Why Cartoon Animation Steered Off Course

It happened in the late 40s.

ANIMATION GREW FASTER THAN ANY ART FORM IN HISTORY

From the 20s and through the 30s animation exploded as an art form. From simple stick figures to a whole new discipline that took advantage of a visual element that was never possible before - movement.

A few animation "principles" were developed and refined within less than a decade!

IT WAS THE MOST APPEALING OF ALL VISUAL ARTS

Animation, born of the also recent invention of cartoon art and comics was a whole new way of looking at the world.

ITS WHOLE POINT WAS TO DISTILL THE FUN - LEAVE OUT THE BORING PARTS

It took all the boring parts out of life and just left the fun parts. It was fun to look at and fun to watch move. It told funny, ridiculous stories. It was the ice cream of the arts and because of it became the most popular of all the visual arts. Most people like fun - except executives who prefer market research.

To me the first half of the 20th century could be known as "The Cartoon Age" just as well as "The Jazz Age" or "The Age Of Progress".

IT WAS NOT CONSIDERED ART- IT WAS MERE "ENTERTAINMENT"

Astoundingly, this unbelievable new creative medium didn't get much respect - surely because it was so inventive and obviously directly enjoyable by so many people.

Some comic strips artists were respected (and made tons of money) but animators - who were doing a much more sophisticated form of cartoon got paid less and no respect. Most animators, excluding Walt Disney, were practically anonymous - unlike their comic strip counterparts who were rich and famous.

ANIMATION ARTISTS CAN'T DRAW AS WELL AS ILLUSTRATORS AND GET LESS RESPECT

Even the best draftsmen of animation's Golden Age couldn't draw as well as the average illustrators from the same period and I think many suffered an inferiority complex because of it.

This was probably mostly Walt Disney's fault. His own inferiority complex was contagious and poisoned much of the rest of the business.

He diverted almost everyone away from their natural cartooning instincts and made them all want to create "quality" rather than fun. Quality meant animating things that other mediums could do better and much more easily, like:

More detail
Human proportions
Elaborate special effects
Spectacle
Crying
Tribes of Naked Babies

None of these things lend themselves naturally to animation. They just make the work harder and eat away precious time that could be better spent being imaginative and doing what only cartoons and animation can do.

But creative cartoons and impossible magical animation don't get respect, remember. They just generate tons of money for the studios that release them - who in turn crap on the artists who made all the money for them.


ANIMATION ARTISTS TOOK MOVEMENT FOR GRANTED BECAUSE THEY WERE SO GOOD AT IT

Animators too busy comparing themselves unfavorably to illustrators, comic strip artists, live action movies and other related forms of art didn't realize how wonderful and unique their own skills were. The things you could only do in cartoons and the crazy amount of skill the animators developed in performing them came so natural to them that they didn't think much of them.

ANIMATION FIGURED OUT ITS BASICS BY 1940 - then stopped

What we think of today as "animation principles" were pretty much figured out by 1940 and nobody invented any new ones after that. For a few more years, they developed and refined this handful of techniques and produced the best animation in history.

ANIMATION LEADERS AIMED MORE AT THE DRAWINGS THAN THE MOVEMENT BY THE MID 40S

While most animation leaders stopped developing new techniques in movement itself, they instead started thinking about "improvement" coming only from the drawings themselves. Different studios and leaders approached this in different ways, but all of them slowed down or reversed the tools that made animation its own unique art form.

DISNEY - MORE COMPLICATED DESIGNS - SAME MOTION PRINCIPLES AND FORMULAS

Disney kept designing more and more complicated or "realistic" characters. They didn't change the way they moved them so much, just made it harder to move them.

Taller proportions-long legs. Much harder to move convincingly.

More detail - the more details on a character, the slower and more difficult it becomes to animate the character. More effort is expended on just not making jerky mistakes than on making the characters fun and entertaining. For 25 years, Disney's characters became harder and harder to draw, but the animation hardly varied at all. The characters moved the same way the simpler characters did - according to old Disney formulae.

Other animators see how technically well animated these elaborate Disney features are and know the incredible effort that went into them and are impressed. This doesn't automatically impress laymen or the audience though.

CHUCK JONES - LESS ANIMATION, MORE CLEVER AND STYLISH POSES

Chuck Jones developed his own unique drawing style and humor and year by year, toned down the animators' input or directed it to point to Chuck's poses and expressions. By 1948 he was making his funniest cartoons, but the animation was less inventive and fun for its own sake than just a couple years earlier.

