A FUN BOOK

I'm reading a few books at once as I always do. I'm still reading "Animated Man" and I just finished Mc Bride's famous (some would say infamous) book on Frank Capra. Here's one of the books I have on my bed stand: "The Worst Case Scenario Survival Handbook: Extreme Edition." Have you read any of these Worst Case books? Are they serious?

Here's (above) my favorite chapter: "How to Escape From an Angry Gorilla." The situation is that a gorilla has grabbed your arm. Maybe he's doing it to be playful, maybe not. There's no way to tell. You have no choice but to assume he's hostile. The book wisely advises the reader to be silent and act submissive. So far so good.

Then the book takes a giant step. If submission doesn't work try treating the grab as a sexual (my word) advance by the gorilla. It almost certainly wasn't sexual but the idea is to plant the thought in the gorilla's head. It's as if you're saying to the gorilla, "Hey, big boy! I like you too. No need to get rough! Let's you and I go steppin'."

You groom his arm. Maybe the gorilla is starting to get hot and bothered. Hopefully this causes the ape to walk away in confusion. Hopefully. But what if he doesn't? What if he takes it seriously and...Ugh! It's too horrible to think about!

I hasten to add that the book doesn't mention sex. That's my interpretation...and maybe it would be the gorilla's too.


Here's (above) another chapter: "How to Survive if You're Buried Alive." Aaargh! How gruesome! The book advises that you only have an hour or two at most before the air runs out. What you should do is wrap your shirt around your head like a bag with a big knot on your forehead to provide an air pocket for your face. You then kick the wooden coffin lid with your feet. The weight of the dirt above will have weakened the lid and if you're lucky you might succeed in breaking it. Your main problem will be channeling the dirt as it falls into the container and you dig your way upward.

Does that seem realistic to you?

A NOTE ABOUT STORYBOARDS

That's me (above) pitching a board at Disney's. I think the guy giving the black power salute is Bob Taylor. I can't see very well but I think the drawing I'm pointing to is a black and white doodle of Donald that I later re-did in crayon (reprise below). I love working in crayon but hardly ever get the chance. One of these days I'll do a post about how great crayons are, even the Crayolas you get in the supermarket. But I digress.

What I really want to talk about is how much influence a storyboarder should have on a film.

I'm a storyboarder myself and I like it because in some ways it's close to direction and I like to direct. In a small and limited way storyboarders are the visual kings of the projects they work on and like every other storyboarder I like to be king.

Hearing me talk like this would have amazed animators in the 30s and 40s. In the golden age of Warners, when cartoons were done right, storyboards weren't a big deal. Boards were done by writer artists and were so rough and so lacking in continuity that a casual reader would have had trouble understanding them (example below). That's why so few Warner boards of that era survived. Nobody thought they had any value. Really, the story only came together visually in the mind of the director who did a bunch of drawings for his handouts.

Later on, in the TV era, writers and executives effectively got rid of directors and a new category of artist was born, the non-writer storyboarder. This was a terrible defeat for animation.

The problem is that films with a strong script and storyboard feel often don't lend themselves to animation very well. If you look at the funniest Bill Nolan black & white Terrytoons you'll see that the highlights, the real audience-grabbing scenes, are often something the animator (or the animator-director) thought of. Cartoons lost a lot of their playfulness and innovation when animators were reduced to fleshing out other peoples' ideas and layouts.



Of course audiences like structure and and so do I. In the current factory system some of the storyboard feel is inevitable. Even so, without the animators' input into the stories cartoons will continue to be a sad thing, very much cut off from its roots. We need to bring animators and directors back under the roof of the parent studio. We storyboarders should remind ourselves that the animators are the stars (or should be) and we're just there to make them look good. Everybody else, the executives, directors, writers, storyboarders, layout people and colorists...all exist solely to make the animator actor look good on the screen.


BTW, this post was inspired by Mark Mayerson's almost current blog about storyboards:

http://mayersononanimation.blogspot.com/


The storyboard at the bottom is from Ward Kimball's "Mars and Beyond." I don't know if it helps to make my point, I just put it in because I like it.

CLAMPETT AND THE ART OF THE INBETWEEN

GREETINGS CARTOON FANS!

Thanks to friends John & Kali I'm able to post a real discussion of animation with lots of examples and not just a couple of stolen frame grabs. I even have a link to a film clip at the bottom! I feel so adult!

