect and rich with color and imagination.
Technically the voice is probably some combination of impressions of popular starts of the time. I think Crazy Guggenheim is the main inspiration for the sound of the voice, but Daws adds a lot more to it. (He said Marlon Brando!)

Crazy Gugghenheim's is basically a retard while Jinks is only partly demented.
He is an idiot who doesn't know it. He thinks he is smarter than everyone else and is cocksure about it. Even that doesn't sound all that original when I just write it out. Written words are a pitiful medium of communication when it comes to describing cartoons.
You gotta hear the words as acted by Daws. He puts so much color into his inflections, that it almost seems as he is writing the story himself. The story is no longer about the events, but rather about the character's reactions to the events.
The gags as written are all standard and the written dialogue is perfunctory for the most part. It's what Daws does with it that gives it interest.
I've been trying to figure out Jinks' voice and his psychology and it's a lot more complex than I had thought.
I've been trying to imitate it and there is more to it than what's on the surface level.
I used to think it was just a funny "trick voice" but now I think Daws must have really examined the psychology of the character.
Voice actors like Daws Butler, Mel Blanc, Bea Benaderet and the other greats of the past were realy worth their weight in gold. They did for sound what cartoonists did for visuals. They thought like cartoonists. They didn't just act well or make pleasant sounding voices like you would expect actors in live action to do. They "cartooned" the voices and acting.
Daws has a great natural sounding speaking voice, even when not doing a character. It's like a wonderfully unique instrument.
But he plays the instrument really well-and in an exaggerated way. His contrasts are clear, controlled and funny.
His enunciation is perfect-even when he is purposely slurring words together for humorous effect.
He understands the personality and the story.
He conveys every bit of emotion along the way of a sentence, as ideas and changes unravel in the character's brain. This is extremely sophisticated and requires a lot of sensitivity and control. Plus, he invents just weird and funny ways to enunciate things that are totally unrealistic. Just for fun.
Well it's very hard for me to analyze everything there is to say about Jinks in words, but when I hear Daws do him, I am getting a lot of insight into the character from not what he is saying, but how he is saying it.

http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/HB/CharacterVoiceTracks/JinksMagicCarpet.mp3

Today we have 2 basic kinds of voice actors:
1) Celebrity voice. These are live action actors or worse - "personalities" who come in for an hour or 2 and read lines with bland nondescript voices and stiff acting. They are reading from imbecilic scripts and basically dumb down their acting to match the dumbed-down writing.

2) Pretend Cartoon Voices - The Saturday Morning cartoon voices- the squeaky nasal voices that pass for what someone in charge must think cartoon characters are supposed to sound like. They have been doing this since the 1970s. I always thought of it as normal people who weren't actors coming into the recording studio and pinching their noses to create an instant "cartoon voice". One that sounds just like everyone else's cartoon voice.
There are some talented voice people in the business today, but too often they are made to do either the "normal voice" or the "cartoon voice" and don't get to work on many characters that offer much of a challenge. And that's putting it nicely.
One of the things that made me love cartoons and want to be a cartoonist and animator was "character". I wanted to draw and animate cartoon characters. I didn't want to just animate funny gags and crazy stuff - althoug that is a big part of it. The cartoons that most inspired me were not just the ones that were animated the most elaborately. The cartoons with the most interesting, believable yet otherwordly characters made the worlds they lived in seem more real than the actual mundane reality that I, as a bag of gooey protoplasm and oozing corpuscles, was stuck in.