By the late 50s the animation had become completely stiff and Jones' drawing style tastelessly out of control.

UPA - MORE LIKE RESPECTABLE MAGAZINE CARTOONS - STYLIZED - LESS ANIMATION

Magazine cartoonists drawing for Punch or The New Yorker got a lot more intellectual respect that cartoons from the "funny papers" or animation. Don't ask me why. The UPA artists drifted towards these graphic styles and abandoned creative movement - and definitely funny drawing almost altogether.

IN GENERAL - MORE TALK, LESS WALK

By the late 50s most non-Disney cartoons were left without clever and fun motion. Instead they traced back layout poses to make evenly timed inbetweens. The characters talked a lot more than they moved.

Disney continued doing elaborate movement because they could afford to and they believed still that that was what animation should do - it should move. At least!

But it was mostly movements you had already seen before in previous features.

The exception would be the imitation UPA cartoons they did - the ones you see imitated in all the "Art of Pixar" books.

These flattened Disney cartoons look to me like a misunderstanding of the UPA philosophy. Disney made harsh looking cold designs, but animated them very fluidly as if they were still animating Mickey and Donald. It's definitely clever (the first time!) but not very entertaining - except to Cal Arts alumni.

CLAMPETT LEFT WARNER BROS. IN 1946

All growing art forms need bold charismatic talented leaders. Clampett was the biggest most influential leader in funny cartoons for the first half of the 40s and everyone imitated him - even Disney was obviously influenced.

His cartoons were constantly inventive and he wasn't a total slave to the "Disney principles". He more than anyone, kept expanding the medium of impossible movement (animation) and dragged the rest of the business along with him while constantly creating and developing characters.

Then at the peak of his inventiveness and the peak of the Golden Age - he up and left!

Some say he was fired, he says he quit. But I think this single event in animation history was the most catastrophic thing we've ever endured. His momentum carried Warner Bros. for a few more years even as they gradually slowed down, but it created a hole in the art form that has never been filled.

TEX AVERY LAST LEADER TO KEEP UP CARTOONY ANIMATION

Tex Avery was the last leader to continue doing cartoony inventive animation, but he had less influence than Clampett because he didn't create characters. He made gag cartoons based on funny ideas rather than stories about funny personalities.

History has decided to award him the creation of Bugs Bunny, somewhat arbitrarily in my opinion - but how could it be that someone who created the greatest animated cartoon character in history could never again create even 1 character that the public really wanted to follow?

TEX DIDN'T CREATE CHARACTERS AND THE PUBLIC WOULD RATHER STICK WITH LESS FUNNY CHARACTERS THAN MORE FUNNY CONCEPT CARTOONS

Tex still made some of the funniest cartoons ever, but we remember Chuck Jones, Hanna Barbera and Disney more. - because we associate them with casts of characters. Most humans would rather watch continuing adventures with characters they are familiar with than a series of brilliant one-shot cartoons. Of course we love star characters the best, but we'll even take less charismatic continuing characters if there aren't any stars around.

It's a natural impulse for us to bond with friends. We bowl with our neighbors and party with them - even if they are not the most interesting folks in the city. Today's networks have come to realize this. They will leave a boring series on the air long past the period where they aren't getting ratings - because the audience will soon get used to the characters and accept them and even believe they are entertaining. Especially since there is no competition.

THE END
Tex was the last guy to uphold cartoon animation's roots, but he wasn't enough of an influence by the 50s to halt the ever more decadent trends that the rest of his colleagues were following.

Progress died and even worse - cartoons as a unique form of entertainment and art died.

Tex Avery's Rational Story Structures

Here's a very good copy. Thanks to Steve and Asifa!

http://www.animationarchive.org/pics/badluckblackie.mov

Here's a youtube low rez version.



here it is with a better picture, but in French.

Tex Avery - Bad Luck Blackie
Uploaded by robeu

Tex Avery's storytelling tradition goes back to American folklore -"Tall Tales" like Paul Bunyan.

He likes ideas that are based on impossible premises. Once you accept the impossible premise, he keeps building it to more preposterous heights.

This takes a lot of imagination to make funny, but it also takes a very rational approach to storytelling. Tex Avery at MGM became a master of story structure.

