FOR YOUR VIEWING PLEASURE: MORE MIKE FONTANELLI!

SOME UNCLE EDDIE PHOTOS

I'm kinda busy tonight so I'll have to put up Mike's pictures tomorrow. I think you'll find it worth the wait. Meanwhile here's some Uncle Eddie photos taken in the backyard of my first house. John needed some pictures so he could try to sell me to TV as a cartoon show host.

THE REMARKABLE MIKE FONTANELLI

It's about time I paid tribute to a terrific artist and a good friend, Mike Fontanelli. Mike is an awesome character designer, a phenominal writer and gag-man, an ace director, a hilarious caricaturist and a legendary oogler of women. The designs on this page were done for Tiny Toons, which was his first character design gig. In other words he did these drawings when he was raw, almost right out of the starting gate. He's even better (and much thinner) now but I don't have his recent work at hand so these will have to do.
Mike grew up in Brooklyn and went to the School of Visual Arts where he studied with Will Eisner. After SVA Mike got a job in a New York book store while he tried to figure out what to do next. While there he did some free drawings for a small-circulation fan magazine which somehow made its way to Los Angeles where Bruce Timm saw it and showed it to John K. John immediately called him and offered him a job. He even offered to pay his plane fare out to LA. The rest is history. Boy, it pays to get published, even in small venues! You never know who might be watching!

This drawing of Buster Bunny (above) is an interesting one for a couple of reasons. Look how happy and energetic it is! It just oozes charisma and appeal! And take a look at the clean-up line. The thick-and-thin is exquisite! Then there's the bear with human feet below. Now all these years later Mike is a rich, ascoted bachleor living with his cheetah and fine art collection high atop a penthouse in Beverly Hills. Really, Mike is carried around everywhere by an army of naked butlerettes. We still eat pizza together but his tasters have to have the first bite. OK, I'm exagerrating just a bit.

WHY ANIME SUCCEEDS

When I first got into the industry I was really impressed by some of the animatics I saw. I remember thinking, "Gee, you don't need to animate some of this stuff! The story is interesting even without animation! And without animation there'd be more time and money to make the drawings really good!" I remembered how much I liked "Crusader Rabbit" when I was a little kid and that was nothing more than a Leica reel. "Roger Ramjet" and "Astro Boy" confirmed the idea.

Of course the biggest advantage of animatic films like anime isn't the low cost or even the potential for better drawings. The biggest advantage is that having no animation forces the filmmaker to look for other ways to make the film interesting. Even the least imaginative animatic makers are likely to consider drawings with drastic angles and stories with a Sergio Leone sensibility. Animatic producers tend to be more aggressive in their search for new ideas and audience-pleasing techniques. With no animation they have to be! You've gotta hand it to them, the animatic people made an asset out of a liability and generated a whole industry (anime) centered around animated films without much animation.

So how does the rest of the animation industry compete with this? It seems to me that the natural way to compete with innovative still drawings is to create innovative moving drawings. That's what John did with "Naked Beach Frenzy," possibly the funniest cartoon made in the last half century. Funny moving drawings require a new way of writing stories. The stories actually have to be funny and they have to lend themselves to the type of humor that funny artists like to draw. Good plots may be less important than good opportunities for funny drawings. Well, it's a big subject and there's no space to cover it here.

Following the lead of anime, it would be nice if cartoons containg funny movement would be cheaper to make. Sometimes I toy with the idea of making cheap, pencil test cartoon shorts. I don't know how often I've heard studio people say things like, "Well it was a lot funnier in the pencil test" or "You should have seen the pencil test!" The fact is that pencil tests are almost always far, far more funny and gutsy than the finished film they're subordinated to. The only problem comes with trying to color them. How do you put color on lines that are all over the place?

SOME ROCK & ROLL FACES

I wish I could remember the name of the library book I got these pictures from. Maybe it was a history of rock & Roll. Anyway, what do you think of them? I love the picture of the Jitterbug musicians on top. Is that Duke Ellington on the left? No, it couldn't be, he'd be older. The guy on the right is surely one of the happiest people ever captured by photography. I know how he feels. It's a great feeling to get some drastic new threads! Other musicians and vocalists (below) include Louis Jordan, Nathaniel Mayer, Little Richard and...who are those 70s guys?

