Sunday, June 23, 2013

WALLY WOOD'S WOMEN


This is about Wally Wood.


I love the way Wood used to draw women in glamor poses (above), even when they were casually walking down the street.

Even his sci-fi was full of glamor poses. A wife tearfully saying goodbye to a husband leaving for Mars wasn't above striking a calendar pose. Amazingly the off-topic poses didn't diminish the seriousness of the story.

Wood obviously did this because he thought it was funny, but I'm guessing that it was also because his photo reference (above) came from ads and mens magazines. 50s glamor was very stylized. Even ice-cream could be sold with bombshell poses. The era wasn't interested in looking natural, and neither was Wood.


Unfettered by naturalism Wood was free to figure out his own way of walking women. I like that better than the literal stuff we do now.

I imagine that this (above) is the way women really walk in heels.  It's different than what Wood did, but that doesn't mean Wood was wrong. Cartooning and animation aren't about realism, they're about caricature....


...and nobody caricatured better than Wood. Imagine how this walk (above) would have looked in animation. Imagine how much fun it would have been to draw. It would even have been fun to draw the discombobulated men she passed.


Surprisingly animation never picked up on Wood's unique way of drawing sexy walks. Too bad, the subject (above) was far from exhausted.


Animation's in a rut, don't you think? I yearn for something new and different. 



I'm thinking only of walks here, but I don't mean something X-rated. I mean something "G" or "PG" that's funny, and which a family could watch together without the parents falling asleep. 


Geez, all this is making me want to draw.



4 comments:

Unknown said...

There are a ton of things I could say about those awesome Wally Wood drawings, but the main point is that they epitomize everything that cartoons are capable of doing best: caricature and capturing what real people do in a satirical way. I don't understand why this is such a hard thing for many people to get and understand.

Comedy itself has such a rich history, diversity, and variety with regards to approaches and styles that could also serve as good inspiration. Not all animation has to resort to cold postmodernism, random and gross stuff, and mean spirited jokes to be funny, IMHO.

I posted a comment on Cartoon Brew recently about how while the animation for the Wreck It Ralph pencil test was well drawn and everything, the acting came across as unnatural and mugging to the camera. A few people didn't really understand what I was trying to say and thought that I was advocating that animation copy live action and so forth.

They're so used to seeing cardboard like drawings all the time I guess. If that's what the masses really want, then that's fine by me, but I think people generally still want to see stuff driven by characters they can identify and relate to and ones that evolve and change overtime.

Unknown said...

I took a shot at animating a sexy female walk. It can be seen on my website, at:
http://www.viagriampleten.com/animation/sexy-walk/

Joshua Marchant (Scrawnycartoons) said...

I admit Eddie, I couldn't quite see where you were going with those last couple posts about crazy leg walks but these new examples are beauties!
Each one totally different personality and funny too!

MILTON: Veeery nice!

kurtwil said...

Wally Wood was unique...thanks for showing us examples of his work!