STILL MORE ABOUT THE BARRIER BOOK

Mike Barrier's book continues to amaze.

For a while after Harman and Ising (third and sixth from the left in the group shot below) left, Iwerks (with Disney, above) was the only first string animator in the studio. To maximize Iwerks' impact Walt forced a system of assistants and inbetweeners on him, which he apparently resented.

I'm not surprised. It must be hard to come up with something good when a bunch of newcomers are let loose to redraw your scenes. I imagine Iwerks had to lose a lot of time supervising the new guys even though the new system was presented to him as a "time saver." Eventually Iwerks quit.

It didn't matter, Disney continued to tinker with improvements to the system until he came up with the collaborative way of doing things that we have today: the one where animators work from exposure sheets done by someone else, on a story they may have had no part in making, where someone else takes the guts out of their drawing and acting, where every drawing is supposed to be "on model," and their scenes are expected to fit seamlessly into the next guy's scenes.

Compare this to the early days of animation where an animator might be told simply to have his character fight with a turkey for half a minute. The new system might tell the animator exactly what frame the character should lift his leg during the fight. Some animators probably thrived under this kind of control but others like Iwerks must have been disheartened. You get the feeling that a kind of innocence and fun was removed from animation around 1930.

Was Disney's a bad system? No, of course not. It has obvious assets. If an animator works with assistants of his own choosing he really can go faster and sometimes the assistant is a better draughtsman than the animator. Not only that but animators like Scribner and Sibley managed to find sympathetic directors who would give them wider creative latitude. It's hard to imagine that animation's golden age could have occurred under the old system...even so.... did we lose something in exchange for what we gained? Is there a way to get that freshness back?

Just for the heck of it here's a picture of Disney's very first studio in Kansas City. That's the Laugh-O-Gram office on the second floor above the parked car on the right.

MORE ON BARRIER'S "THE ANIMATED MAN"

I'm only 20% through the book but I can report that what I've read so far is pretty amazing. If Mike is right then a lot of the character of the later studio was formed in the late twenties when Disney was struggling to keep his head above water amid betrayals by artists and predatory competitors.

A lot of his problems stemmed from location. He was trying to get an animation studio started in L.A. when all the good and experienced animators were in New York. He had to rely a lot on the few experienced people he was able to lure to Los Angeles and each one in their turn betrayed him, some at the worst possible time when his whole career hung in the balance.


He didn't have the experienced animators to compete with the East Coast so he had to rely on a technical innovation, sound, to stay in the race. The New York animators were funnier, gutsier, and were better at acting, but the people they were working for were slow to adapt to sound, which proved to be their undoing. Against great odds Disney (along with Carl Stalling who may also have betrayed him) made sound work.

The book doesn't say so but it's hard to resist the conclusion that Disney began to believe that technology and advances in technique were more reliable allies than people. You could hire a funny guy and, sure the films would be funnier, but then he'd leave you. But if you had a patent or a unique organizational technique...well, that's something you can cling to. Disney had a lot of people problems in the late 20s and the accounts are heartbreaking to read. In the absense of star animators Disney made a big effort to educate the artists he did have. He'd even drive them to the art classes he arranged. Sadly a lot of them didn't take it seriously and most tried to get out of it. The animators who left Disney tried to make a go of it in set-ups of their own but were too mild mannered to survive in the business world. You wonder what would have become of animation if these mild people had been its only champions.

Now I know some fans of the Fleischers would say, "So what if Walt had gone under? New York was turning out gutsier animation and they'd have gone to sound eventually. Walt was stressing out because he was trying to start a studio on the wrong coast. His effort to get it started on uncongenial ground (the West Coast) ended up warping and twisting the medium and we've never recovered." I'm dying to see what answer the book makes to this.

My own suspicion is that New York animation was dying for reasons that had nothing to do with Disney but that's a guess and I could be completely wrong. After all, Popeye was popular enough to get an Oscar one year.

BTW, the terrific Disney caricatures on this page were done by Fred Osmond. They're ripped off from his blog: http://cartoonsandcaricatures.blogspot.com/2005_07_01_archive.html

WHO IS MORE BEAUTIFUL?

Sorry, I got busy and now I'm sleepy and don't have the stamina to put up a normal post. I don't think I'll disappoint anyone though. What do you think of these pictures from my archive? Beautiful women all but my question to the readers is, who is the most beautiful? I vote for Ingrid Bergman. She's sexy but also kind and intelligent, at least in the picture. No offence to fans of sexy, mean and stupid, which has its appeal.

Anyway, here's Bridget Bardot (above).



How about Gina Lollobrigida ?

Lauren Bacall?

Ingrid Bergman?



Audry Hepburn?

Bridget Bardot? I happened to have another picture!

MY FAVORITE BOOK

I'm embarrassed to say that my all-time favorite book is one that I still haven't finished, Homer's "Odyssey." I first encountered it in an old-fashioned literature anthology that we used in 3rd or 4th grade. I was impressed by the earnestness with which the stories were told. The author really seemed to believe that reading about Ulysses was the most important thing you could do, and of course he was right.


My favorite character was the cyclops. He seemed oddly human and appealing but these qualities didn't prevent him from being single-minded about eating the Greeks. I remember thinking how strange it was that the cyclops could think and speak but still have no mercy on his fellow creatures (sounds like animation writers, doesn't it?). It was the first inkling I had that the world contains some puzzling characters whose motives can never be understood but who must nevertheless be resisted.