Bad Luck Blackie structure

Premise

The premise is that if a black cat crosses your path it brings you trouble.
A Bulldog is mean to a kitten. A black cat witnesses the bullying.
He tells the kitten “If you’re ever in trouble, just whistle and I’ll cross the bulldog’s path and something will come crashing down on his head.”

Is the premise funny?

Not if you just told it to someone.
Tex wants you to understand this premise, so he can get to the middle of the cartoon, which has a series of funny accidents happening to the bulldog, each time he bullies the kitten.


Setup

Structurally, the beginning of the story has to introduce the premises upon which the story is based on. Tex needs to have us understand what the cartoon is going to be about.

In some Avery cartoons, Tex gets the setup over with as fast as possible using exposition, so that you can get to the story part, like in his hilarious “Deputy Droopy”.

In Bad Luck Blackie, he instead chooses to make the setup really funny by not merely stating the story premise, but by giving us feelings about the characters.

Characterization

In less talented hands, a mean bulldog torturing a kitten would be very downbeat and depressing. Some of the gags are downright shocking and cruel! Like the kitten getting his tongue caught in a mousetrap.

Amazingly, this whole section is really funny. You feel sympathy for the kitten, but at the same time, the bulldog’s design and acting and his sheer glee makes you like him as well.

Introduce Twist

Once we’ve seen the setup and we feel sorry for the poor kitten, Tex introduces a way to save the kitten and thwart the Bulldog’s bullying.

A black cat tells the kitten to just whistle whenever he’s in trouble, and Blackie will walk by the bulldog and cause something to fall on his head.

Blackie himself is not just a black cat; he is a character too, a street smart city kid, like one of the Bowery boys.

Build The middle

The gags in the middle are mostly bigger and bigger and crazier things falling on the Bulldog’s head, but the setup, middle and payoff for each gag is funny too.
Most of the humor comes, not from the object that lands on the Bulldog’s head, but from his personality. His joy at torturing the cat, his change in attitude as he starts to realize the consequences of his actions, and his self pride, when he thinks he has figured out how to outwit the whistle gag.

So Tex leads us to believe that the gags are a straight build up of things crashing on the head gags (and those are all funny) but he tosses in some twists and thwarts our expectations here and there, just as we think we have it all figured out.

This is not only imaginative, it is extremely clever and took a sharp brain and serious structural planning to pull off.

Tex is in total control of our brains and our expectations.

Crazy Topper Ending

Once Tex has basically milked what you think is the most you could from this premise, he tops it all off with a fast climax as the bulldog runs away with huge impossible things falling from the sky. By this time, as Joe Adamson keenly observed in his Tex Avery, King Of Cartoons book, the premise is no longer needed for us to accept things falling on the bulldog’s head.
Blackie no longer needs to cross his path. We just have to hear the whistle and we totally accept the logic.

The Best Cartoonists Make Us Believe Preposterous Things

Tex took us on a ride that we should never have accepted if we stopped to think logically about it. Thank God he didn't have to get notes from today's executives!

He did it with utter control of his talent, skills, logical brain and our psychology.

Tex Avery is a genius in my books. Most cartoons day are plagued with time-eating explanations for things that don't need to be explained logically. The more that modern cartoons try to explain the ridiculous things that happen in cartoons, the more we are aware of how unbelievable they are. And these explanations are generally boring to boot.

Cartoons can completely convince us of impossible, illogical things...if they are highly structured and logical in their illogical premises. And the more fun they are, the less time we will have to stop and say "Why, that's impossible!"

Direction 4: The Kind Of Cartoons Dads Like - Tex Avery's "Voice"

Avery is right up there with McKimson as far as being a Dad-pleaser.This cartoon is interesting because it combines 2 extremes of cartoon philosophy. The story is down to earth yet the styling is very designy. A seeming contradiction.
It's designed and layed out by my old pal and hero, Ed Benedict. This character even looks like him. I don't know if that was intended.
The funny part about this combination of talents is that Ed didn't really like his own cartoons. He loved the pure UPA approach. His favorite cartoon was that Wee Willie thing. He thought adding entertainment and good animation was debasing the whole idea of artistic style. He would get mad at the MGM animators for using timing and squash and stretch and all that "cartoonish action". You should have seen the face he would make whenever he squeezed out the hated word "cartoonish". He would lean real close to me just for the one word to make sure the steam from the disdain would melt my eyebrows.
I think that's the right attitude for him to have too. He's the designer. We need artists and we need cartoonists (but the cartoonists should be in charge, because they're the ones who will bring in the money that funds the artistic growth and pads the executives' pockets).

