LITTLE ANNIE FANNIE LAID BARE

Here's (above) a Little Annie Fannie episode from September 1963. Attributed artists: Kurtzman, Will Elder and Russ Heath. I love the "dipped-in-strong-tea-and-burgundy" color scheme. Here's a treat (above): Kurtzman's original watercolor painting of the same page! All the colors we associate with Annie Fannie are here: brown, yellow, orange, red, and green. I think I prefer this rough color scheme to the finished product which mutes the colors to make the word balloons pop better.

Can anyone do a better job than I have at describing the difference between Elder's final color and the Kurtzman rough? I know there's more to it than what I described.


Here's (above) Kurtzman's original black and white value treatment. The first panel is a whole, self-contained art lesson in how to contrast values for maximum impact. Kurtzman's made me a believer in the idea that you should always take time to do a monochrome value treatment first.

NEWSPAPERS IN 1890 BETTER THAN OUR OWN?

It's hard to believe but newspapers in the late 1800s were more attractive in one respect than papers are now. The biggest difference is that old newspapers relied mostly on pictures that were drawn. An artist can draw a news event, say a murder, in the most exciting way possible. He'll show you the shooter (top picture, above) sneaking up to the victim's home and taking a bead on her. A photographer can't do that. He's stuck with showing up the next day and taking taking a picture of an empty house surrounded by yellow police tape.

Even televised news is at a disadvantage compared to artist-rendered print media. How would the TV news cover an event like the one shown below where a buffalo went on the rampage? If the cameraman didn't happen to be there all he can do is photograph witnesses talking about it.

We all know that print media is eventually going to lose out to digital media but, given it's magnificent history, it should go down swinging, using every asset at its command. It should tell the news with both art and photography.

BTW, my sources for these pictures, The Police Gazzette and Frank Leslie's ,were weeklies and had a bigger budget for drawings than did dailies of the time.

THE GREEK TRAGIC HERO AND HOW THE IDEA RELATES TO CARTOONING

Believe it or not, the Greek concept of tragedy applies to animation and cartooning. By "Greek" I mean the Homeric Greeks. According to historian Warner Yaeger the Greeks thought about tragedy differently than we do. We pity tragic heroes, they admired them.

The tragic hero led a deliberately unbalanced life. He devoted all his energy into becomming supremely good at one important thing. He may have been a lousy father and an indifferent husband, he may have had no table manners at all, but in his field of expertise he was unbeatable. Of course this skill came at a great price.

The Greeks believed that sooner or later the tragic hero would be brought down by his inability to cope with menace from the part of life that he neglected. They admired the kind of man who took this kind of risk. Modern people admire balance. The Greeks (before Aristotle's time) admired imbalance, though they thought only special people were suited for it.

How does this relate to cartooning? If you have skill and a special passion for it the Greeks say "Go for it! Go all the way and don't look back. " You'll definitely pay the price, but it's worth it.

I LOVE CROWDS!

I love crowd shots. They remind me how much fun it is to be with a lot of people who like the same things I like. One of my all-time favorite crowd photos is this one (above) in what appears to be a nightclub. The people look like they came out of an old master's painting like Gericault's "Raft of Medusa." This is every performers dream, to be surrounded by listeners who "get it," who are on the same wavelength. Click on the picture to see the detail.

Crowds look better in magazines than in newspapers. Papers just can't resolve the faces, at least not photo faces. Drawn crowds like the Wood drawing above look good in any print medium. If you're a print cartoonist learn how to draw funny crowds!


I know who did this crowd: Weegee the great New York tabloid photographer. A gambler's just been shot and a torrent of humanity streams out of the tenaments to get a look. It has that gritty 50's feeling. Humanity is portrayed as consisting of angels and demons with every shade between.

DRAWINGS BY JOHN K. & CHUCK JONES

Here's a rough (above) that John did for Ren's opening shot in "Sven Hoek", R&S second season. The shape and height of the chair is hilarious, the placement of the picture frame is perfect. Like everything John draws the line is confident, the silhouette lets lots of air in and the pose is funny as it can be. Notice how he avoids "twins" in the legs and feet. Click to enlarge. Another John drawing (above), probably from the same show. I don't think this was intended for production. John was always drawing things like this on scrap paper to show people how to draw the characters. Look how tight the sausage of Stimpy's body is! And the emphasis on volume actually makes the drawing funnier!