THOUGHTS ABOUT ANIME

You don't need a crystal ball to see that anime is poised to make a big impact on the American market, even bigger than it's made so far. Somewhere down the line someone will make the breakthrough anime that'll push Disney and Pixar off the map. It's only a matter of time.

Me, I'm not an anime fan. I know there's been some good stuff done in that medium but there's also an awful, awful lot of kitch. I mean big, hulking mountains of it! All the cute girls with gigantic, cute Bambi eyes, cute and oh so precious hairstyles, and cute little outfits with cute little boots... Cute! Cute! Cute! Even the guys are cute! Man, I'm getting a sugar overdose here!
And how do you like anime plots ? "Ganzu, the cute princess of cutania must get the power ring back that was stolen by Power lad and his Power Pals. A fight ensues with Power Lad shooting power beams at the cute girls and their cute, fuzzy little animal friends. Eventually Power Lad and his Power Pals realize the've been manipulated by the evil Ganzuni. Another power beam fight ensues with the cute forces in beautiful outfits joining with the powerful Power Pals (also in cute outfits and hairstyles) against Ganzuni. The good guys win. " Aaaaarggghh!!!!!

BTW, I didn't draw the picture of power Lad and his Powerful Beams of Power above.

GWEETINGTH FINE ART LOVERTH!

Can you guess who did these nudes?

WHAT I'M READING NOW

Here it is, the second volume of Simon Callow's biography of Welles. I've only just begun it so I really shouldn't be writing about it so soon. I just can't help it, there's so many interesting things in it. Please forgive my writing and probable typos. I have to write this fast with no time to edit.
Here's an example (above) of the kind of narrative prose Welles liked to write. I knew I'd seen the style before but I couldn't place it until now: it's from Psalm 23 in the King James Bible. In that Psalm each line is split in two: " The Lord is my shepherd / I shall not want. " It's the only poetry in the English language that might surpass Shakespeare, in fact some say that Shakespeare wrote it. Almost every line is two or three simple thoughts jammed together with a natural pause between each thought...it's a very powerfull type of prose. Very noble, very musical.

Shakespeare used it in the beginning of "Romeo and Juliette:" "Two houses / both alike in dignity /in fair Verona /where we lay our scene (maybe I've quoted wrong, I don't have it infront of me)." That's the way Welles wrote about the little boy and his bull: "The boy's name was Chico / and the bull's name was Bonito." Joe Fante, a heavyweight writer himself, is credited with writing the narration but you know that Welles wrote it. All his narratives sound like that. It's a beautiful way to write.

I've only read a dozen pages or so. When I put it down Callow was relating the story of how Welles rehearsed the actors in "Magnificent Ambersons." He recorded the rehearsel on records then played the best parts back when it was time to film it. Welles thought actors always spoke their lines too slow infront of the camera and he wanted to remind them how good it sounded when they spoke fast in rehearsel. Callow thought it had the unexpected effect of making the scenes feel awkward because the actors couldn't find the natural rythym of the present, infront of the camera.

Welles put a lot of emphasis on the reading that was done in rehearsel. I'm proud of myself because I deduced this before I ever read it, in fact I did a blog entry about it. You can hear it in the way he delivered his lines in " Jane Eyre." The lines sound like they're being read! You might think that would be a liability but it wasn't. It sounded great that way! I read ahead in the Jane Eyre sequence and discovered that he walked on the set and started directing from a podium just like a conducter, even though he was only hired to act.

REFRESHED AT THE FOUNTAIN OF MILT GROSS

I spent another afternoon sketching Milt Gross pictures at the ASIFA Archive in Burbank. Once again I'm indebted to Mark Kausler and Steve Worth for making this possible.

Gross really was a genius. The shoulders on this guy (above) are completely detached from the rib cage and yet it works. The head seems to come out of the sternum. How did Gross think of that?

