19TH CENTURY FRENCH CARTOONS AND CARICATURES

I'm ashamed to say that I don't know enough about 19th Century French history to comment on the exact political context of these prints. Evidently Napoleon III met a lot of resistance from republican artists,  and that worked its way into the cartoons of the time.

The print above derives from republican sympathies but it would be a mistake to think that republicans were united in support of the new trends in art. An awful lot of them, including some of the funniest caricaturists, were against them.  Caricature magazines roasted Courbet, Manet, and even Rodin.

Lithography created a whole new market for cartoons like the one above. Most of the prints I've seen were relatively small. I guess that made them cheaper and easier to hide if need be. It's too bad because poster size reproductions would have been so much more appealing.

What's being sold here (above) is a lifestyle, a way of seeing the world. The anti-establishment reader is encouraged to imagine himself as artistically and culturally sophisticated and the defenders of the establishment are served up to him as boobs. It's argument by ridicule, which is not a very good way to get at the truth, but its appeal to artists and readers alike is irresistible.

A commenter wondered if this was the era that pioneered caricature with big heads (above) and little bodies. Is it? Who's responsible for that?  BTW, click to enlarge.

Here's a color lithograph by Daumier. Was a different stone used for each major color? It sounds expensive. Maybe silk screen or hand coloring would have been cheaper. I'm not sure.

According to Alberto's comment, even Monet did caricatures (above) for the humor magazines. It looks like he was pretty good at it.

WHY I LIKE GARY LARSON

I'm a huge fan of Gary Larson's "Far Side." I even bought the 2 volume set that contains almost everything he ever did. I and the rest of my family pick it up all the time, and it comes in handy for killing water beetles and black widow spiders. Come to think of it, it would kill just about anything it was dropped on. The paper's the heavy kind that's made by melting powdered rock into the page. The result is a book that's as heavy and indestructible as a cinder block. I know it'll be a comfort to Gary that, long after his bones have turned to dust, people will still be killing bugs with his books.

Gary doesn't like to see his work on the net, but I want to talk what he does and I don't know how to do that without illustrations. I thought I might strike a balance by using only illustrations that are already on the net, that I got off Google Images. That way I'm not adding to what's already out there. I hope that's OK.



Well, Larson was the best newspaper cartoonist of his time, was he not? What I wonder is how he managed to get along with the syndicate. Didn't they try to censor him? Didn't he get notes like: "Nix this! Nobody'll understand it!" Maybe doing one panel cartoons helped. Maybe they come under less scrutiny.



And I can't figure out how the syndicate let him do cartoons without regular characters. Syndicate people can't be too different than the kind of people who run TV animation, and those guys (women, actually) want nothing but repeating characters in repeating locales like "The Simpsons." How did Gary manage to talk them into doing different characters and different situations?




Larson is the king of funny and deliberately ignorant staging. I love the way those two tall slabs (above) are awkwardly jammed up against each other in the middle of a ridiculously huge, empty plain. And look at the people! Larson must have watched a lot of old black and white animation. This cartoon (above) reminds me of old animation where people pour out of giant, deflating buildings like hordes of ants.

It's funny to think that, while TV executives were telling us that modern audiences required talking heads, Larson was out there making a fortune by doing broad, cartoony humor. His characters don't run around like the ones in the old cartoons, but the concepts are broad as they come.







Larson is frequently cited as an artist who can't draw well, but whose subject matter is so weird that it doesn't matter. I disagree. Larson's a terrific artist. If you don't think so, compare his work to imitators like Shuster and McPherson above. Unlike his imitators Larson's layouts are always clear and funny, and built around pleasing shapes and interesting negative spaces.

A lot of Larson's humor is in the backgrounds. I like to think that's because he thinks the world that characters inhabit is weird and funny, not just the characters. In the kitchen cartoon above Shuster draws a completely generic room. he doesn't seem to have an opinion about it. If Larson, who does have an opinion about kitchens, had drawn the same room he would have let us know how weird it was that people cook their food in a funky, boxy place like that.



One-panel newspaper cartoons used to be fairly flat. If all you're going to do is have a guy sit on a chair and make droll comments to his wife, I guess flat is all you need. Not so with Larson. He often deals with big, flamboyant subjects that need room and 3 dimensions to play. His characters are almost flat but his backgrounds go way back!

BTW, I notice that Larson uses a clean Rapidograph-type line. No thick and thin, no scratchiness. Apparently Crumb isn't the only artist who draws that way. Me, I usually prefer thick and thin, but I admit that there's something obsessive and weird about lines with uniform thickness, and that perfectly compliments Larson's type of humor. It's a case where the medium exactly matches the message.



Terrific staging (above)! Clampett did something similar toward the end of "Book Review." Chaplin did it in "The Rink." It's a deliberately unnatural and ignorant background that obviously exists just to put across a gag!






Here's (above) some weird Larson people bunched unnaturally close together and talking underneath an absurdly empty and bleak ceiling. You're laughing before you read the punchline. That's the way cartoons are supposed to be. The art is supposed to be funny, not just the words. The mood of the room is supposed to be funny, all by itself.

How do you like the patterns on the women's dresses? How do you like their hair styles and glasses? Isn't it a relief to see women who are drawn funny, and not cute or beautiful? Let serious people draw beautiful women. We're cartoonists. We're above that. Women should only be attractive when that's necessary to motivate the gags, as it frequently was in Tex Avery and John K cartoons. The same goes for men. No attractive men unless the gag needs them!!!

I love the way Gary uses windows. In his cartoons we're frequently looking into a room or out of it. We humans love to be inside our boxes, which we decorate with little knick-knacks, but we have a great curiosity about what's going on outside the box. We can't seem to make up our minds about where we want to be, inside or outside. Inspired by Larson, I'd love to do a cartoon with lots of window action.