Here's a xerox of a drawing that Chuck Jones did, maybe in the late 70s. Maybe it was a telephone doodle. The face on the right is an interesting blend of flat and constructed style. There's something offputting, even evil, about the characters but the skill is undeniable.

MORE ABOUT DELSARTE

Readers who hated the last post I did about Delsarte will probably hate this one too. It's a hard sell to convince people that Delsarte's old-fashioned "tie-the-pretty-girl-to-the railroad-tracks" school of acting is actually worth studying.


  Here's the picture (above) I posted a few days ago. Look at it closely. The woman refers to the man as a giant, yet she's looking down and her hand is at waist-level. Why isn't her hand way up? She should be pointing up to the sky, shouldn't she? The guy's a giant after all. When she says he acted like a dwarf she looks upward disdainfully. What's going on? How come at the mention of "dwarf" she looks up, where she didn't at the mention of "giant?" Why is the orator defeating our expectations? Why don't her expressions and attitudes describe what's happening in the dialogue?

The Delsartean answer is that her gestures are describing what's really happening in the scene. the emotional point of the scene is that she's heart-broken with disappointment. The description of the guy is secondary, and is only an excuse to convey her emotion. The idea that gesture shouldn't slavishly follow text is extremely interesting. I remember a quote from Norbert Weiner: It is a cybernetic law that the more expected a communication is, the less information it contains." In other words, gestures that only mirror the dialogue are boring. Gesture should ADD to what the dialogue tells us!


Delsarte is full of ideas like this. How about the one where he says gesture should always preceed dialogue? Or repeated expressions of the same thought should always be identical? Or never dwell on the final word? Or geture should always be choreographed? Or...well, you see what I mean. It doesn't matter if the man is right. What's important is that he stimulates our imaginaton!

MORE CARICATURES OF ME!!!

Here's more caricatures of me by John Kricfalusi. The one on top has ears growing out of my cheeks, little curly hair whisps and lemur fingers. The expression defies description. It's an emotion that science hasn't catalogued yet. I see the figure as something out of "Island of Dr. Moreau":

"Men die under the lash...of his TORTURING WHIP...
Women SHUDDER at the touch ...of his CRUEL CARESS!
There's no escape...from this HALF MAN/HALF ANIMAL'S PARADISE OF TORTURE!"
Here I am (above) as a rat. I seem to be a likable rat. I have a curly, little whisp of an upper lip with piano keys dangling from it, a cavernous ear, and eyes that look like custard cups with a couple of flies sitting on them.
Oops! Here's the beast man again:
"What FIENDISH EVIL lurks behind this face? What WEIRD VENGEANCE is brewing!?"

JUST ONE MORE WORD ABOUT BOMBSHELLS

I have no idea how blogger will arrange the pictures I scanned in. Probably in the ugliest way possible. Oh well, nothing can dampen my enthusiasm for this post. I love talking about blonde bombshells. It was one of the greatest entertainment innovations of the 50s. It was not only good for busty actresses and scandal magazines but for popular literature, art, comedy, and the morale of the whole civilized world.



So far as I know the bombshell was invented by Norma Jean...I don't know her last name...the genius who transformed herself into Marylin Monroe. She was already beautiful but she wanted more than beauty, she was looking for something funnier and more flambouyant. She began by imitating Jean Harlow's look in "Dinner at Eight" then she slowly personalized the look. In the act of stylizing herself she helped to stylize the whole era she lived in. Charismatic, super-stylized characters like Marylin and Elvis provoke new structures in the media that portrays them, new kinds of stories, music, film making and acting. They're catalysts who stimulate everyone else's creativity. No wonder Arthur Miller fell in love with her.

INTRODUCING MILT GRAY'S MS. VIAGRI AMPLETEN

I wonder if blonde bombshells are making a comeback? For some artists they never really left. One of those is my friend Milt Gray who's just published his own how-to-draw-the-bombshell book (above). Milt is from the Jessica Rabbit, Bill Ward, Eric Stanton school of girl art. He goes bananas over a certain part of the female anatomy. Can you guess which part?
The pictures in the book are character layouts from a 12-minute sexy adventure film he's working on. He estimates that he'll have to generate about 15,000 drawings so down the line he'll need some help. If you need a job and can draw or animate this sort of thing, let him know. He plans to put up a web site soon at www.miltongray.comAt the moment the only way to get the book is from Astounding Comics, 224 E. Orange Grove, Burbank 91502, tel: (818) 953-7234 (What's the store's net address? Aaaarrgghh! I forgot to ask and it's a trillion o'clock at night as I write this). The store accepts mail orders.


