HAS ALCOHOL CONTRIBUTED TO ANIMATION?

Even though I have no desire to drink on the job myself I sometimes wonder if other people should.

I began to think about this a long, long time ago when I got a farm laborer's job hoing cabbages. I remember the sinking feeling in my stomach when the farmer showed the three of us the field. It was sundrenched and acres wide with long, straight rows of cabbages diminishing in railroad perspective to the horizon. Our job was to rake out unwanted cabbages so the that every wanted cabbage had a foot of space to grow. He showed us how to do it then left us there, faced with the stark reality of sun, flies and endless vegetable rows. One of the experienced guys offered me a drink from his flask and I, with a look of superiority, declined. Boy, did I regret that! That was the roughest work I ever did!

I did learn something from it, though. Some jobs are so mind-numbingly tedious that they can't be done without liquor. Prohibition must have made some forms of work nearly impossible. I imagine that the only thing that made hoing possible was the knowledge that there was a jug in the bush at the end of each cabbage row.

Maybe this applies to animation. It's a creative job but there's a certain amount of tedium too. Maybe the old, golden-age animators were right to to get soused at lunch. Maybe liquor is the lubricant that made it possible to do all the great work they did. I say maybe because I don't know. Having an mp3 player and headphones is my substitute for booze and it seems to work... but everybody's different.

thanks to Jenny for the Freddy Moore picture that I stole from her site.

LANDSCAPERS ARE MY NEW HEROES

I promised to write something about the Japanese Garden near where I live. It's at Balboa Park on Balboa near Woodley. The park covinced me of something important.

That something is that landscaping is an art which is worthy of the respect we give to architects. Why aren't landscapers consulted before a major building is built? Why can't a new building be built to conform to a landscaping idea instead of the other way around? Maybe landscaping is the beacon that can lead us out of the dark age that Bauhaus plunged us into.
This is the only life we have. Everybody reading this will be dead in a few decades. we need beauty in our lives now, while we can still enjoy it. Architects don't seem to care about this. They're invoved in some insane competition to see who can build the most alienating concrete wind-trap. I wish someone would write a book explaining how architecture became corrupted and irrelevant, which is certainly where things stand today. Anyway Japanese gardens like the one in Balboa Park suggest another way of doing things. Somebody should ask landscapers how they'd solve the problem of urban blight.

WHAT IS THE PROPER ROLE OF AN ANIMATOR?

No, Leon Schlesinger wasn't an animator but this is the closest picture I could find on the net to an animator wearing a crown. Anyway, to get back to the title question....

What is the proper role of an animator in an animated cartoon? That's easy. I can answer in one word..."king!" In animation the animator is king. Everybody else's job exists to make the animator look good. The rest of us, even the director, are like the hairdressers and make-up people on a live-action set. We exist to make the actor, i.e., the animator, look good. We exist to maximize his chance of achieving glory on the screen.

In a saner world the animator would be a star. His name would be known to the public and the public would argue over who the best animators are. Animators would have groupies, artistic pique, scandalous divorces, punch-outs with paparazzi, would get fat for parts and write tell-all biographies. The best of them would also break their backs to make the performances that will be remembered forever.

It seems to me that the best way to achieve this is to bring the animation back under the roof of the parent studio. Why we ever let it leave is beyond me. Animators are our performers. In their absence we've had decades of souless cartoons. We've been trying to tell stories without actors.

We need to start training animators now. The studios should help art schools to organize their animation programs more efficiently. Good animators should be rewarded with good salaries and stories should be written with the kind of scenes that animators like to work on. Most of all we need cheap and easy to use pencil test programs and internet tutorials on their use.

A TRIBUTE TO SALOON PAINTINGS

Am I the only one here who likes saloon paintings? I mean the reclining nudes that always occupy the center space over the bar in the old westerns. It's in the interest of the bar to put one up because every red-blooded man will be tempted to order an extra drink just so he can toast the lady.


Of course we're cartoonists and if we were painting the bar picture we might put up something a little different. I could see this Milt Gross guy reclining in a bunch of grapes and cupids, couldn't you? Don Martin would have made a good saloon painter. Of course his pictures would have needed those long Baroque frames with all the gold curly-cues.


Bar nudes can't be too sexy. If they are the patrons won't try to toast the lady, they'll try to jump over the bar and rub her bottom.

