Go See Some Cool Puppets in CT!

My friend, Craig Marin (who made the Soupy Sales marionette) is having a huge exhibition of his FLEXITOON PUPPETS in Greenwich, CT. There will be over 100 puppets, marionettes, props, sets, storyboards and production art from their television, film and stage projects.





It runs from today, November 29 - January 5th.


The address is 299 Greenwich Ave 06830, and if you're anywhere on the east coast try and check it out. You can see a speedy promo at www.flexitoon.com"


Craig and I are trying to figure out how to do some live/puppet/cartoon stuff together all in one show.

Some good things in the Horton Trailer

Holy cow, I didn't realize I'd get so many comments just about a post I threw together. I was a bit worn out from preparing the college post and that got hardly any comments, so I threw up a picture of Horton and didn't think much about it and got deluged! Now I feel guilty. I looked at the trailer and the first thing I saw was all the modern 'tude and Cal Artsy acting and self-analyzing character story stuff.

But then I noticed there were some pretty good things in there, so I thought I better mention them.

http://www.hortonmovie.com/site/horton.html



The Non Cal Arts Expressions Look Great

A lot of them are buried in fast inbetweens though. And I'm curious as to why they are blurred. It'd be great if you could actually see this stuff.
I like how the eyes are sunk into the skin of his eyelids here. I wish we could see it better.
After the blurry stuff stops, he goes back into the Cal Arts business.

Here's some very clever stuff...
I'd rather it wasn't blurred though.
These hands are great!

The Textures Are More Subtle Than Usual

The fur looks more cartoony or toylike than what you usually see in CG films. They aren't putting realistic hairs and pores on cartoon bodies - which makes most cg characters look like deformed mutant humans.

These characters look like Seuss characters - at least when they aren't making Disney expressions and that in itself is a huge advance in modern cartoon design.

The Colors Are Not Obnoxious

They seem to be doing natural colors and not trying to punish our eyes with typical cartoon colors.

It doesn't really look like Seuss BGs and the colors are conservative, but it's a huge relief from what we are used to in cartoons:

I hope there is at least one sequence that is rendered in the style of my favorite Seuss book:
Maybe the Blue Sky artists are slowly pushing back against the forces of Hollywood/Disney formula. This definitely looks better than most feature cartoons. It's at least cartoony underneath the expressions and in a few short bits. Maybe there is more of that in the film.

I wish they could just go ahead and do some shorts using the Seuss stories as is, and not have to fill them up with Hollywood sappy story stuff and characters who have to examine their inner selves and learn that it's ok to be yourself. Just tell the stories and use the original poetry and get good character actors with fun voices to narrate.
Come up with a animation style that is as silly and cartoony as the drawings. Seuss is pure silly fantasy. It's not supposed to have fake heart or be believable. It's supposed to be funny and clever and imaginative. An escape from the mundane.

That'd make a great DVD.

_________________________

A note on individual interpretations of classics:

I'm actually all for individual creative additions to classic properties, as long as they don't completely undermine the essence of the material. Unless they are satires, of course. (Good ones). It's like covering a standard pop song.

Clampett and Jones both did their own interpretations of Seuss and Horton and you can sure tell the difference between them. I think Clampett did the better version and closer to the source, but that's just my opinion. The Grinch has a lot of good things in it. Both directors obviously have great respect and admiration for Seuss, but are also very strong stylists themselves and couldn't possibly help adding their own personalities to the cartoons. I wouldn't want them to just take Seuss' drawings and inbetween them.

That's not the same thing as a corporate whitewashing of a classic. My complaint is that the same bland formulaic makeover is applied to everything today. There's no sign of anyone's individuality anywhere. It's like there is only one animation creator and he makes every frame of every film. The same expressions, same acting, same contrived story gimmicks are just pasted over any subject matter.

There are lots of truly creative people in the business that could do marvelously entertaining, exciting and popular cartoons if only we could discard the corporate formula veneer that smothers every attempt to be sincere and creative.

Cartoon College Year 3

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2007/09/my-ideal-cartoon-school.html

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2007/09/year-2-cartoon-college.html

My 3rd year program assumes that students now have some solid basics down: Construction, line of action, basic motion. Now I want to take those skills and broaden the students' horizons.

Artists need to learn how to recognize the difference between formula and invention. Animation is full of formula and I would like to see a generation of artists who can break through the formula and start to use their skills as tools in order to create with, rather than simply repeat what has been done to death.

