John K Stuff

Friday, March 16, 2007

Good and Bad off-model from Warner's

50 years ago even bad cartoon art was good.

This was a golden-age of off-model merchandise.

From 1970 on, off-model looked like this.

Look at the humans that this artist thought he was doing in the Looney Tunes style.

Off-model from the 50s looks better than on-model today.

Here's on-model from the 50s: Chuck Jones style

Here's almost on-model from 1947: Friz style

On-model today:

Old toys:

Modern toys:

Post 1970 WB art:

Pre 1970 art

So long, folks!

Thursday, March 15, 2007

My Lady's Garden - Carlo Vinci - beat up the pervert

Here's a wonderful kiddie picture with a common cartoon theme.

Title:

"My Lady's Garden"(1934), Terrytoons

Alternate Title:

It's amazing how many early cartoons had would-be rapists in them. Spiders are almost always rapists and they don't even want their own kind. They like mere six legged chicks.

Clip 1:

The funny part about all these old cartoons is that the little guy is always able to beat the crap out of the big hairy brute. They never even bother to explain it. Like Puddy the fly was bitten by a radioactive Ultimate Fighter and then gained super strength or something. Nope.

Merely because the little guy is good, that's enough to beat up a huge bastard. Today, the executives would make you explain why the little guy can vanquish the big mean monster. "Kids won't understand it unless it's logical." or some kinda poppycock like that. Maybe because executives are bad and ugly and they have vanquished the good and kindly cartoonists. For now.

Clip 2:

In the 30s you didn't need an excuse to be entertaining. You just did it and no one ever questioned it.

Carlo Vinci must have animated a hundred of these scenes where the beautiful girl's chastity was threatened but ultimately was preserved for another day.

If you are interested in seeing more perverted cartoons, write to world renowned animation archaeologist Jerry Beck at CartoonBrew.
http://www.cartoonresearch.com/garagesale.html

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

The rise and fall of Construction in cartoons Pt 3 - 1950s - Undertures and corners

This is part 1 of the Disney 50s: Undertures
Part 2 will be: stock "cartoony" construction
part 3 will be: UPA influence/ Tom Oreb/Ward Kimball-The Cal Arts New Testament
Part 4 will be: combining UPA with rubber hose-the most successful use (to me) of UPA influence at Disney.

Undertures:

Disney continued making their main characters "undertures", that is - designs that are less cartoony, interesting or individual than live humans. This Prince from Cinderella is the worst of the type, because there is no visible construction in it. The facial features just float inside the inspecific silhouette of his face. This inspecificity of construction makes it very hard to animate. It means the features will have a tendency to float around, because they are not clearly set into specific forms.

Alice is an underture, but her construction is still mildly visible. She is still based on Elmer Fudd/ Preston Blair baby construction.

You can see her cheeks bulge out and her eyes fit into them.

There is no specific individual design to the character. She is pure generic. She is construction alone, with no individual variations on the basic Disney forms.

Wendy is the exact same design (or lack of design) as Alice. She still has a bit of visible construction. She has a definite chin, jaw and cheek. (Today's Disney designs don't. The mouths and eyes just float around independent of the silhouette of the head and jawline)

Aurora is sthe same design as Alice and Wendy, with taller proportions and a slightly more anglular finish. The angles make 3-dimensional sense unlike today's wobbly pointy copies of this style.

She is animated beautifully, with the help of rotoscoping and Marc Davis' fantastic skill, but the most you can say about it is that it is smooth and solid. It's a hell of a lot of trouble to go to for the mere result of not looking clumsy.

No one today could animate humans without the features floating all over the place and the construction shifting and melting as the character tries to turn in 3 dimensions. I don't know why anyone even tries, since the best you can get with "realistic" design is merely: "It didn't look awkward." Unfortunately, today there are no Marc Davis' at studios that spend a lot of money and 20 years training you to do extreme solid animation that isn't clumsy.

Here is an extreme underture animated by the great Milt Kahl. Even Milt himself hated animating this and complained all through the production. He wanted to go back to the old sensible days of animating cartoony characters like Br'er Rabbit.

This is the only male realistic character I have ever seen that is animated smoothly, without melting all over the screen or looking completely awkward. Yet much less capable animators than Kahl in eras that are much less disciplined than mid century America keep attempting it.

This looks like Dic took over Disney.

Can someone explain why?? No one likes to animate stuff like this and it only worked the one time-and didn't work at all in the context of the film itself:

Next installment: 50s construction of "cartoony" characters at Disney's. Using the same stock construction for countless characters.

Tuesday, March 13, 2007

Scene Planning For TV - Setups for storyboard and layout 1

All storyboards should have some logic in their planning, whether for full or limited animation, but it is especially important in limited animation.

Hanna Barbera developed an extremely intelligent system in the late 50s that allowed them to animate whole cartoons with one animator-one American animator.

Of course they used the simplest possible system, just 3 shots basically, but we can add more shots than that and still get a lot of good stuff out of it. They only had $3,000 per short back then so what they did with it was pretty amazing. We have a lot more money these days to play with, even taking inflation into consideration. We just waste most of it.

Storyboard theory today, thanks to Dic and some other studios in the 1980s developed storyboard practices that are not only creatively preposterous, but also way too ambitious for how much money they actually had to put into the cartoons. Downshots, crowd scenes, 3/4 animation and other expensive practices that are difficult to pull off in even fully animated features became standard practice in the 1980s. Many producers feel cheated if you use actually practical common sense thinking when planning your cartoons. Executives tend to like storyboards that look like the animation will be very hard to do. They want to imagine they are getting Sleeping Beauty when they look at the storyboards for their low budget kiddie cartoons.

They had crazy rules in TinyToons from what I hear from the artists who worked on it. Everything had to be hard to do, or it wouldn't get accepted. Something simple and entertaining was cheating. So the board artists developed tricks to fool the execs into thinking that their cartoons would call for the most expensive and time consuming techniques. Techniques that do not add up to entertainment or good drawing, acting or story.

The ugly result of this is that all this ambition upfront ensures that the cartoons will have to be animated overseas at lightning speed and the animation coming back will look like hell and disappoint everyone back in the states who worked on the cartoons.

The amount of money that is spent on cartoons today could easily bring back animation to our shores. We'd have to eliminate a lot of wasted money on this end-on market research, development, executives, crappy scriptwriters-believe me there is a ton of wasted money that never makes it to the screen.

And we'd have to plan our cartoons efficiently and logically. Then we'd have to train the artists to follow simpler staging procedures. We wouldn't be making Bambi, but we could make Ren and Stimpy quality this way.

I made a manual for artists that had worked on these crazy cartoons that all started with a downshot, just to try to cure them of irrational practices and concentrate their staging on telling the story in the simplest, funniest and most effective way. You get it for free.

Using simple staging buys you more time and money that you could use to put some animation and maybe even acting in the cartoons.
http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2006/04/my-animation-1.html

More to come....