The Real Ripping Friends

The original Ripping Friends-created in 1988 were actually a watered down spin off of my Brik Blastoff concept from the early 80s.
http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2007/01/brik-blastoff-of-outback.html
Brik himself was modeled after Kirk Douglas in Detective story.
So was Rip. Crag is a variation, as are some TV and CG movie guys.

I watered the "CARTOONS FOR MEN" concept down to what I thought would sell on TV. It took ten years to get it on TV and then it got watered down even more, to the point where I shudder watching it. I shudder even more seeing all the rippoffs which are also watered down - in weirder and weirder ways.

But here's how they were originally conceived:
Here they are as super geniuses, drawn by the great Jim Smith.
Jim draws them tampering with the laws of the universe with their ungodly scientific instruments.
In an article from Chris Gore's Wild Cartoon Kingdom-early 90s.
Here's their girlfriend, Dr. Jean Poole.
People tell me they've seen her before, just not in my cartoons.

The drawing below was done by Lynne Naylor and inked probably by Libby Simon.
Here's a doodle I did for a line of children's clothing accesories. It's Rip modeling the latest Mattel Idiot-Ride-'em-Helmet.


I'm sure I have some more early sketches somehwere. I might even have an old story outline for a movie idea. I will hunt...This is as close as the show ever got to using my drawings. They still changed them and blanderized these from the originals, but they are at least recognizable as my style.

Cost Per Chuckle

This probably cost a couple hundred bucks to shoot and a few bucks more to pay the talented puppet. It was shot live in real time too.





CLICK HERE FOR SOUPY SALES CLIP!

Anyone want to hazard a guess as to how much this bit cost? Or how long it took to make? Or how much in Psychotherapy the animators had to spend for having to look at these character designs every day for a couple years?

Acting tool 4) Body Language: Foghorn Leghorn - Bob McKimson Director - Henery's dad poses

Walky Talky Hawky, 1946
Here is a great "pose to pose" scene from a Bob McKimson cartoon.
You can tell these are drawn by Mckimson himself. They are really solid.

Each pose contrasts from the previous pose and the next one.

This is really good cartoon acting. The poses are over the top, and totally readable. You know exactly what the character is feeling and portraying.

The character himself is acting. He isn't sincere. He is pretending, which adds a level to the cartoon acting. Very funny!

Someone commented that he thought I was suggesting pose to pose being better than straight ahead animation. Not at all. They are just different approaches that you can use and even combine for different purposes.

Pose to pose eventually became limited animation. But in most limited animation, the poses are not really poses. They are just characters standing straight up and down, and there is no excuse for that. Poses should be "posed". It doesn't cost more money to draw a pose, than to draw a non-pose.

Classic cartoon acting tends to put more emphasis on the body than the face.

Drawing specific expressions is hard. It depends on tiny subtle details that all have to be depicted in line, and then turned in volumetric perspective as the character moves his head around. That's why to this day, most cartoon expressions are not even expressions, they are just animation cliches.

Because real expressions are so hard to draw, animators evolved a style that is more stagy than live action, where you can read the characters' emotions through their body language. Their poses.

This applies to all the classic studios: Warner's, Disney, MGM, Fleischer and the rest. Sometimes in closeups, the odd animator would experiment with more subtle, detailed and specific expressions-Rod Scribner, Willard Bowsky, Grim Natwick to name a few.




CLICK HERE TO WATCH CLIP

By the way, McKimson is one of my favorite cartoon directors and one that is extremely important to cartoon history. After Clampett left Warner's in 1946, McKimson's cartoon unit became the backbone of the Warner Bros. team of units.

Jones was the arsty experimenter who would sometimes deliver pure cartoon humor (esp. in 1948). Freleng basically just followed what everyone else was doing-whatever the current trend was, he would conservatively mimic it.

McKimson wasn't as artsy as Jones or as well-rounded and inspired as Clampett, but he knew his audience maybe better than anybody. He aimed at regular folks and you can tell he felt it was his duty as a cartoonist to entertain the masses-especially the masses of Dads.

His cartoons are hilarious and brilliantly timed and animated. He carried on Warner's tradition of full animation longer than any of the other directors. By 1950 Jones and even Freleng were animating more stylized, more limited and less cartoony stuff. Against the pressures of tightening budgets and UPA's influence, McKimson kept making lively fully animated characters for a few more years.

Without McKimson's cartoons, Jones' tendency to make "art" and sweetness might have run wild and the WB studio might not have kept up the reputation that Avery and Clampett bought it. Looney Tunes are remembered today and still beloved for being mass appeal, honest-entertainment cartoons, the antidote to Disney.

I love Jones and am glad he was so arsty and experimental, but the audience needs a balance of down to earth human entertainment and that's what McKimson delivered. Vincent Waller was my McKimson. His down to earth funny world view balanced all my weird ideas.

