Jinks Is Iconic - a Real Character

A lot of animation fans, particularly of my generation, were mad at Hanna Barbera's limited animation cartoons and blamed them for ruining animation. I admit they sure had a big part in that.
But they also created some iconic characters, which is not an easy thing to do.
When they started limiting their animation, they must have figured they had no choice but to find some new creative aspect of cartoons to focus on. Tom and Jerry depended on lush full animation for its entertainment value and they didn't have to worry too much about personality. All of a sudden they couldn't rely on lots of action, so instead turned to character.
I've been watching a lot of Pixie and Dixie cartoons lately and studying Jinks. He's really an amazing personality and I'm trying to figure out where it's coming from.
It's a pleasant design, but not too far removed from Tom.
The animators - even without full animation, do a good job of conveying his personality, but aren't creating it. They are following a clear, distinct idiot-proof guide.
Is it in the writing? Not so much even there. Lines like "Now to have myself a ball" could be read a thousand different ways. Today it would be read completely generically. The way Daws Butler reads that line is hilarious. It's something you would never expect and rich with color and imagination.
Technically the voice is probably some combination of impressions of popular starts of the time. I think Crazy Guggenheim is the main inspiration for the sound of the voice, but Daws adds a lot more to it. (He said Marlon Brando!)

Crazy Gugghenheim's is basically a retard while Jinks is only partly demented.
He is an idiot who doesn't know it. He thinks he is smarter than everyone else and is cocksure about it. Even that doesn't sound all that original when I just write it out. Written words are a pitiful medium of communication when it comes to describing cartoons.
You gotta hear the words as acted by Daws. He puts so much color into his inflections, that it almost seems as he is writing the story himself. The story is no longer about the events, but rather about the character's reactions to the events.
The gags as written are all standard and the written dialogue is perfunctory for the most part. It's what Daws does with it that gives it interest.
I've been trying to figure out Jinks' voice and his psychology and it's a lot more complex than I had thought.
I've been trying to imitate it and there is more to it than what's on the surface level.
I used to think it was just a funny "trick voice" but now I think Daws must have really examined the psychology of the character.
Voice actors like Daws Butler, Mel Blanc, Bea Benaderet and the other greats of the past were realy worth their weight in gold. They did for sound what cartoonists did for visuals. They thought like cartoonists. They didn't just act well or make pleasant sounding voices like you would expect actors in live action to do. They "cartooned" the voices and acting.
Daws has a great natural sounding speaking voice, even when not doing a character. It's like a wonderfully unique instrument.
But he plays the instrument really well-and in an exaggerated way. His contrasts are clear, controlled and funny.
His enunciation is perfect-even when he is purposely slurring words together for humorous effect.
He understands the personality and the story.
He conveys every bit of emotion along the way of a sentence, as ideas and changes unravel in the character's brain. This is extremely sophisticated and requires a lot of sensitivity and control. Plus, he invents just weird and funny ways to enunciate things that are totally unrealistic. Just for fun.
Well it's very hard for me to analyze everything there is to say about Jinks in words, but when I hear Daws do him, I am getting a lot of insight into the character from not what he is saying, but how he is saying it.

http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/HB/CharacterVoiceTracks/JinksMagicCarpet.mp3

Today we have 2 basic kinds of voice actors:
1) Celebrity voice. These are live action actors or worse - "personalities" who come in for an hour or 2 and read lines with bland nondescript voices and stiff acting. They are reading from imbecilic scripts and basically dumb down their acting to match the dumbed-down writing.

2) Pretend Cartoon Voices - The Saturday Morning cartoon voices- the squeaky nasal voices that pass for what someone in charge must think cartoon characters are supposed to sound like. They have been doing this since the 1970s. I always thought of it as normal people who weren't actors coming into the recording studio and pinching their noses to create an instant "cartoon voice". One that sounds just like everyone else's cartoon voice.
There are some talented voice people in the business today, but too often they are made to do either the "normal voice" or the "cartoon voice" and don't get to work on many characters that offer much of a challenge. And that's putting it nicely.
One of the things that made me love cartoons and want to be a cartoonist and animator was "character". I wanted to draw and animate cartoon characters. I didn't want to just animate funny gags and crazy stuff - althoug that is a big part of it. The cartoons that most inspired me were not just the ones that were animated the most elaborately. The cartoons with the most interesting, believable yet otherwordly characters made the worlds they lived in seem more real than the actual mundane reality that I, as a bag of gooey protoplasm and oozing corpuscles, was stuck in.

Mel Blanc Explains Stuff

Mel is generally considered to be the greatest cartoon voice talent of all time.

There are still some great voice talents today and I've been lucky enough to work with such versatile and charismatic characters as Billy West, Cheryl Chase, Eric Bauza, Corey Burton, Gary Owens, Charlie Adler, Patrick Pinney and more.

All of these folks have highly sensitive and trained ears as well as mouths. This is what they do for a living. They are specialists in sound and much more qualified than movie actors to do animated cartoon voices, but sadly often get passed up when it comes to nabbing the big roles in animated movies. They are also much more eager than already famous and rich movie actors; they aren't there to just have a fun afternoon and walk away. This is their life.

