SOME ANIMATION DRAWINGS

I just unearthed some of my old doodles and photos from a box in the garage. Some of these pictures are admittedly terrible and were never meant to be seen by anyone, but...what the heck...it's OK to blog about trivial things sometimes, isn't it?

The cat here (above) is even bigger than the dog, which is a mistake, but then again...this isn't a storyboard...it's just a visual way of writing a script. Oops! I spotted a misspelling but hopefully you won't see it.

Here's a REALLY quick doodle from some other cartoon. The dog and the human walking him are going in different directions because I changed my idea in midstream and didn't bother to redraw.

I saved this because it made me realize that there's something surreal about walking in a world where everybody else is walking at the same time. Anyway,
nothing ever came of this because it would have required too much animation.

I don't know why this would interest anyone except my mother, but here's (above) a photo of me at work at Filmation way back in 1980.

Above, the same timid dog we saw in doodle form, a little later in the cartoon. Even squirrels push him around. Once again, this is a fragment of a visual script rather than a storyboard.

I love writing prose but scripts work best when they're drawn out rather than written. There is one drawback to that technique, though. You can unconsciously lose your feel for structure when the story's drawn. That's why it's useful for an artist to outline a story first with words, if only in bullet points.

RANDOM EDDIE DRAWINGS

 What the heck was this sketch (above) for? Was it for this Theory Corner site? I only remember that I started to copy Tee Hee's Kate Hepburn then changed my mind and drew it the way I like to draw women.

I made her a mystery woman..."Madam X."

Above, Ghengis's horse remembers the good old days before he and his master split up. 

These sketches (above) were for Disney's "Nightmare Ned." In this dream Ned lives in a dollhouse and invites his tormentors, The Evil Twins, in for a cup of tea.

Yikes! Looking like it's been stepped on several times, here's (above) more panels from the Ghengis storyboard.

RANDOM EDDIE DOODLES (AND ONE BY JOHN K)

That's a John K panel above.  John's the best storyboarder in the industry.

A NOTE ABOUT STORYBOARDS

That's me (above) pitching a board at Disney's. I think the guy giving the black power salute is Bob Taylor. I can't see very well but I think the drawing I'm pointing to is a black and white doodle of Donald that I later re-did in crayon (reprise below). I love working in crayon but hardly ever get the chance. One of these days I'll do a post about how great crayons are, even the Crayolas you get in the supermarket. But I digress.

What I really want to talk about is how much influence a storyboarder should have on a film.

I'm a storyboarder myself and I like it because in some ways it's close to direction and I like to direct. In a small and limited way storyboarders are the visual kings of the projects they work on and like every other storyboarder I like to be king.

Hearing me talk like this would have amazed animators in the 30s and 40s. In the golden age of Warners, when cartoons were done right, storyboards weren't a big deal. Boards were done by writer artists and were so rough and so lacking in continuity that a casual reader would have had trouble understanding them (example below). That's why so few Warner boards of that era survived. Nobody thought they had any value. Really, the story only came together visually in the mind of the director who did a bunch of drawings for his handouts.

Later on, in the TV era, writers and executives effectively got rid of directors and a new category of artist was born, the non-writer storyboarder. This was a terrible defeat for animation.

The problem is that films with a strong script and storyboard feel often don't lend themselves to animation very well. If you look at the funniest Bill Nolan black & white Terrytoons you'll see that the highlights, the real audience-grabbing scenes, are often something the animator (or the animator-director) thought of. Cartoons lost a lot of their playfulness and innovation when animators were reduced to fleshing out other peoples' ideas and layouts.



Of course audiences like structure and and so do I. In the current factory system some of the storyboard feel is inevitable. Even so, without the animators' input into the stories cartoons will continue to be a sad thing, very much cut off from its roots. We need to bring animators and directors back under the roof of the parent studio. We storyboarders should remind ourselves that the animators are the stars (or should be) and we're just there to make them look good. Everybody else, the executives, directors, writers, storyboarders, layout people and colorists...all exist solely to make the animator actor look good on the screen.


BTW, this post was inspired by Mark Mayerson's almost current blog about storyboards:

http://mayersononanimation.blogspot.com/


The storyboard at the bottom is from Ward Kimball's "Mars and Beyond." I don't know if it helps to make my point, I just put it in because I like it.

SCRIPTS OR STORYBOARDS?

It won't come as a suprise to anyone that I'm on the storyboard side of that controversy, especially if we're talking about animated cartoon comedy. I've written in both script and storyboard formats, and the boarded stories always turn out funnier. That's because a board provides constant feedback on how the visuals are going. Some ideas just don't look funny when drawn and it's nice to be able to toss them in favor of something that draws better.

It's also because scripts are a form of book. They're a medium of their own and what feels good in the medium of print often doesn't feel good in animation. As an example, scripts tend to be dialogue-heavy, even when they're written by artists. That's because ddialogue driven scripts are leaner and easier to read. Dialogue comes in trim little columns surrounded by oceans of white space. It looks better on a page. You can read it faster. It's an amazing but true fact that dull, dialogue-heavy, talking head cartoons get made for the trivial reason that their kind of script is easier to read.

Here's an example. This is an excerpt from a first-draught script I wrote for Animaniacs. A witch's candy-covered house attracts the Animaniacs and she tries to eat them. They turn it around and harass the witch to distraction. The script reads OK whenever it depicts dialogue but watch how hard it becomes to read when it describes visual gags:
Which part would you rather read?

It's also true that stories that originate on storyboards tend to emphasize visual gags, the thing that animation is best at. When I'm drawing I naturally pay more attention to the way a character looks in clothes, the way he bends to pick things up, etc. Sometimes these details are so funny that I end up building a whole sequence around them. That feels right to me. Comedy is best when it's about little things. Scripts, on the other hand, favor the overview, the big things and the complex subplots.

Now that scripts dominate there are very few funny cartoons. Since scripts are uncongenial to visual comedy the powers that be have decided to eliminate visual comedy. This is the shocking price we've had to pay for our script addiction.