The year is dedicated to honing the cartoonists' observation skills and getting them to be able to apply their observations to their cartooning and animation.

Intense Caricature Study and Application

This is caricature with a purpose: to broaden your creative palette in animation. It's not to become professional caricaturists. It's not to get a caricature style. It's not to imitate someone else's caricature style. In fact, it's intended to cure students of desiring a limiting style.

Every person you draw is uniquely his or her own style, has a unique set of not only features, but expressions, gestures, mannerisms, textures, body language, body shape etc. The style of your caricature should be dictated not by a preset notion of a caricature style, but by the style of the person being observed and dissected.

You want to get ideas from those you observe, you don't want to impose your own notions of what you think looks good onto your model. That's backwards.

The danger of imitating someone else's style is that you end up imitating their limitations and probably tone down their positive attributes. Hirschfeld is a great designer-caricaturist and unfortunately, much-imitated. What people tend to imitate is a superficial surface of what he does. He doesn't really caricature bodies and he makes everybody look elegant, even though most of his subjects aren't elegant. It works for him and makes for great illustrations, but there is only one Hirschfeld. Drawing spaghetti arms, graphic textures and squinty eyes won't make you the next great caricaturist.

For the purposes of animation, your caricatures should be observant and exploratory rather than imitations of someone else's ideas and filters. Every subject you draw has new information that - if you can capture it, you can use in your own work. If you filter what the real world looks like through some preset notion of style (what things should look like) then you are severely handicapping your creativity.

Your goals in this course will be:

Make it look like the person.
Be Funny.
Learn the mechanics of the person.
To be able to draw a specific set of forms from every angle.
Be able to articulate what you learned from each person you caricature.
Absorb the ability to make new shapes constantly and not rely on traditional cliched animation shapes.

Specific Faces and their Mechanics

Students will pick either other students, teachers, family or film and TV actors and study not only what their faces look like in repose, but how their facial mechanics work for different expressions.






Specific Bodies
Everyone's body is as unique as their face, yet bodies are hardly ever caricatured. Usually someone has one way of drawing hands, or drawing fat, but this class will encourage students to observe how many different funny forms hands and fat can take.

Specific Expressions, Specific Gestures

I want students to constantly observe everyone around them. Be able to imitate them. Study their unique expressions, body language and gestures. There are no shortage of unique among cartoonists and animators. I've known so many that are full of individual quirks that are really funny. Amazingly these same individuals rarely put their own quirks into their cartoon drawings and animation. People automatically fall into line when they get a job and fit themselves into what they think is the correct and approved way to draw cartoons.I want students to begin to get a handle on real and specific expressions , then apply them to cartoon characters. Students can pick any of a set of classic characters and draw them in specific poses and expressions. This is not an easy thing to do!

Caricaturing Cartoons

The whole point of cartooning is to make fun of things. Did you know that you can make fun of people's drawings? You learn a lot that way.

Blandness is a big obstacle to creativity in animation today. This course consists of taking cartoon drawings that others have done and doing caricatures of them. This will get the students to be more analytical, and will instill a thirst for contrasts and fun in their work.The first semester would be spent doing still drawings and analyzing contrasts in designs. The second would be animating caricatures of cartoon styles and inventing funny ways to move funny characters.

This will teach students how to explore and refine creative ideas. To bring them conviction and clarity. To avoid the middle. To instill a sense of design and balance.

Character Animation

Walks, Dances, Rhythms

We'll study the best and funniest complex actions from classic Popeyes, Disney, Warners cartoons and animate variations using different characters.

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2007/08/something-not-bland-popeye-can-you-take.html

Animating different types of designs.

Solving design/animation problems. Animating cartoon designs from media other than animation-comic strips, magazine cartoons, etc. Here's a few I would like to try, but there are a lot more styles to experiment with.





There are a small handful of design styles in animation today: The Cal Arts Style. The Spumco Style (its derivatives). The Cartoon Network Everything Has Corners Style. Each of these graphic styles come with their own set of cliched automatic motions.

They also come with severe creative limitations. I want to show students the vast variety of cartoon drawing styles that exist in other mediums and have them find ways to animate them that enhances the graphic styles - all with a mind to humor and entertainment.

This will open the students' minds to the limitless possibilities of animation that have yet to be explored.

Animating Super Structures with Varied Timings
A lot of animation today consists of quick actions that zip from pose to pose and avoids any slow careful 3 dimensional motions and subtle changes of expression.