By the way, You should also look up an article Milt wrote on animation timing for John Kricfalusi's blog. It's flat out one of the best things I've ever read on the subject!

MOVEMENT THEORIES OF DELSARTE

A while back I talked about Laban's theories of gesture. Maybe I should give equal time to gesturist I like a lot better: Francois Delsarte. Delsarte was the 19th century theoritician who came up with the over-the-top acting style you see in some silent films, the ones where the poor old lady is thrown out of her house by the evil, black-caped landlord. The technique is so old-fashioned and so funny-looking that our entire modern theory of acting exists to refute and bury it. That's too bad because nothing better has ever been invented.

I'm not saying that we should throw out all the great performances of the last 100+ years and go back to stylized caricature. What I'm saying is that we should keep what was of value in Delsarte: strong sillouettes, an emphasis on style that seems real rather than realism, and acting with the whole body rather than the face where it's appropriate.


If you think Delsarte was only studied by campy, second-rate actors, think again. Among his advocates were dancerIsadora Duncan and fundamentalist preacher Billy Sunday (above and below). I'd like to add Lawrence Olivier but that's a guess and I haven't read it anywhere.
Billy Sunday is the best American orator I've ever heard. You can hear him here at: http://billysunday.org/audio/prohibition.wav
Delsarte was a elocution theorist as well as a movement specialist. Billy Sunday didn't try to tone down Delsarte, he pumped it up and exagerrated it. He was the most popular preacher of his day. I've never seen a film of Billy but I've seen a lot of still pictures. He must have put on quite a show.

GRIGOR EFTIMOV...GENIUS!

Grigor is a theme park caricaturist on the East Coast, New Jersey I think. The man is a genius! He solved one of the most difficult problems in all of portraiture....how do you caricature a perfectly normal face? It's easy to exagerrate a nose that's already a little long. What do you do when the nose is perfect and so is every other appendage? No problem, says Grigor.

In the example above Grigor takes the dreaded perfect nose (The guy's nose, that is), pulls it out of the face and points it upward. That's a risky thing to do. The guy's nose doesn't naturally point up. You could lose the likeness. Grigor seems to have discovered what John K discovered, namely that you can invent characteristics as long as the drawing still FEELS like the person. I'll point out that Grigor also gave the guy a muzzle he didn't have before and a cow pie in place of his hair. Talk about creating a muzzle, Grigor gave this girl (above) a muzzle fit for a giraffe. And she's a good-looking girl too! Did he worry about losing the likeness? Did the crowd string him up? Nope! He fearlessly laid on the muzzle and it worked! Of course it fits into the crescent moon of the boyfriend's face.

Unbelievable! Here (above) he makes the girl's face huge then turns around and makes the guy's face even bigger! Does Grigor know no fear!? What if it hadn't worked!!??? The man is the Evil Keneival of caricaturists! I'll add that Grigor also does realistic paintings of distinction. A tip of the Uncle Eddie cap to Grigor Eftimov, caricaturist extraodinaire!

I"M GOING TO LEARN A FEW WORDS OF YIDDISH

This is what I'm reading now: "Born to Kvetch" by Michael Wex. It's a book about Yiddish which has the distinction along with Jive of being one of the world's only deliberately funny languages. I've only just started it so I apologize in advance if I make any factual errors.

Yiddish is a deliberate corruption of German with a lot of slavic words thrown in. It's a relatively new language, only a few hundred years old. It began when German Jews decided to come up with their own version of German so their kids wouldn't be assimilated into what Jews considered an alien culture and religion. Yiddish isn't only different than German, it's a parody of it. It's also a parody of Christianity.

The language can get pretty insulting but the insults are so funny sometimes that it's hard to get mad about it. In that sense it's like Jive, the language that some urban American blacks speak. Jive isn't supposed to be understood by the white man. It's deliberately full of funny sexual and racial references that would put off white people, if they only understood it. It's a funny language that's meant to use humor to seperate black people from the mainstream. Jive is fast disappearing as is Yiddish. Now that Jews have Israel and blacks have their freedom the need for seperation is slowly disappearing. Israel officially discourages Yiddish, except for scholars who study it as an academic subject in the university.