We need experimental cartoons as well as entertaining cartoons. The experiments seed the growth of the medium, the entertainers find practical uses for the new techniques. Sometimes, but rarely, you can find both those talents in one place. They were in great and precarious balance at Warner Bros. in the 1940s.
This gag really made Ed mad. He said he kept drawing stylized ducks, but every time Tex looked at the scene he said the joke wasn't playing funny. Tex eventually opted to do the scene using old fashioned 40s cartoon ducks because the joke worked better. I think Ed reluctantly agreed that that made sense, but it still outraged his pure artistic temperament.
Ed rolled his eyes at jokes this crass, which delighted me no end.

Silly Symphonies, UPA cartoons, early 40s Chuck Jones cartoons were all experiments in techniques. It's interesting that those cartoons are generally less entertaining than the cartoons made by cartoonists who used techniques they were already used to, but maybe that's the way it works.

How about this realistic dead deer on the hood of a car driven by stylized men? I bet that made Ed real mad.

I think this is what the cartoons studios are missing today. They need to spend some of their profits doing experimental shorts and then letting the entertaining talents find uses for the new techniques.

I think it's possible to achieve both at the same time, but either way we would promote healthy creative growth if we aimed at progress in both technique and entertainment possibilities.

This post was prompted by my Dad sending me this email:

John: Watch this fishing and hunting cartoon, this is what I call funny, especially if you are a fisherman or hunter.

dad

Tex Avery Takes and a Sense of Design

Everyone knows what a "take" is, right? It's a startled or surprised reaction.
All animators use them. Most use them as simple punctuation, an accent that draws your attention to the a character's surprise or change of emotion. You're not supposed to really notice them.

It's just another punctuation tool, to help the audience follow what is happening in the story.

Tex Avery Turns The Tools Into The Art Itself

Tex Avery, on the other hand thinks the animator's tools are more than mere grammatical devices. He thinks the tools are funny and can be entertaining in of themselves.
He thought takes were so funny that he constructed a few whole cartoons around them.
Northwest Hounded Police is a cartoon with a story that is just an excuse to draw wilder and wilder takes.
It makes you wonder what Heck Allen's role was.



Here's a "double-take", 2 in a row.

I love this one.

THE TAKE THAT CHANGED MY LIFE

WILD TAKES DEPEND ON DESIGN

I first saw this take as a still black and white image in Joe Adamson's "Tex Avery, King Of Cartoons" book. I had never seen a Tex Avery MGM short before and just staring at pictures like these in the book made me completely rethink what was possible in cartoons. I had seen crazy images like this in Mad magazine - drawn by Basil Wolverton, and in Weirdo model kits and Nutty Mad toys, but never in cartoons. I didn't realize that this was being done at least 10 years before Mad and 20 before Weirdo's.

Shortly after reading the book, I started to see the actual Avery cartoons and they blew my mind. I instantly started drawing crazy drawings of my own. Not as great as this below!

These kinds of takes depend not on story or even animation. They depend on design. The way the take works is to quickly snap to the extreme pose and then basically hold it (usually moving holds). Leave it on screen long enough for the shock to sink in and make you laugh.

It's not the event itself that is funny. It's how funny and well designed the drawing is. You could write, "His eyes bug out and his tongue jiggles", but would that make anyone laugh just to read it?

A lot of other cartoons tried to imitate Tex' innovation, but didn't always get it.
Famous studios was basically made up of Fleischer animators who'd abandoned their own style in favor of imitating Warner Bros. and Avery cartoons, but they never seemed to feel it. It's like someone did actually write, "Olive's eyes stretch out" and the animators just literally did it, without thinking about it having to look funny or pleasant. They drew what was required according to the story, and collected their paychecks.

I wish I had a Casper cartoon on DVD to show you some of the takes they animated. What they missed was the good design. A funny cartoonist needs to have a sense of design and balance. Held takes work best when they have beautiful shapes and composition. They can't just be ugly.

Other animators also did funny Avery style takes, including Clampett and Walter Lantz animators.

REN TAKE

Here's an Avery style take from "Man's Best Friend".




Next...

Clampett

Clampett did do a few Avery style takes, but also had a really unique way to do takes that I've never seen anyone else do.

Instead of just relying on a held funny design, he also did "motion takes". I'll explain tomorrow.

BONUS: "Ugly art" that is actually beautiful design

I'm sure this is all inspired by Tex Avery's takes.