This class will ask the students to do more careful and subtle types of acting and actions that don't rely on stock animation tricks.

We'll study live action actors and try to implement a wider range of timings and actions from life.

Bob McKimson's animation will set a great example of motion that doesn't cheat. Doing it the hard way.


Animating Caricatures

This class will take what was learned in the caricature classes and apply it to motion.

Students will animate characters that have the specific mannerisms and expressions that real people they have studied have.

Advanced acting, dialogue animation. Timing, pacing.

This continues the 2nd year studies.

Analysis Of Formula and Breaking Of Habits

Is this all there is to be said for eye expressions? Many animators think so.

Analysis and pattern recognition is the antidote to cliche. If you can see formulas, then you can break them.

The 'tude expression formula. This is used automatically when you can't actually think up a specific expression.

The stronger your observational abilities and your analytic prowess is, the faster you will be able to grow creatively.
During your career you will be called upon to rely on formula and cliche, although your bosses won't call them that. If you recognize them for what they are, you can adapt quickly to different styles.

If you ever get a chance to work on a project that actually demands creativity, you will be less likely to be frozen in someone else's formula.

Unusual Color Selections and combinations at HB

What color is the sky? Painting things colors you wouldn't expect automatically generates some surprise and interest.
One thing I look for in cartoons is clever and unique color combinations. You wouldn't think it would be hard to find that, but it is. For this post, I'm not talking about technique. Merely the choices of colors.

It's so easy for an artist to just grab blue, red, purple, pink, green and orange straight from the tubes and slap it on the paintings. It requires no forethought or creativity. Most paint sets come with those colors.

My favorite paintings, whether they come from Disney, Hanna Barbera, Genndy Tartakovsky or Illustrators are the ones where the artists choose odd colors. They mix each color in non-mathematical proportions with other colors, and then combine them with other odd choices.

What's a mathematical proportion? 50-50. Orange is 50% red, 50%yellow. Turquoise is 25% yellow, 75% blue. That's what you see in most cartoons-even in really expensive cartoons that could easily afford good color stylists.

CREATIVITY = SURPRISE

I like to be surprised. I think creativity is largely about surprising the viewer. If you just do what they are already used to seeing, then is that really being creative?

For about 3 years, the Hanna Barbera cartoons were filled with creative colors and color combinations.
Interestingly, the title cards tend to be less creative. They are more primary and secondary.
I like colors that are hard to name, like in the painting above. What would you call that ground color? Burgundian Umber?


How about the sky? Olive-mustard? And how many people would think of putting those two colors together in the first place?

COLOR BALANCE AND HARMONY

I like the kind of overall color stylings that start with one basic dominant color - like this sky color that doesn't have a simple name.
The other colors then are related to the dominant color.

Art put some brighter colors in the reeds. The smaller details are the best places to put more pure colors, because then they add some extra interest and punch without dominating the whole scene and taking away from the focus, which in a cartoon is usually the character.

He still was judicious in his reed colors. Light blue, purple and army green. He didn't put the whole rainbow there. He also applied the colors lightly so that some of the sky green blends in with the brighter colors and harmonizes the whole image.

These paintings are pure eye candy to me.

Here are slightly more normal colors, but still with harmony and a limited palette.

Title card with pink and yellow. Yeeesh.



A little too pure blue for me, but there is still something odd about it.







I really like clever uses of browns. Nature is full of an infinite variety of brown colors and inventive artists will take advantage of this much wider range of creative choices than what most cartoons allow.

What would you call the wall color below?

The greens in the grass have been blended with milky white to keep them from being too pure. I wonder why they didn't choose colors as odd as the sky colors for the grass.

Colors Out Of The Tubes

I actually don't remember the Rescuers looking like this. This may be the product of remastering. They take a lot of old cartoons and get rid of any mixed colors and turn them all into neon primaries and secondaries now. Especially pink and purple. They also seem to turn up the contrast so that dark objects turn solid black. The new Looney Tunes disk has some of the worst examples of color tampering I've seen yet- but not on every cartoon.

These colors don't need a color stylist to choose them. These are the first colors every kid chooses when they start coloring their pictures.
If I had a lot of money to spend on cartoons, I would expect my artists to come up with new colors and combinations all the time. Wouldn't they want to?

You know where to get good color ideas (besides from nature)? In fashion magazines-especially the European ones. I'll save that for another post.