The title of the book mentions a Yiddish word, "kvetch." According to the writer all Yiddish speakers constantly complain (kvetch), whether there's anything to complain about or not. Yiddish-speaking Jews cultivated this to remind themselves that nothing will be right for them till they have a homeland of their own in Israel. The complaints are made tolerable by humor and it's no accident that Yiddish speakers helped to make America one of the funniest countries in the world. In Japan students of English sometimes study American jokes because it's believed that humorous speech is so widely used here that they'll be earmarked as foreigners if they don't make frequent jokes in the middle of a converstion.

I wish I had the energy to look up a few common Yiddish words to include here but I'm so sleepy that that I can barely finish typing this sentense. When I do learn some Yiddish words and phrases I want to move on to select Italian words and gestures. I also want to pick up some Jive. With all these funny linguistic treasures around us it seems foolish not to dabble.

DARE TO BE TWO-DIMENSIONAL!

It seems to me that too many dramatic animated features labor under the assumption that audiences want to see three-dimensional (ie., psychologically three-dimensional) characters in the lead roles. That can't be true! true.

Would the Lone Ranger show (above) really have been improved if the ranger had taken off his mask and said to Tonto: "Tonto, it's not easy helping other people day in and day out. Did it ever occur to you that maybe I'd like some help too? I'm a man and a man has needs!" No, it wouldn't have been improved! The third dimension is not for the Lone Ranger or any other mythic character.


Aren't you glad that James Bond (above) is two-dimensional? What about Snow White in the film by that name? There's not a three-dimensional character in the film. "Pinnochio" contains only one 3-D (actually 2 1/2 D) character, Jiminy Crickett, and he's not even the character the film is named for. "Alice in Wonderland" and "Fantasia" contain no 3-D characters. The early, vintage Disney didn't believe in three-dimensions and he was right. Maybe he took his cue from the best children's writers of them all, the Brothers Grimm (below), who avoided 3-D like the plague.

An added benefit of committing to 2 or 2 1/2 dimensional characters is that it solves a lot of story and directorial problems. 2-D characters are naturally extroverted. They want to do things. They want to talk and act in a stylized way. It's easier to fit music to them. Stories with these type of characters exert pressure on writers to come up with momentum, thrills and suspense. Dare to be two-dimensional!

BOOTY FROM A TRIP TO THE LIBRARY KIDS DEPARTMENT

Depressing, horrific, post-modern kids books have been in fashion for years. Here's one (above) called "Spooky ABC" by Eve Merriam, illustrations by Lane Smith. This one happens to be about Halloween but there were plenty more in the same eerie style about more conventional things. All the time I was scanning these pictures I was trying to recollect where I'd seen this style before and it finally came to me: in "Silent Hill," the horror video game about pervasive evil and dismemberment. These ABC pictures are by Lane Smith, two-time winner of the New York Times Best Illustrated Book award. The book is one of the big, expensive ones. Can't publishers find a way to bring the prices down?
This green picture of the house is also by Lane Smith. So far as I can guess it appears to show a bunch of convict slave zombies carrying the kid and his house to Hell, or perhaps to outer space.

The gigantic, yellow, expensive blob of a kid is, believe it or not, from a story Dr. Seuss wrote in the 1970s. Why do minimalist books cost so much?

When my kids were young I couldn't get them to read most of their illustrated books. They found my bound copies of Carl Barks' Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge books and poured over them, even before they knew how to read.

WHY CARTOONS FAVOR ZOMBIE AUDIENCES

It's amazing how many vintage cartoons contain zombie audience scenes like this one (above) from Clampett's "Henpecked Duck."
Look at the audience behind Daffy. The characters in the background painting are hazy and ghost-like, with blank faces as if they were just bussed in from Hell.

Here the audience has acquired some definition but they're still engulfed by an eerie mist and are lit from only one direction. Why did so many old-time directors favor this kind of weird treatment? The obvious answer is that drawing each individual head in the crowd would have been time-consuming and take too much attention away from the main characters. Look at these sharply-drawn Jack Davis heads (above). I don't know about you but I spend a lot more time looking at the faces in the crowd than the people in the car. So that might be the answer.....but it's not the only possible answer. Maybe zombie audiences were just plain funny.