CARTOON ACTING

Animation acting isn't the same as live-action acting. Our medium requires that whatever action we draw also moves funny. That means the story has to be written with cartoon posing in mind.

In the action above, the story point might have been satisfied by having a nervous character point to the ground and say, "Here! Dig here!" In the drawings above I use twice as many words as that. Why? Because certain actions look good in cartooning and pointing is one of them. I just wanted to milk the drawing opportunity. The words are repeated simply as an excuse to have fun by drawing more pointing poses. Of course the story has to contain characters that would plausibly act like this. Stories written by writers rather than cartoonists seldom do.

WHAT IS GOOD ACTING?

My intention in this article is to contrast what I consider flawed acting with a sample of the genuine article. The flawed acting is contained in the student film above, a two minute 3D animated film called "Interview." This film is far better than a lot of student work I've seen and I have to say I enjoyed it in spite of the fact that I'm about to rip it. My apology to the talented, deliberately anonymous filmmaker who I hope never reads this. OK, watch the clip then come back and we'll talk about it....

Well, what did you think? My problem with it is that the character is simply giving us a graphic description of what the words say. The visual doesn't add anything. In other words, they're's not acting. Good acting isn't just mouthing the words. Good acting is performance. Good acting is just like tight-rope walking or juggling or ballet dancing. You have to pull off something difficult and entertaining that an audience would be willing to pay for; something they'll imitate and talk about the next day.

A good actor creates a memorable character. He's not content to settle for acting that's simply "convincing." Convincing behavior is all around me, right outside my window and it's free. I don't need to pay an actor for it. What I am willing to pay for is hyper-reality: clever, beautiful, fun artifice that I'm willing to accept as real but isn't. Watch the Peter Lorre clip below and you'll see all these factors operating. Lorre could have played the role as a straight-forward psycho thug. Instead he creates a character who's a sickly, spacey, oddly-appealing troll. See what you think!

MORE RUBENS!

I hadn't intended to put up another fine art post so soon but I'm too sleepy to write something original and these Rubens drawings really are worth seeing. Be sure to click to enlarge.

The picture of the young girl above is from 1630 or so, done in red and black chalk with a little red ink brushed in and with white chalk for corrections. This stands out even among Rubens' other drawings. The girl is a specific person. We can see how in real life she'd be riddled with flaws as we all are, and yet at the same time she exemplifies an ideal of grace, depth and intellect.

I may have posted this one before, I can't remember. It's a study for a picture showing Daniel in the Lion's den.

I can't remember what this drawing was for. Maybe a crucifiction scene. The right side of the body and the elbow in particular leap out of the drawing. The figure has incredible solidity and weight.

BABY ANATOMY

Have you ever noticed that babies have an expressive furrow above their eyebrows?

It's not the result of a bulging skull. Here (above) you can see the furrow moves independently of the skull. It seems to be brought about by a muscle that's much more subtle in adults.

My guess is that the furrow exists to make crying expressions read better. Nature really wants us to pay attention to crying infants.

Babies cry a lot broader than adults. They put their whole face into it. This (above) is an interesting picture. Look at the way the baby's chin is tucked up under his lip and the way the lip covers it.

Why on Earth do babies have such big sex organs?

And why are their chins and lower jaws so small? You don't see any babies with Katherine Hepburn chins.

MORE ABOUT T. S. SULLIVANT

T. S. Sullivant fans should be in heaven now because John K wrote something about Sullivant at the same I started this. If you haven't read it then run, don't walk, over to John's blog "All Kinds of Stuff' and read the entry, "Being Enslaved" which is a brilliant argument for originality in character design, exemplified by Sullivant. I'm incredibly busy today so my own Sullivant entry is much more modest. I simply note my own discovery that he did some of his best work when he was in his 60's. Imagine that! The picture above was done in 1921 when he was 67 years old! For comparison, Vlaminck petered out when he was 30. Boy, you never know when the axe is going to fall!

Jim Woodring, who wrote the article I'm referencing (The Comics Journal, special edition, winter 2002), says he's seen some of the originals and they appear to have been chipped and scraped with a knife in an effort to make the lines look scratchy. Fascinating! My dad was an amateur pen and ink artist and he was always scraping his pictures with a razor blade. More than once he told me that half the work on a picture is done after it's drawn. I wonder if he picked that up from Sullivant?

A COUPLE MORE FAUVE PICTURES

Most of the cartoonists who visit here hate the Fauves. Me, I love them. Here's (above) a 1906 Derain showing the Thames near Charing Cross bridge in London. His color seems to have poured down into the water, caught fire, then was guided toward the indigo bridge by seething bits of green energy. What's not to like?

It would be a mistake to think of this as some kind of drug-induced LSD vision. Derain uses false colors in order to make us realize that the colors we see every day are just as bizzare. We should see color the way a formerly blind man would see them on his first few minutes of sight. For such a man shadows wouldn't be subordinated to local color, they'd be independent forms. Lines would just be lines, they wouldn't define a shape and colors would battle for dominance. This is the violent, alien world Derain paints for us!

Here (above) is Vlaminck, also 1906. Red leaves on the red trees are no longer content to be decoration. They radiate and burn themselves into the blue sky behind them. Leaves seperate from the trees and gyrate in mid-air. The red and pink path carries this crazy energy to other trees. It's an alien force being unleashed, a force that was there all the time but we never noticed it.

Of course I'm only guessing that this is what Vlaminck had in mind. Artists need to have fantasies about the pictures they paint so they can see their subjects in new and exciting ways, and the same goes for viewers.

Here (above) is Matisse's famous green stripe painting, also 1906 I think. The face is both flat and three-dimensional. The colors in the backdrop refuse to be background and come forward to compete with the foreground. The face plane is stressed and appears to be in danger of splitting.

The green strip painting influenced a lot of painters in Matisse's time and continues to exert an influence today. Here (above) is a Matisse-influenced face by illustrator Phillip Burke. The surface tension is much reduced from the Matisse original but the color is still exciting.

A THEORY CORNER EDITORIAL

To Theory Corner Men:

Men, let's face it. We've been selfish. We never talk to women the way they want to be talked to, the way they CRAVE to be talked to. They want their men to hold their hands and talk to them Don Juan de Marco-style, like this:

"There are some women...fine featured...a certain texture to the hair, a curve to the ears that sweeps like an eternal nautilus...these women have fingers with the same sensitivity as their feet...and when you touch their knuckles it's like pressing your hands around their knees..and touching this tender, fleshy part of their fingers is the same as brushing your hands around their thighs...and..."

OK, it sounds hokey to us but women eat this stuff up. And if they like it so much, why not give it to them? Consider that one half the world (men) has it in their power to make the other half of the world (women) substantially happier without spending a single cent. What a huge improvement for such a small effort!

I hear you say that that modern women would never fall for something this corny. NOT TRUE!

I've tried this on my family and female friends and it worked 100% of the time! I don't mean I tried to seduce them, just the opposite. I bragged before hand that I could get a reaction from them, whether they liked it or not, with over-the-top purple prose, then I read the dialogue hesitatingly from a dog-eared piece of paper in the presence of other people. Even under these circumstances, even with the most skeptical of women, after only a couple of minutes they were all reduced to shell-shocked puddles. Don't take my word for it, try it yourself and improve the world.

BTW, the picture is by the young Robert Crumb.