The Ingredient That Made Me Want To Be an Animator

The essential ingredient of cartoon animation is not on this list.

I had a great clip reel that Kedz made for me but I no longer can post clips on my blog for some mysterious reason. It used to be easy, but Internet Jesus has changed everything without telling me so the same steps I used to use no longer satisfy Him.

You'll have to use your imagination and pretend all these pictures are moving.

Is This A Work Of Cartoon Genius?

I must be one of the world's biggest cartoon fans, but rarely do I find a cartoon that I think is brilliant. Something that covers all the great things a cartoon can do that separates it from other forms of entertainment. I think this Don Martin comic meets and exceeds the highest cartoon criteria.

First, it's drawn funny. Really funny - and in a totally unique style. I love the early Martin stuff best because it hadn't found a formula yet. It's still searching and so has less rules and more variety.
The concept of the story is really funny. The people are generic (for Martin's world) but still bizarre - and meant to be typical normal humans. That whole approach is so unique in itself! We're supposed to instantly identify with these everyday normal people that only exist in Don Martin's world.
Martin is presenting a gag and story that couldn't possibly be done as well in any other medium- including animation.
The gag is built around a growing crowd. Crowds don't work in animation. Imagine the amount of time it took to draw just one of these crazy panels. Now multiply that by 24 frames a second for film. Then having to animate each of these characters doing something somewhat different than each other - as is indicated in the poses. This would not only take Herculean labor, it would also be totally wasted because all the stuff would fly by so fast you couldn't take it all in. With still pictures, you can slowly go through the panel and see every funny detail.
These birds are stylized and hilarious at the same time. They work both as a group, and as individuals. You can stare at each of these panels forever and find humor within the overall gag situation and in the minute details. Each little character is drawn with thought. Martin didn't just draw a ton of birds in the same pose.
The gag builds to more and more heights of preposterousness. It is structured.
Goddamn, these are some weird creatures! What a mind!

I love the crazy eagerness of the human characters eating the delicious popcorn.
Nice stubbly chicken butt.

The frenzy keeps on building, even when you think it can't get more nutty.



Wouldn't you kill to have this painted as a mural on your wall?

And of course he ends on a morbid joke, because he is aiming this at little kids to get them in trouble with their Moms. This psychology makes the comic even funnier.A masterpiece of inspired and original cartooning!

One more thought: Don Martin doesn't design his humans to keep up to date with what is supposed to be "cool" or hip. No 'tude. His characters exist in a timeless world so that anyone can identify with their situations. The fact that they are so uncool makes it all the more pure and inviting. We know he isn't trying to talk down to us, like so many cartoons today made by nerds who are trying to be cool.

Mutant Cartoon Creatures From the Netherworld

Here are a pair of decent regular funny animal characters from the Golden Age of Children's Entertainment. Looks completely normal and acceptable, doesn't it?


When I was a kid I read just about all the funny books -as long as they were based on preposterous ideas that no one in their right mind should accept -
like

Men In Long Underwear who beat the crap out of each other while the police stand by and allow it:
Animals who walked and talked but wore some human clothing - even when they didn't always cover up the dirty parts:What I couldn't tolerate at all were realistic comics about people who did things that could actually happen. I considered this kind of thing an abuse against kids and their meagre pocket change that they stole out of their Dad's church jacket at great risk to their tender hides.
Unrealistic humans were good. Especially if there were obvious impossibilities in their designs-like dot eyes and eyebrows that grow on top of their skull hair.

Dead cartoon humans were OK too.
I'd even accept mixing cartoon humans with cartoon animals, but there was one cartoon tradition that I had a real hard time with - and I was pretty open minded about preposterous ideas.

THE DOG NOSE ON HUMANS OFFENCE

For some reason, even though I demanded nonsense in my funny books, something about this tradition unsettled my stomach.
Are these funny animals? Or depraved mutated humans?
Here, a genetic monster tries to murder a genuine pantless cartoon character. These fleshy human creatures wore clothes on all their body, not just in the odd place like decent funny anmals.
Some of these dog nose mutants even had realistic age-related wrinkles and loose jowls.

Their bitches were extra frightening.

There were different stages of animal-human hybrids created from unholy stem-cell research. Some just had one animal part - the dog nose. Some also had dog-like ears, while many had human ears to accompany the dog nose. Were there rules for this?

How do you decide when the human ear is appropriate and when it's more logical to add the dog ears to the human face?



Humans with Pig faces also lived among the dog nose people.They seem even more evil and loathsome than their canine counterparts.
Natives also came with partial animal anatomy.




In these worlds we had funny animals that walked and talked, humans with animal parts that walked and talked, but we also had the kind of animals we are used to in real life - dumb animals that don't read and write or talk or walk on their hind legs.


I am dying to know how old time cartoonists decided which creatures were allowed the gifts of intelligence, opposable thumbs or pants. Talk about playing God! Every cartoonist has as much power as the Almighty in making arbitrary decisions about which of his creatures get the good or bad end of the stick.
Can anyone explain why this existed? The only thing I can come up with is that conservative cartoonists felt a bit guilty about drawing regular funny animals that walked and talked (because that makes no sense) - but their jobs demanded it. Donald, Mickey, Bugs and all the animated cartoon stars were very cartoony and easy for the audience to suspend their disbelief, but maybe not so easy for the more conservative of the comic artists - so when they got to create their own incidental characters from scratch, they naturally drew more "realistic" and sensible humans in clothing - but then - so as not to alert Walt to it - at the last second, they would paste a dog nose or pig snout onto the human to trick their bosses into thinking that these were also funny animals that matched the style of the popular star characters.

It's probably more likely that it was unconscious conservative auto-pilot drawing, never realizing how much more bizarre half-way cartoon characters are.

The reason I suspect conservatism as the culprit is that if it wasn't, there would be many funny variations on the idea.

How about a realistic dog that stands on his hind legs but has a human nose?

Or a man with Crab eyes? A filter-feeding flesh colored shark that walks on realistic human legs with no pants, but a tuxedo jacket and a duck beak on top of his head?

How about an eel in a Burka? I mean, this could go on and on. It has limitless potential for fun.
There are actually even weirder versions of dog nosed creatures in especially the Barks comics, and I'll have to dig some up to scare you with - the way I was scared when I was an impressionable little boy.

This tradition really creeped me out as a kid, but I've come to accept it as an adult and intend to bring it back in all its former glory - and then to take it to more extreme lengths of outrage against the senses.