Years went by without any thought of The Odyssey then I saw "The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad" in a theater. Wow! My kid heart almost jumped out of my chest! I instantly recognized my old friend the cyclops, made even more terrifying by Harryhausen and Bernard Herriman...Sinbad was from Iraq but the feel of the story was unmistakably Homeric...minus the cheesy Hollywood touches. I began to think of the Greeks as the storytellers who delivered the goods, who could explain life to me better than anyone else.

Still later I saw "Jason and the Argonauts" and that firmed it up. There again was the Homeric sensibility even though the story was written by someone else. I loved the ideal that permeated the film: manliness, intellect, courage and a thirst for adventure. Isn't that what we all crave? I don't claim to possess any of these Homeric qualities but having them in front of me as distant ideals changed the course of my life.

I don't think the picture above is of Homer but it's the way I like to think of him so it gets a place here. I mentioned earlier that I never finished The Odyssey (I listened to an unabridged tape set of it a couple of times but maybe that doesn't count). Maybe I never will finish it. I have a taste for modern stories now and the Odyssey's way of telling a story seems too old-fashioned to me. The really odd thing is that I can still say with complete sincerity that it was and is the most influential book I've ever read. It's amazing how even a small dose of Homer goes a very long way.

NEGLECTED ANATOMY LESSON #1

GOOD LORD! Look what women have to put up with! NO WONDER there are so many lesbians!!!! Um...wait a minute, that's a bit emotional. Let me start again...

I know a number of art students hang out on this site and I thought I'd post something just for them. My guess is that anatomical drawing teachers are pretty selective about what they teach. That's a pity. The day will come when students will need to draw the omitted item and they'll be totally unprepared! Well, worry not, Theory Corner is here to help! Get out your pencils and notebooks and get ready to take notes!

NEGLECTED ANATOMY LESSON #1

MALE BACK HAIR




Hmmm. Let's try to make some sense of this picture (above). It looks like the hair occurs in tufts. The pattern here is kind of mangy. It looks like a patch of moth-eaten buffalo skin that I found in an attic once. Amazingly the biggest tufts occur at the sides, near the bottom of the rib cage...what's that about? And looking closer I see the rib tufts seem to have sent out feelers to the shoulder tufts. Hmmm. Are the tips of the shoulders hairless? That's incredible!

Phew! Well that's enough with that picture!

Here's (above) a picture of a less mangy back. It looks like the hair is combed away from the spine. You don't suppose the guy's wife combs this stuff do you? And what are those little correction-tape notes? Why are the hairs in need of correction?

Notice that the neck is hairless. I assume that's because he cuts it. I mean surely nature wouldn't be so cruel as to just start the hair abruptly like it's a jacket he's wearing.

Man! Nature dealt this guy (above) a bad hand! Or maybe it didn't. I showed this to my daughter and asked her if she found it attractive. She of course said no (actually "Ew!" was the word) but then I asked if she'd feel the same way if she liked the guy. To my amazement she said something like, "Oh, well that's different. If I liked the guy the hair wouldn't matter." Isn't that interesting? I'll end this lesson on the comforting thought that a providence seems to take care of us males. Women are somehow prevented from realizing how ugly we men are. Isn't that wonderful?

DAUMIER CARICATURE SCULPTURES

Here's some Daumier caricatures of French bureaucrats of the mid-1800s. Neat, huh!?

THE PRICE WE PAY FOR STORY

[NOTE: Blogger (or is it YouTube?) doesn't support archived YouTube videos that are more than a year or so old. This post relies on video reference and suffers from the loss. Even so, the text is still worth reading and the subject is an important one.]

I like a good story, even in short TV cartoons (this page is about TV shorts), but I sometimes have to remind myself that story comes at a price, sometimes a very high price.

It's a case of losing something to gain something. With story-emphasis you lose or drastically reduce the likelihood of humor, good music, memorable performance, innovation, atmosphere, funny cartooning and funny animation. What do you get in return? So far as I can tell...momentum. You're less likely to get up to get a cheese sandwich if you're wondering whether Scooby Doo and his friends will discover that corrupt real-estate dealers are behind the so-called haunted house. Is the price worth it? Watch the story-light cartoons on this page and judge for yourself.





One of the greatest casualties of today's extreme story emphasis has been music. Can any story that animation writers are likely to come up with match the entertainment value of Cab Calloway's band in the "Snow White" film above (topmost)? Nowadays studio musicians are given a cartoon after it's already been written and animated. Musicians are almost an afterthought when budgets are figured out. Does that make sense? Isn't music the most fundamental of all the arts?




And what about atmosphere and texture? How do you like the atmosphere in "Mysterious Mose" (second film from the top, above)? Would a cartoon with story emphasis have had time to play out the rich atmosphere and gags in Betty's bedroom? Would the story that replaced the atmosphere likely have been as memorable or as funny? Would "Bimbo's Initiation" (above) have been improved with the addition of more story?

[Chuck Jones came up with a memorable story for "Scaredy Cat" (later remade as "Claws for Alarm") but that was more a situation than a story. Arguably situations fit short subjects a lot better than stories.]




Another casualty of story has been performance. Great cartoon performances need time to play out. Story-emphasis cartoons are always racing ahead to the next plot point. What's the rush? We have to remind ourselves that stories exist to justify and give context to great performances. Audiences crave great performances, that's why we have the Oscars every year.