Here's a quick sketch I did while leaning outside my car window. All the time I was driving there were great cloud formations but I couldn't get my hands free to draw. What a pity; no record will ever exist of the flottila of battleships chasing the runaway amoebas or the indian bracing himself to get hit with pies. Finally these came along, the caterpillar with a bonnet and the people in the school bus throwing dogs and cats out the window. It was too good to pass up! I pulled over to the shoulder and drew fast with cars whizzing by only a few feet from my paper.
Here, to fill out the post, is Jerry Lewis's famous elevator scene from "The Errand Boy."
Here are a couple of sketches featuring Sid Caesar, Carl Reiner and Howard Morris. If you're seeing them for the first time then I envy you.
I love sketch comedy and it breaks my heart that we so infrequently see this kind of thing in animation. I'd love to do some short cartoons that are built around funny sketches. Avery's "King-Size Canary" was a arguably a sketch cartoon as was the "Shampoo Master" and lifeguard sequences of John K's "Naked Beach Frenzy."
Before I close here's a tip of the Theory Hat to Steve Worth, the erstwhile wizard of the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive. Steve just won a well-deserved Annie for his work on the archive, escorted on stage by the famous "Annie Trophy Girls." Way to go, Steve!
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.
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!
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.
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.
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?
Here's a quick sketch I did while leaning outside my car window. All the time I was driving there were great cloud formations but I couldn't get my hands free to draw. What a pity; no record will ever exist of the flottila of battleships chasing the runaway amoebas or the indian bracing himself to get hit with pies. Finally these came along, the caterpillar with a bonnet and the people in the school bus throwing dogs and cats out the window. It was too good to pass up! I pulled over to the shoulder and drew fast with cars whizzing by only a few feet from my paper.