How fearless Gross is! The guy (above) doesn't fall, though he's leaning and is painfully top-heavy. He doesn't fall for the perfectly logical reason that it's funnier if he doesn't.

I love Gross' walks. Strides like this (above) just beg to be animated funny.

This ball-throwing pose (above) probably worked better in print than it would in animation. Even so, the way the forms squash into each other certainly is interesting. Animators shouldn't be put off by the flat, print bias of the pictures. Even the flatest ones are terrific conceptual blockbusters.

MY FAVORITE NAPOLEON STORY

Over the weekend I did some housecleaning and found some books I thought I'd lost. One of them was a terrific book on military tactics. Most of the people who visit here probably aren't interested in this sort of thing but I can't resist relating one of the stories in the book, dealing with Napoleon's famous Italian Campaign.

It seems that Napoleon had a brilliant way of dealing with armies larger than his own. Really big armies usually had two or more commanders. Napoleon would use spies to locate the border that seperated the two commands. He reasoned that this was the area where commanders had the most difficulty in command and control and would offer the least resistance. He would create a breach with artillary then pour a fourth of his force into it. Once in they would quickly dig trenches, effectively splitting the enemy in two.

As soon as the French were dug in they directed all their fire against one of the enemy's halves. Since Napoleon's troops were protected by the ground they could shoot at others without being shot themselves, at least for a while. Sooner or later the enemy's superior numbers would prevail but that's OK. The Frenchmen in the trenches only needed to hold out long enough to pin the enemy down so they couldn't reinforce their friends.

Remember that I said only a fourth of Napoleon's army rushed into the breach and dug trenches? Now the other 3/4 comes into play. They attack the other enemy half. Since Napoleon is directing 3/4 of his troops against an enemy that's only at half strength, he's probably going to win. When he defeats this half he turns his full force on the other half of the enemy that'd been pinned down. Once again he usually prevails because he has his whole force intact and the other side has to make due with half. A nifty tactic, huh?

A WORD ABOUT JOHN K AND CLAMPETT

Before I dive deep into the well of theories again I want to comment on a critical internet article about John K and Clampett which appeared a couple of days ago, and which was linked to without comment from Cartoon Brew. The article made me pretty upset but I'll try to respond with restraint since the author seems to be a nice guy and tried to be fair in his own way.

First off, I was disappointed to see Clampett's work described as crazy, crude and exagerrated. He certainly was all these things (I'm assuming "crazy" was used affectionately) but it seems stingy not to add that he was also crucially inventive and highly entertaining. Sergio Leone, Fellini, Mick Jagger and Elvis were also crude and exagerrated at times. So what?

Clampett's style was summarized as having to do with bulging eyes and rubber-hose limbs. That's OK so far as it goes but where's the rest of the list? I didn't see any mention of Clampett's innovations in comedy, acting, pacing, animation, cartooning, dialogue, editing, and musical application. It's so strange to see the man's whole ground-breaking effort reduced to a couple of insults.

John K got the same harsh treatment. John's work was characterized by naked boobs and farts. Poor John gets no credit for the uptillion drawing, story, dialogue, editing, pacing, acting and musical innovations. The author casually reduces this bulging warehouse of gifts to the animation industry down to...boobs and farts. At the end of the piece he condescendingly pats John on the head by conceding that the pathetic purveyer of farts at least stimulates discussion about animation. Unbelievable.

Now I'm willing to concede that everyone isn't tempramentally suited for outrageous humor. If you don't like that sort of thing, or can only take it in small doses, then it's natural to resist people like Clampett and John, regardless of their innovations. Maybe it's even natural to nitpick about whatever faults they have. That's OK, I understand that. Just be respectfull when criticizing people who are giants in their field. We need these people and they're getting frightningly scarce.

SALLY WORM SWIPED?

Did the latest Wallace and Gromit film, "Curse of the WerRabbit," steal portions of a character design from "Tales of Worm Paranoia?" Here (above) is the suspicious design in the W&G film.