THE NEXT NEW THING

This is an exciting time to be in the animation industry because it's possible to glimpse the new thing that's coming and it's a doosey. Thank heaven! I thought I'd burst if I had to sit through another CGI feature of a bunch of wacky misfits who are forced to seek a new home or another 2-D TV show featuring nerds and smart-alec kids in suburbia. And screw anime! It's just not good enough! In my opinion what's coming is embodied in these thumbnail copies of Milt Gross poses that I drew at ASIFA. Much credit to Steve Worth and Mark Kausler for making them available. If they don't excite you that's because you dismiss them as being old-fashioned print-media drawings that could never animate...but they do animate. In fact there's plenty of precedent for it, which I'll discuss in future posts.

HOW MY KID DISCOVERED BREASTS

What follows is a completely trivial story. It's so mind-numbingly banal that I can't believe I'm trying to foist it off on other people. I'm just too sleepy to come up with something better! Oh, well! Here it is.....

I've always been influenced by things I've read. A case in point is an article I read about something called childhood amnesia. According to the author in later life your kid will forget nearly everything that happened before the age of four. Isn't that interesting?

Now maybe I was eating chicken when I read this because for me the compelling application of this idea was that I could give my two-year old the legs of the chicken rather than the breast and he'd never remember it. The cute little twerp never ate most of the food on his plate and was indifferent to chicken. I, on the other hand loved chicken, especially the breast when it was slow cooked upside-down in an oven so it retained all its natural juices. I figured I'd introduce him to chicken breasts when he was four, that way he'd believe he had them all his life. It was a silly thought, I now realize, but at the time I thought it was a revelation from heaven.

As it happened I forgot to tell him about breast meat for an extra two years. That's two extra years of juicy, to-die-for meals for his grateful dad. One night when he was six my wife cooked a particularly succulent chicken and put it hot and steaming in the middle of the table. My kid eyed the legs and licked his lips as usual. I decided to celebrate the world-class chicken by opening a special bottle of wine I'd been saving so I went out to the kitchen to get it. Little did I know that my wife was carving in my absence and gave me a leg and my son a big, heaping slab of breast meat.

When I came in I poured some wine into my wife's glass and as I did so I heard my kid say, "Hey, there's something strange about this chicken." Strange? What strange? I looked at my kid and he was thoughtfully touching his tongue to a morsel of breast meat on his fork. Inside I had a fit! "Uh, Kid,...if you don't like that I guess I can trade my leg for it." I began but he stopped me. "That's alright, Dad. It's not horrible." I could see the moist flavor bubbles on the surface of his chicken. "Really, I don't mind trading, Kid." He waved me off. "Dad it's actually (Munch!)...mmmm...actually...(Munch! Munch!) well, kind of interesting." I frantically sniffed my chicken leg as if to savor it. "Yes but legs, AH, now that's flavor!" My son: "Yes but this is not just (Munch! Dribble!)...I mean... (Drool! Munch! Dribble! Munch!)this is REALLY GOOD!" No more thoughtfull eating after that. He shoveled it in like there was no tomorrow. "It's so odd that I never realized how good chicken was before!"

From then on he got the breast and I got the leg. I just couldn't bare to withold it from somebody who likes it so much. He's in his twenties now and loves chicken breasts as much as I do. He does remember that there was a time when he didn't find chicken so appealing but he can't remember why.

I

SOME PERSONAL PICTURES

Here's a couple of pictures (above and below) of me surrounded by cartoonist friends, Kali, Margo and Katie. I got the pictures from their blogs. Heh, heh! Eat your heart out guys!

Here I am (above) with Theory Corner fan Sophorn. The man's amazing! He not only draws but builds terrific custom cars as well! The censor stamp is to cover a minor photo distortion that made me appear fatter than I am. I only covered up a little bit of the picture, nothing you'd miss.

Here I am (above) drawing at ASIFA. Once again I used the censor stamp, this time to cover up a tiny distortion in the photo that made me look older than I am. I just covered it up a tad, nothing drastic.


Here I am presenting a cake that Marlo, Katie and Kali made for John's birthday. You don't mind that I used the stamp again do you? It's just a little touch-up. Once again a tiny error in the photo made me look older than I am. Boy, there's a lot of lying camera lenses out there!