OK, enough gushing! Let's get down to it!

This is Porky on the doorstep from Clampett's "Kitty Cornered." This was the first Clampett I ever saw and when it came on my jaw practically dropped to the floor!
I was used to pose to pose animation where the inbetweens were just technical necessities. I didn't question that, I just assumed that animation involved a certain amount of tedium and there was no way of getting around it. Now here, in front of me, was a whole different way of animating! Here the animator (Rod Scribner) did his own inbetweens. I was shocked! It not only worked but it was fall-off-the-seat funny!


Most of the poses on this post are inbetweens. I had to leave out a lot to conserve bandwidth, but you can see that Scribner is cartooning like crazy, throwing in every funny idea that could fit. The pose above with raised arms reminds me of the old Keystone Cops poses that you used to see in newspaper comics. I love how Porky's fat little body compresses here. Look how delightfully seedy his eyes are!


This (above) is the kind of toothy, squinty expression you only get in inbetweens. Inbetweens should look like inbetweens. They should show all the transitory little emotions between the major emotions. Even a sad person will have a happy inbetween or two and visa versa.


Here (above) Porky struggles to get the word out. Even if he didn't stutter he'd have to struggle. We humans communicate with grunts and whistles from our lips and voice box and getting it all out past the mushy part of our muzzle requires an effort!
"OH BOB! YOU WERE SO GREAT! HOW DID YOU AND SCRIBNER THINK OF STUFF LIKE THAT!!!???" Oh...uh... pardon. I lost it for a moment.



So here's the pig again! He pushes out toward camera with his mean little baby face...


Then he antics back, looking very much like a human all of a sudden (as all animals should periodically), then...

BAM! A really explosive thrust outward (above) with big, dilated eyes and killer arm positions! Those arms work great with the bowed legs. Scribner was a great cartoonist as well as a great animator! What a dynamite combination!

Oops! He withdraws into a little compressed ball of peevish anger. Somehow we become aware of the nightshirt again.

His muzzle (above) prepares for another outburst. The cheek muscles pucker and stretch in preparation for forcing the words out.


A big antic (above) allows us to see how large the cranium is. The arms fly up as if to do another Keystone Cops pose but instead...


...instead he grabs the air like a baby and diddles it! And wow, look at the far away stare in Porky's eyes!

Is the anger dissipating? Sort of! Here's (above) another classic inbetween face showing the tired, squinting eyes again. Emotion is very tiring for us and we have to go into near sleep between emotions sometimes, even when we're excited and in the middle of broad action.

The world of inbetweens is a strange, surreal world where characters' real emotions hold sway. It's the world that would exist if all of us were prevented from taking stock poses to impress other people. It's the world of the ego rather than the super-ego. It's a place where people flash angry, infantile, ridiculing, lecherous, acquisitive, stupid poses at each other. In a funny studio the inbetweener would be a respected professional possessing great and mysterious secrets about the human condition.

Back to the cartoon: Porky snaps out of his reverie into this hilarious Joe Besser fists-up-to-the-cheeks pose. I like hands that hug the face. After all, the face is the master, the controller. What could be more natural than to have its minions nearby?

Gee, I must sound crazy talking this way. Anyway, it's a tribute to Bob Clampett that his cartoons stimulate discussion like this. I'm a huge fan of Jones and Avery but their animation is pretty straight-forward and not as nuanced as what Clampett and Scribner did.

Here's (below) the Porky on the step animation!
CLICK ON THIS TO SEE THE FIRST EVER OFFICIAL CARTOON CLIP!!!




OK, that's enough for one day! Return to your work-a-day world secure in the knowledge that you're a new man (yes, even if you were a woman before)! You've been up to the mountain! You've been refreshed at the fountain of Clampett!

I JUST WATCHED "THE MIRACLE WORKER!"

I hope you can tell what's going on in these sketches. I had to leave some out because I couldn't understand them myself!

WHAT WE CAN LEARN FROM CHARLES DICKENS

When Dickens worked horrible jobs in his youth one of the few pleasures he had was taking his lunch hour in a nearby theater. The matinee price was low if you sat in the highest gallery with the errand boys and rowdies. If the gallery didn't like what was happening on stage they booed and pelted the actors with fruit from their lunches.