Here (above) is Sally Worm from "Tales of Worm Paranoia." See any similarities? It's probably a coincidence but it makes me wince just the same.

Boy, look at those parallel lines between Sally's hand and arm. Come to think of it, look at the parallel lines on her body in the color picture. And her clasped fingers might have looked better if they'd wrapped around an imaginary ball. Aaaargh! Now that I'm looking at it closely I can see even more mistakes. All I can say is, "Oops!"

A BLOG ABOUT GOING-TO-SLEEP SLEEP FANTASIES

This is a blog about sleep and I thought you guys would rather see these girls on a bed than me. Anyway here's the story.

I'm the only person I know who actually was objectively aware at the exact moment when rambling, try-to-fall-asleep fantasies turned into full-blown sleep. It came about because the phone rang at just that moment and I woke up with the memory still intact. Of course I wrote it down immediately. Here's how it played out.....
I was tired and in order to get to sleep I fantasized about being at a party. Of course the girls at the party all thought I was incredibly sexy and the guys all thought my ideas were brilliant. As the party progressed and my real body came closer and closer to sleep I began to wonder if the dream couple near me were saying things that I hadn't scripted. I thought I was imagining it at first, after all it was my fantasy and people had to say what I wanted them to say. After a moment I realized that I wasn't imagining it. They were speaking independently and it was really bothering me. Then I noticed what was happening to the furniture!

The table leg was slowly sprouting a dull-orange fuzz. This was just as disconcerting as the unscripted dialogue and I was mad that was loosing control over things. I cast a dirty look at the errand couple then shot another glance back at the table leg. The leg was still growing long, orange fuzz and now so was the sofa beside it. In a panic I looked all over the room and saw that everything, even the people were beginning to spout orange fuzz.

Whenever the fuzz from two sources touched each other the fuzz formed a haze of dirty orange color. "No, No , " I thought, "Stop with the haze! I order it!" but the haze areas kept growing. Then I thought, "What the heck! The haze is kind of interesting. So what if the picture and sound is going off? Let it happen!" The universe was disintegrating hand over fist when the phone rang.

HAVE YOU SEEN JOHN'S LATEST POST?

Has everyone here seen John Kricfausi's latest (or nearly the latest) blog entry about his artistic influences? If you haven't then you missed the mother of all animation posts. I predict that copies of that article will be passed around for decades, it's that good!

Of course John discussed his own influences as a way of opening up a wider subject, namely the need for more diversity in animated comedy styles. It seems like all the good draughtsmen are doing Disney, Cartoon Network, Chuck Jones or Spumco. Some artists are doing independent styles but even those tend to fall into two or three catagories. This is very odd because the history of comics and cartoons is so much more diverse than that. Think about Don Martin, Milt Gross, the Fleischers, Jim Tyre, Rod Scribner, Chester Gould, Al Capp, Bakshi, Barney Google, Seuss, Natwick, Iwerks, Plastic Man, Ding Darling, classic kids books...well it would be a long list. The point is that cartooning is beginning to feel narrow and claustrophobic.

I don't know about you but I can't express myself with (for example) Don Bluth-type characters. I'm not knocking Bluth, I have a lot of respect for the guy, but characters drawn that way reflect his life experience, not mine. I grew up feeling a lot of economic insecurity, a lot of lust for women and a real desire to understand the world. Don Martin 's style speaks to me about economic insecurity, Tex & John speak to me about lust, and Clampett, Scribner, Wood, John, the Fleischers and some of the most innovative aspects of Disney speak to me about about exploring the possibility of things. That's the mix that feels right for someone with my background. Someone who grew up differently would have a different set of influences. Why are we both doing Don Bluth's style?

And how about Cartoon Network's style? It's a fine style for humor about nerds and their hip suburban friends. I wish the studio well and have only good feelings about it but I never considered myself a nerd and I'm not really hip...I'm more of a hip wannabe. A big part of my life and comedy experience could never be made to fit into the nerd/hip nexus. I can't express myself in nerdhip. I don't think in those terms.