McKimson cartoons appeal to the same base entertainment needs that The 3 Stooges provide.


I have lots more observations about McKimson. He had a really funny world view, especially how he perceived the behavior of men. His characters behave as though they have a set of Commandments that guides them to be the best assholes they can be.

I'll tell you the commandments in another post.

CONSTRUCTION

BTW, these drawings are really well constructed so if you are trying to improve your own construction, copy these.

http://www.coldhardflash.com/2007/04/john-ks-guide-to-surviving-end-of.html

Clampett Fun Song

I love how the early cartoons are so musical. The early 30s were especially written around music.

By 1940, some of the animators and directors drifted away from long song sequences, in favor of sweet sentimentality, sarcastic humor, realistic special effects and whatever else were the trends.

Clampett was aware of trends, but wasn't a slave to them. He did what he thought was entertaining, whether it fit whatever everyone else was doing or not.

He kept up to date with the current advances in animation, started new trends in creativity and technique, but didn't abandon the best traditions of early cartoons. He directed by instinct and great artistic-cartoonist taste rather than blindly following what the other guys were doing.

This is a really fun sequence from "We, The Animals Squeak".

I wish there was a magic studio somewhere that would preserve the great traditions of the first cartoons while striving to add new and fun techniques and creative ideas. Historically, as new ideas come along, many creative people discard the good ones from their own past, rather than just adding the good new ones to the good old ones.

Clampett followed this philosophy. His cartoons were fully modern, prophetic and yet traditional all at the same time. And so musical!


CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE FUNNY CLIP!

BONUS THRILL PRIZE!!

Here is that other great musical cartoon master, Friz Freleng. (from the same year!)

JORGE LOVES THIS



Learn about The Cartoon School that should be!
http://www.coldhardflash.com/2007/04/john-ks-guide-to-surviving-end-of.html

Interview at Cold Hard Flash

Hi folks, I'm gonna put up an article about fun cartoon musical bits later today, but for now, here's an interview that Aaron Simpson conducted with me:

CLICK HERE TO READ INTERVIEW

I talk about what would make a good cartoon school and other stuff...

Aaron is a good egg. Buy anything he'll sell you.

Life Sucks 2 sc 4-Storyboards are for STORY, not finished art

Here's an earlier sequence from Life Sucks. This is where Ren first approaches Stimpy in his garden. Stimpy thinks nature is proof that the world is full of beauty and joy and Ren begins to burst his bubble by explaining how much torture goes on in his lawn every minute of every day.




These two still drawings are Nick's cleanups of my scribbly roughs. This animatic is mostly drawn by me in my "bus doodle" style.

I have a few different drawing styles and I use them for different thought processes. When I am writing ideas, I draw them, but I draw really fast, with no regard to construction, perspective, line quality or any finished techniques. I am purely drawing feeling. I am trying to draw in real time as the events play out. I look like a complete spaz when I'm doing it and people make fun of me and imitate it.

The drawings are very scribbly but have the germs of all the visual ideas in continuity. Once these scribbles are complete, then I switch my brain to style mode and draw bigger versions of the same drawings that use more solid principles. This step (layout) requires slower, more carefully choreographed drawings and uses a completely different part of the brain to do. If I was trying to storyboard a scene in this finished style, it wouldn't work. I would be thinking of pretty drawings rather than story and emotion and continuity.

This is a major flaw with TV studio systems today. They expect their storyboard artists to draw finished clean drawings "on-model" so they can send them overseas and then have the animators just xerox them up. This is an extremely inefficient way to use storyboards.

Storyboards are called "story"boards because the story artists are supposed to be writing the stories, not doing the animation and layouts. The more time they waste doing clean stiff on-model drawings, the less time they have to spend on making the story work.

Executives do not understand storyboards anyway, let alone rough drawings. They are easily impressed by a clean inked line, and even if the story isn't working they will quickly sign off on a fancily rendered finished looking storyboard.

Stupid.

You should look up some of Mike Maltese's storyboards for Chuck Jones to see how writers used to work.

Anyway, this animatic is made up mostly of my bus-doodle style. Scribbly but emotional. The few clean and semi-clean drawings are done by Nick Cross and Matt Roach following me up.
LS
Uploaded by chuckchillout8

Eddie has a great storyboard drawing style. It's simple but full of amazing life, fantastic strong clear poses and staging and composition. I used to shudder when layout artists would get his boards and then instantly tone down all the poses when they added the details and put them "on-model". I loved doing layouts from Eddie's boards because all the thought and life was there, and I got to add my own creativity in the finished design details and adding a few poses.

CLICK HERE to buy
"A GODDAMN CHRISTMAS CARTOON"
From John K., the creator of Ren and Stimpy