Some professional actors were wary of matinees so the management would allow people in the audience to buy the opportunity to play a role. The people who bought their way in were very serious about what they were doing and resented being pelted by the street kids. They always had one eye on the audience and were ready to duck fruit or fight at the drop of a hat. They often made an unscripted aside to the audience as an excuse to come to the front of the stage where they could assess the mood of the crowd.

Later in life Dickens said the rough and ready matinees were the biggest influence on his work. From live theater he learned the value of frequent surprises and the importance of humor even in tragedies. He also learned that audiences craved big, over-the-top emotion. Even the rowdies would cry like babies if a villain threatened to dispossess a mother and her baby from their home. He adapted to novels the technique of talking to the audience. You see this in Fielding too, maybe for the same reason.

London must have been something to see in the 1820s when Dickens was a kid. He loved to walk the streets and explore the mysterious alleyways and stairways that disappeared into shadows. The streets were teeming with life and I can only imagine the kind of characters he must have encountered.

In the days before electronic media people cultivated their personalities. You had to carve out a unique identity for yourself and dress and move in a way that underlined that personality. We should do that today. Mild people should be very mild and louts should back slap and wear checkered suits. Stingy people should wring their hands, accountants should squint and earnest people should be well-groomed like Cary Grant. Our goal should be to remake society in such a way that street life will once again inspire cartoonists and filmmakers and writers like Charles Dickens.

Bill WRAY & CHRIS HITI

Bill Wray put up these two paintings (above and below) on his blog: http://madaboutcartoons.blogspot.com/

The top picture looks like it's from the Ren & Stimpy episode, "Visit to Anthony."

Just to fill out the post how about these black and white pictures from Sam Hiti's site: http://www.samhiti.com/?page=artwork

MORE FACES

More about faces! This time the subject is how faces age. The Ekman book isn't very helpful so I'll have to take a stab at analyzing the pictures myself. I'm not good at this so don't expect too much.

I think I'll start with the grandmother in the left vertical column above (click to enlarge) (that's her grandaughter in the right hand column but this won't deal with her). Let's see...Hmmmm...well, the first thing I notice is that her eyes turn into slits by middle age. What causes that? Do the cheeks push up and close the eyes or does the top lid droop down and cover the eye? And am I imagining it or does the mouth seem to widen with age?

Holy Cow! Look at the shape of her face! It was "V"-shaped when she was a teenager and boxy later on! In the second picture from the bottom the smooth, evenly distributed fat of the teen face gives way to lumpy, swollen fat. She looks looks like she was stung by bees. In the final picture the puffiness has subsided. Her face is nicely proportioned and she looks happy.

This woman (above) had an interesting progression. The third, fourth and fifth pictures look energetic, optimistic and intelligent. The sixth picture looks like she's become aware of disturbing things like penises, cliques and the horror of homework. The seventh is completely adult. She believes she can cope with disturbing things. In the eighth the disturbing things won but she doesn't seem to mind. She's discovered...what? Maybe what it's like to be a mother. In the last picture she's become a solid citizen.

Once again, in pictures seven and eight we see the V- shaped face morph into a box. In the ninth picture the box has retreated a bit but the bees have done their job again. Her neck is the same in pictures eight and nine but her face is puffier in nine, indicating that the increased facial fat isn't the result of putting on more weight in general. I wonder if she'll lose that fat as the grandmother did in the first set of pictures.

Boy, there's no doubt that somewhere between 10 and 15 you look the best you'll ever look! It's a great combination of vitality, curiosity and optimism. I wonder if that coincides with the best or most formative time of life?

Here's (above) a more youthful me. That's Kali mugging underneath. Anyway my face was V-shaped in those days and my eyes were somewhat wide open. Gee, I had a big nose and ears even then!

Here's me today (above). The face is puffy and bee-stung just like the women above. What the heck causes that anyway? I don't want to be bee-stung! Shouldn't I get to vote about that? The skin above the upper lip seems thinner than it used to be. Does that happen to everybody? You can see the faint blue hairs of a Zorro mustache that wants to born but for the good of mankind I supress it.
One positive thing: my eyes are slits now. I'm delighted! I used to envy Lee Van Cliff and John Wayne for their squints and now I have a squint of my very own! Maybe that's because I never wear sunglasses. Artists should never wear sunglasses! They should also never do yoga but I'll have to save that for a post some other time!