I don't know Jeff Bergman, but Gabe Swarr directed him doing George Jetson's voice on a couple flash cartoons we did and I was very impressed with his talent.

Of course, there are exceptions to every rule. If we had actors today with such distinctive voices as Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre, Marlyn Monroe, then they might be able to add something to a cartoon movie character. But even so, trained voice actors usually do even better when they do their caricatured impressions of live actors.

They do it better because they understand the needs of the medium and care about it.

It's the reason an animator would make a better director than a live action director. It's our medium, even though we've been kicked out - or at least barred from using our knowledge in a sane way.

Sheer common sense would produce much more interesting and imaginative animation.

Mike Pataki is an exception. He is mainly a movie actor but just happens to have a very distinct voice and delivery. If all movie actors had such distinctiveness and energy then animation would benefit from the larger pool of talent.

Cartoon Voices

The philosophy of voice acting for cartoons has completely reversed itself.

Can you tell whose voices these are by just listening to them?

My Book

Relaxed

HELP

Hello

NEW VOICES

Can you tell whose these are by the sound alone? Can you even understand what they are saying?

Little

we can use that

Different

Phobia

To me (and of course I'm wrong) a good cartoon voice actor has to have 2 main attributes:

1) An obvious unique and pleasant vocal sound.

The greats like Daws Butler, Don Messick, Mel Blanc and more all have a naturally unique distinct sound-even when they are not doing a cartoon voice.


It's like having a quality instrument as opposed to a rusty old out of tune one.

This is why many oldtime cartoon voices came from radio, where the quality of the voice is so important.

Daws Butler

Movie stars are known more for their faces than their voices (especially today) and when you replace their faces with a cartoon character's face, you lose the movie star's value, because the audience can't tell who is doing the voice - and don't care. They just want to believe in the characters themselves.

2) Specialized acting ability.

Clear Diction: You have to be able to clearly understand what the actor is saying (unless he is purposely mumbling for some story or character reason)

For example, listen to Ranger Smith's line at the top. Esp. the second half "Maybe I can do something.. before the commissioner..."

Try to read that line yourself as fast as Don Messick does and still make it all sound so clear and perfectly inflected. It's not easy. Don was a real pro.

A wide range of inflection - and the ability to control it and tailor it to the meaning of the dialogue and character.

If you read everything in a flat monotone, you aren't adding anything to the character.

Vocal acting is even more important in cartoons than in live action, because cartoon visual acting is not as easily controlled as a live actor's visual acting.

A colorful unique and rich voice adds a lot of personality to an animated character, whether you have a huge or tiny budget. It's instant personality.

That coupled with a good design gets you half way there.

Bill and Joe may have made super cheap cartoons, but they had the good sense to use really unique and appealing character designs and combine them with distinct and super qualified voice talent. At least in the beginning.

Network Prescience

This of course comes from the people who directed (or undirected them) the voices in the first place.

Duck Amuck - Daffy's Freak Out

Speaking of experiments...Jones continued to do experiments after the 40s, not so much with animation technique - but with concepts.
Duck Amuck questions the whole concept of animated cartoons and consciously dissects the absurdity of the rules and accepted logic (or illogic) of the medium. This makes the film loved by some and hated by others.
I'm somewhere in the middle. I loved the cartoon as a kid, not just because it was a neat concept (Heckle and Jeckle also did the same concept, but less artistically) but because of Daffy's extreme frustration and the expert animation of it.
Of course he isn't really "Daffy" Duck anymore; he's Arsehole Duck - a completely different character than the earlier likeable wacky version, and I think that too irritates purists. I just look at this guy as a new character and accept his personality as being really funny for its own sake.
Some of the ideas in the cartoon are really funny and abstract like this one where the frame melts and collapses all around him.
This could only happen in animation. I would love to have seen who or how the gag was conceived. Maltese or Jones? It sure wouldn't make sense written.



What really makes the gag work is Daffy's extreme indignant frustration and the beautiful design and animation.
There's those crazy Chuck Jones eyes.



This frenzied scramble is great, isn't it?
Mel Blanc deserves a lot of credit for the cartoon's effect. His Daffy performance is brilliantly funny.

I also love this pose and the way his chest heaves.
Of course the structure of the cartoon is perfect and it's that fact that the story is actually about. ...That the director inevitably destroys Daffy bit by bit, building the absurdity up an ascending slope of dramatic construction.
As much as I like and admire the cartoon, I can't help but feel sorry for Daffy, because he doesn't have a chance. He's at the mercy of his creator.
This is the complete opposite of Clampett's treatment of characters, where they themselves cause their own fates.


The pacing of the cartoon is also as close to perfection as I can imagine.
This is an interesting calm after the storm, a stark contrast to Daffy's previous frenzy.







Well I could probably dissect every scene of the cartoon and I'm sure I'll get around to it soon. It's definitely an important event in animation history and its development - for good and bad, depending on who you talk to. But everyone remembers it.

I would almost suggest that it purposely tries to end the period of classic animation by saying it's all been done and it's just an illusion manufactured by the director, but then you'd yell at me. I'm probably overthinking the whole damn thing - but then, so has everyone else who's ever written about it, so I figure I should get a crack at it.

http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/Jones/53/DuckAmuck/DaffyFreaksOutDuckAmuck.mov