Treehouse Opening Pt 4 - Dire Consequences of Trick or Treating

Believe it or not I really wanted to do some straight story stuff with the Simpsons. By 'straight' I mean a narrative story (as opposed to a song or strictly abstract visuals). I was dying to do a caricature of the Simpsons characters' personalities as well as their design. - like what I do with the Hanna Barbera characters.

I think Abe is a fun character. Old and cantankerous, I figured I'd make him older and more cantankerous. I thought I'd throw in that he'd also be very religious and superstitious as many old timers are.

*An animation history irony:

People tend to think of cartoons as exaggerations of reality - and that was pretty much taken for granted up until the 1960s. 

 In 1960, Hanna and Barbera created the first prime time animated cartoon - the precursor to the Simpsons and every other cartoon sitcom that followed.

The characters and situations in the Flintstones were inspired by the live action "The Honeymooners". So you would imagine that the animated show would be much more exaggerated than its live-action counterpart.  
 

The Honeymooners

Flintstone

While I love the Flintstones, the irony is that it is really a toned-down version of the Honeymooners. The live characters in the Honeymooners are much more exaggerated than the cartoon. They have more depth to the personalities and a much broader range of expressions and gestures.

I don't know how this came about, but the Flintstones' animation style must have seeped into the consciousness of generations of TV watchers all the way to today. Every animated sitcom that has been ever made is less exaggerated than characters in live action sitcoms - and even less exaggerated than real people in general (and even less exaggerated than Hanna Barbera cartoons).

So I wanted to do an experiment and reverse the trend by animating the Simpsons using their same basic personalities, but adding more range and expression to the acting - by caricaturing what is already there in a milder form.

Alas, Matt, Al and I came up with so many ideas - including a song, that we couldn't fit them all into the minute and a half slot. Maybe they'll let me animate a whole episode one day.

The Power Of Inbetweens and Accents

Holds and keys are the drawings you see on a conscious level in animation. That doesn't mean that the drawings you don't see have to be straight inbetweens of the keys.You can get a lot more meaning, feeling and power by controlling the drawings that are on the way to the moments you absorb consciously.
I found this out by studying Rod Scribner's animation and live action frame by frame.
This part of a comercial for Barq's Root Beer was only 5 seconds long and I wanted to get a lot of stuff crammed into it. That meant no pauses or hookups, less antics or at least shorter ones, so this became an experiment in making things read fast. No drawings could be wasted.






I drew a bunch of keys and had Elinor Blake (April March) animate the commercial with these theories in mind.Here's one of her early bands, The Shitbirds.
I wonder why so many animators are also musically talented.

HUMAN EXPRESSIONS

Human expressions are generally a lot more specific and interesting than animated expressions.
Watch Norton's face crawl around and do all kinds of extra things that the script doesn't require, but add extra life to the story.
This is very hard to do, if not impossible in animation. A lot of these expressions can't be translated well in line; they need the subtle shadows and shapes made by the many muscles in his face.
If we want to compete with this specificity, we have to be more exaggerated in our accents, but we can do very subtle expressions in between the accents as you can see in the Barq's frames above.
You can't compete at all with this kind of acting if you are habituated to approved animation stock expressions - no matter how smooth the action is. Plus it's a lot more fun to customize specific expressions to your characters and story. Of course for some mysterious reason most studios won't allow it. They all say they wanna compete with live action, but no way in Hell will they actually let you do what's required.


You can really see how much subtlety is in Art Carney's acting when you watch the clip of one simple line of dialogue. A Hell of a lot of stuff happening for just one script sentence!

http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/01Principles/DialogueActing/NotThatImSelfish.mov

More from Barq's and this subject in another post...

Diversity Within The Same Character

Here are 2 of my favorite stereotyped typical primitive every day white men. Loud, obnoxious, arrogant and stupid. We all have pointy noses that stick way out from our faces. We have no lips either. Only our women have any brains. But most offensive to me personally is the idea that we have triangles for ears. Animation is even more mired in generalization these days, that it discourages variety in character designs of any species. Many cartoons today think it's a sign of quality to have every character look exactly the same as each other - especially in prime time. Even the dog will have the same face as its master, except with a dog nose pasted on. Animation has always had to fight against its own tendency to generalize, but it's worse than ever today.

If your show is in a hip "pointy style", then every character is crawling with corners - and no individual face. Animation producers and executives and even creators just love to come up with tons of rules to stifle the imaginations of the few creative cartoonists we actually have in the industry.

This was not always quite so severe.


There was a time when individual characters changed all the time from cartoon to cartoon - or even within the same cartoon. And I love this variety.

http://www.animationarchive.org/2008/09/biography-john-k-on-flintstones.html

I have always loved cartoons, where you could tell the difference between animators by how they drew (and moved) the same characters.