Personally, I think all this stuff has a ton more design-sense and skill than any of the so-called "designy" cartoons. Plus, they are fun.

Heckling Hare: step-by-step construction lesson

ROD SCRIBNER LOVES WRINKLES!

Here is a really cool frame from Tex Avery's "Heckling Hare". It's a hilarious scene animated by Rod Scribner.

Scribner loves to draw lots of extra wrinkles and brow folds on his characters, yet he still keeps them appealing and solid. They are not just arbitray lines and details floating around on the head. They make sense.

They wrap around the structure of the head and they describe certain things-expressions, eyebrows.

At first glance all the wrinkles make the drawing look complicated, but if you break it down to its forms first, then it will help you understand the drawings better.

Scribner uses the same classic principles that Bob McKimson and all the old animators used, but he applies them to his own style.

HOW TO STUDY OTHER PEOPLE'S ART

You can learn a lot by copying frames and animation from old cartoons. But the way to do it is:

Don't draw straight ahead.

Build up the drawing using proportions and construction. The Preston Blair Book explains this method of drawing very well, but I will help demonstrate it for you.

STEP 1 - PROPORTION + ANGLES

First, I measured the proportions of the characters and copied the proportions. Then I sketched in the rough forms that make up the poses, and drew straight lines through the forms to check that the angles the heads and bodies are tilted on look like the film frame.

Bugs is made up of 3 major forms in the drawing:
1) Head
2) Neck)
3) Body

Download this zipped quicktime to your desktop:
JOHN K TUTORIAL, STEP 1 (20.8mb)

STEP 2 - 2ND LAYER OF FORMS

After breaking down your characters into their first level of forms, then take each of those forms and find the next level of forms.

Start with the heads.

Bugs has one head.
The one head is made of of 2 major parts:
1) The cranium -upper part of head
2) The muzzle- lower part of head

Each of those levels is then further broken down into sections.

Upper head is made up
1 eyes,
2 eyebrows and
3 space around them.

all these sub forms have to wrap around the larger form that they are stuck to.

Lower head (muzzle) is broken into
1 nose area,
2 cheeks and
3 mouth

Each of those layers is in turn broken down into more parts.

Get it?

If not, watch me do it.

Download this zipped quicktime to your desktop:
JOHN K TUTORIAL, STEP 2 (28.4mb)

STEP 3 - EXPRESSION
Expressions are made up of

Eyes,
Eyebrows
Mouth,
Cheeks,
Jaw

To get the eyebrow expression I usually just draw one line right through both eyebrows to describe the expression in one connected stroke.

Later I can erase the middle unibrow section. This way the eyebrows are related to each other in the final drawing and not just floating independently of each other.

When drawing the mouth expression, you have to make sure that the cheeks and jaw all relate to the mouth. They are all part of the same mechanism.

Once you have your basic expression wrapped around your head and muzzle, the last step is to add the details that help solidify the expressions.

Eyebrow wrinkles above the eyebrows. They follow the same direction as the main eyebrow line. They wrap around the head too, the same way the eyebrows do.

The mouth cheek area: The lower lip has to relate to the mouth shape and so do the cheeks.

Teeth: Draw them as blocks of teeth first, not as individiual teeth. Make the blocks be in the same perspective as the head.

Once the blocks look solid, them break them into individual teeth.

Download this zipped quicktime to your desktop:JOHN K TUTORIAL, STEP 3 (53.9mb)

Straight Ahead Drawing VS Constructed Drawing

Now I drew this first drawing without first constructing it. I already know how it works so it only looks half crappy. But compare it to the below that I drew with construction first. See how much more solid and convincing and powerful it is?

ALL THE DETAILS FOLLOW LARGER FORMS

When you know your principles of drawing well , then you will be able to draw with much more confidence and you won't be afraid of details and you will have a lot more creative choices you will be able to make in your own work.


Download this zipped quicktime to your desktop:
DOG - SPEED DRAWING (32.1mb)


REALLY IMPORTANT POINT! _Use Empty Space!

Look at all the empty space left in the drawings. The whole head is not filled with wrinkles and details.

If it was, you wouldn't see the expressions at all. You would just see a busy mess.

In order to see something important-you need to leave areas of space around the details that let you see the important stuff.

Make sense?

If you do this lesson, post a comment and I'll put it up in another post and critique it.

Thanks To Kali for making the films, and Marc for getting them in here.