A closing note: I didn't mean to slam Mc Pherson as hard as I did. He's a Larson spinoff, but he puts a lot of work into everything he does and manages to be funny much more often than most of his peers.

CARTOONING LESSONS BY SCRIBNER AND CLAMPETT

I thought I'd do a whole post on the subject of Clampett's "Buckaroo Bugs," but I quickly realized that the cartoon is so rich that I could scarcely do justice to a whole sequence here, let alone the whole film. Maybe I'll focus in more narrowly, just on the cartooning in one of the sequences.

Clampett was lucky to have an animator, Rod Scribner, who was a terrific cartoonist as well as a brilliant animator. He could draw funny, he could move things funny, he could act a character and project a winning personality, and he had that indefinable thing that's so rare in the industry...charisma. Since Clampett had a lot of these virtues himself, the match was made in heaven.

The title card credits Manny Gould as the principal animator in this cartoon. I wish I could tell which scenes were his. I'm crediting Scribner with the animation here, because it looks like his style, but Clampett's practice of switching animators in mid-scene can make identification difficult.

Anyway, here's the cartoon, starting about a quarter of the way in. Bugs is pretending to be a bandit and has just denuded Red Hot Ryder with a magnet to the belt buckle.


Before we talk about the action, check out what's happening in the drawing above. Bugs is a big guy wearing a black mask, which is a strong graphic symbol denoting mystery and menace. Red Hot Ryder is a tiny little guy with panties and what appears to be woman's shoes (they're actually short boots).

It's a clash of opposites with big, pretending-to-be-mean Bugs attacking what looks like a poor little lady. A third element is the absurdly over-sized hat, which has a life of its own and threatens to overshadow whatever Bugs and the "lady" do.

Bugs makes like he's going to grapple with the little guy but instead comically attacks the guy's hat.


He pulls up on the hat and the little guy is pulled along with it. Look how inert the little guy is! It's funny to see a body that had a will and a structure a moment before, suddenly become a wet sack of potatoes. This is not only a funny thing to do, but it underlines the idea that gravity is attempting to hold everything down and sets up the gravity-gags to follow.

This is a good example of how exaggerated, cartooney handling -- the suddenly inert body -- makes for interesting animation possibilities. If I were an animator I'd kill to get scenes with gravity gags because they're fun and make use of the unique capabilities of animation. Don't expect to find gags like this in scripts written by non-artist writers.

BTW, the long, back part of the hat (above) is a great visual joke. Why are long, sagging things that stretch out behind us funny? Do they remind us of testicles or loaded baby diapers? I'm not sure.

Clampett was a visceral director. He did lots of gags about things that are funny for reasons that are difficult to put into words. Most other artists avoided gags like that but Clampett reveled in them. Life contains zillions of funny but hard to articulate anomalies, but among the Warner directors, only Clampett seemed to be interested in them.


Here (above) the hat as wet bed sheet (or pizza dough) is emphasized. Bugs' earnest, serious expression is a terrific contrast to the absurdity of it all.

How do you like the funny proportions in Ryder's body: a long torso, a bulbous round pelvis, then stubby little legs with girl shoes. Genius!


Bugs (above) suddenly covers Ryder with the stretched out hat.


The momentum (above) causes him to flip over.


Ryder (above) stands and flails around inside the hat.


Bugs (above) needs to run off screen to set up the next gag, but instead of going into an immediate run he instead flails around with Ryder for an instant. I had to cut frames to compress the action so you may not see the scramble here. I mention it because I like it when characters unexpectedly go in and out of synchronization with each other. You see it in Fred Astaire movies and it's devastatingly effective.


When it's time to leave bugs just leans into his run and is offstage in an instant.


More cute pantie shots (above). Notice that Ryder has stepped out of his pants while we was flailing.


He steps back into his pants, which for some inexplicable reason I find funny, and the hat brim takes over as the dominant funny element. Here the brim develops wings, sort of. I always find it funny when a comedic character has a suddenly billowing cape or a loose, blowing skirt. Maybe that's because you don't expect a fleshed-out, three-dimensional character to become, without warning, a graphic symbol.



The big, floppy brim (above) really dominates now. it's like a wet bed sheet.


Ryder (above) pushes up and it pops off.


Now it billows out (above) and settles down. Look at the oodles of energized space that's enclosed between the hat and the top of Ryder's head. Artists love stuff like this. We're constantly amazed at the efficacy of the tools at our command. Only a moment before, the scene was about how much like pizza dough the hat was. Now the scene is about the gracefulness of the falling hat and the power of unexpectedly enclosed and activated space.


Now the hat (above) goes back to its previous shape, which is delightfully drawn. Simultaneously we're reminded of how stupid-looking and funny Ryder is. This sets us up for a bunch of stupid poses that are coming shortly.

I'm just amazed at how frequently Scribner and/or Clampett change the focus of the gag within a scene. One thing is emphasized and then another, and yet the scene retains it's over-all unity of purpose.


I'd intended to comment on a the frames that follow but look how much space it's taken just to describe the few pictures we've seen so far. Clampett cartoons are so rich that you could spend hours analyzing simple actions.

I'll leave up the remaining frames without comment. Remember that I had to drop frames to compress the action.












Oops! I can't help but comment on this one (above)! Ryder puts down his guns and withdraws his hands. That doesn't sound like much, and it won't seem like much in still pictures like the one above, but when you see it in motion it's hilarious!

I associate this technique with Friz because he used it so often. He realized that the simple, understated act of picking things up and putting them down can be incredibly funny when it's done right.