Not only am I for creating distinct specific characters, I take it even further than that. I want each instance of each character to be diverse in the specifics, yet maintain his own general traits.
The biggest misunderstanding of a classic animation tool is the slavery to the model sheets that top animation brass foists on us today.

Model sheets used to be drawn to help animators get a round about visual description of the characters. It was still expected of the animators to come up with their own specific poses and expressions. Each animator would also draw the character's details in his own style. He couldn't help it. It's natural for actual creative people to put their own stamp on a character or even a scene. We are doing it, even when we try not to.


So I'm amazed that we have arguments about how we need to have less stereotypes in cartoons, when every studio you work at beats generalization into you until it becomes impossible for you to do anything unique that might break out of the whole generic field.
Yes please, let's make individual characters - and then on top of that - individual instances of each character for each emotion and for each artist.

Even the Flintstones, which were wildly erratic and "off-model" in the beginning are very generalized, toned-down versions of real living characters who had a lot more specific physical traits and personalities.
I used to have heated arguments with Ed Benedict about whether or not an animator should have some leeway to stray from the models at all. As unique a designer as he was, even he had been trained into believing that every animator had to draw the same way according to the tyrannical model sheets. But it's practically impossible for real creative people to do that.
http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2007/05/ralph-and-norton-hide-outside-window.html

Suspicious Ralph. LEVELS OF ACTING SPECIFICITY

You can have different levels of specificity.

1) General emotions common to all beasts: Humans have certain basic expressions that are common to all animals

Happy

Pain

Hungry

Boss

Fear

Lust

Mad

Kill

2) Specific to Humans

and then certain emotions, interests and traits that are unique to us as a species.

Indignation

Sarcasm

Laughter

Music

Art

Dance

3) Gender Specific
Specific to women or men-all women have certain basic emotions and expressions in common, that are different to men.

This is where animation separates from live action. Animated characters barely get past the gender specific level. Once in a while maybe, but hardly ever do animated characters come off as individual characters.

5) General Character Types

Types are a level more specific than male or female, but belonging to a type is still not individually specific.

Looney Tunes is as close as we ever got to personality, and even they only slightly got past specific types:

Wiseguys,
bullies,
Jerks,
buffoons,
etc.

In a cartoon, you can have an asshole blowhard character-like PegLeg Pete, Stromboli and a million others.

Warner Bros. had some more specific variations of this type-like Foghorn Leghorn or Nasty Canasta.

In live action, the variations of any type are much more specific-Archie Bunker and Ralph Kramden share some broad general characteristics but come off as totally different characters with their own packages of expressions, gestures, voices, "character designs" and quirks.


Live action actors, start with huge advantages over animators:

1) Human actors actually are individuals. Every person is different. in real life.

2) They don't have to spend a lifetime learning to draw. They can spend their time learning to act.

3) They have a medium that is based on individuality. The star system. You like certain actors because they look unique, have charisma and or have very unique mannerisms, expressions and voices.

4) Animators have to draw every single frame to fake life. They have to learn a ton of physical things that actors don't:

Weight

Mechanics of motion.

Squash and stretch

Live actors do all this naturally and in real time. They don't have to figure out how to walk convincingly.

By the time animators get to the problem of acting, they usually rely on expressions, mannerisms, gestures that they have seen in other animated cartoons.

5) All real people look different. Most cartoon characters are repetitions of designs already created.

6) It's really hard to draw real specific expressions and then wrap them around cartoon construction. An actor doesn't have to think about what muscles to move to make an expression. He just makes one.

How then can animators break away from formula animation acting and enter the realm of fully realized individual characters?

A TYPICAL ANIMATION SASSY GIRL-SMARTER AND BETTER THAN ALL MEN

If an animator has time left over from learning to draw and animate to learn how to act, or even care about it, he has to ignore most animated formula acting and study real people and great actors who all have interesting and specific expressions and mannerisms.

6) Individual Character Specific

Each individual woman for example, on top of her basic shared woman expressions has her own personal specific expressions and mannerisms. And this is what separates real people from animation people. Specific versus generic.




A good actor takes what's common to all and then adds what's unique to the individual.

Alice is a "sassy girl" but a very specific individual one.

Alice's sarcastic reply to Ralph about her dress...

Ralph Yells At Alice About Dress
Uploaded by chuckchillout8

Jackie Gleason covers every level of general man and beast traits to a very specific unique version of a loud mouthed asshole.

Ralph acts like he's not suspicious of Alice...

These are not expressions or poses you would ever see on a cartoon model chart.

And he has a million more in his repertoire. This is just one scene!





Norton's reaction expressions are very specific and entertaining too.

Ralph acts like he's not suspicious
Uploaded by chuckchillout8