A lot of classic comedy doesn't reduce to nerd/hip. Jackie Gleason, Sid Caesar, Kovaks, Jack Benny, Chaplin, Clampett Tex and John all did comedy about other things. Me, I think it's funny when you're sitting next to a beautiful girl and her big, mean bruiser of a boyfriend and she's coming on to you to make him jealous. It's funny when you're the only guy without a sandwich at a business meeting and someone's inadvertantly waving their pickle under your nose. It's funny when Moe thinks Larry and Curly are stupid when he's really just as stupid as they are. It's funny when Daffy imitates Danny Kaye or compulsively talks to Elmer when Elmer's trying to sleep. What does any of this have to do with nerd/hip? Where did this one-size-fits-all compulsion come from?

BTW, the caricature above is actually of Alex Baldwin but it looks like John, doesn't it?

ADVICE FROM A CHICK MAGNET

I'd like to introduce all my readers to my friend Scott. No, that's not him above. That's simply the subject of his expertise. Scott is one of the world's formost experts on women. He's also a chick magnet. He isn't quite at Vincent Waller's level but he's only a couple of notches below and that's saying a lot. Scott and I worked together on Tiny Toons and I can tell you that the hall outside of his room was the site of an endless traffic jam caused by all the girls in the office passing and repassing his room on any excuse they could think of. He could have papered the wall with all the phone numbers he got.

The reason I mention Scott is that one day he told me his secret for finding the right women to date. When I heard it my jaw dropped. It was the best advice about women I'd ever heard! In fact, everybody I told it to thought it was the best advice THEY'D ever heard! Honestly, when I told this secret at parties you could have heard a pin drop afterward. This is the atomic bomb of dating secrets. It has to do with two questions that the potential date, or her friends, must answer affirmatively.

Question #1: Does the girl like her dad? Scott will only date women who like their fathers. He reasons that if a girl feels mistreated by her dad she'll spend the rest of her life making other men suffer for it.

Question #2: Does she have brothers or sisters? Scott reasons that only- children are selfish and self-centered. The girl must have siblings. He's also a big believer in birth order. Avoid the last girl born into a big family because she's probably wild.

There it is. Scott told it to me and now I've told it to you.

TWO OVER-RATED "MASTERPIECES"

Here's (above) Manet's famous Olympia painting. It's said to be the painting that began modern art. If that's true then I'll concede it's historical significance but that doesn't mean I have to like it. The lighting is flat, the head looks grafted on, the body is just a line drawing which makes almost no impression on the bed and the woman is sterile and uninspiring. I like most of Manet's paintings but this Mel Ramos-style pop art just doesn't do it for me.

This (above) is a famous Carravagio. I don't like the man. He's a good technician but he has no soul. David Hockney thinks this picture was painted using projection optics and I'll bet he's right. And has there ever been a more bored, kitchy and uninspiring model in the history of fine art? Alright, there's "Olympia" but I'm not counting her.

THE INCAS WERE FUNNY!

I'm amazed at how often funny sculptures appear in collections of Pre-Columbian (i.e., before Columbus) art. The pictures I've been able to post here are just the tip of the iceberg. They get a lot funnier than this. The L.A. County Museum of Art has a terrific collection of funny, Virgil Parch-type sculptures, some of them more than 1500 years old. I'll post some pictures whenever I can find some good ones. You'll laugh out loud when you see them.


It's disconcerting to think that the earliest known peoples to appreciate formal comedy might have been the Central and South Americans. Among the 4 or 5 major nations only the Aztecs seemed to be serious and straight-laced about art. The others got jokes in every chance they could.

Maybe ancient South American comedy isn't better known because serious South Americans of the present are embarrassed by it. Or maybe the scuptures just don't seem like high art because they're funny. Anyway, my advice to time travelers going back to the golden age of that continent is to carry plenty of whoopee cushions and joy buzzers.

LOVE THOSE CALIFORNIA WATERCOLORISTS

More pictures from the super-cool California Watercolor movement of the 1940s: Hardy Gramatky (above), Erle Loran (middle), and Dong Kingman (below). Click to enlarge.

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.