Action Analysis &Animation &Articles on Animation &Commentary 07 Jul 2013 05:00 am
Two Tier Tyre
– Somehow always touching in the back corners of the recesses of my mind is the work of Jim Tyer. He’s possibly the most well-known animator in the medium’s short history. The guy has done such eccentric work that it’s impossible to find someone comparable. Even to those who don’t realize they’re mimicking his work, they would be surprised to learn that they’re doing Jim Tyre and not Tex Avery or Bob Clampett and Rod Scribner.
A number of things have been written about Jim Tyer. Interestingly, it’s predominantly the same few people that seem to be writing and usually the same bits are repeated.
Chief among sites that offers bits and comics among their offerings, is Kevin Langley‘s Cartoons Comics and Model Sheets. This blog first caught my attention with plenty of Mr. Tyer’s imaginative drawing. Not quite rough, not quite gesture drawing, and certainly not rendering. The best one could say was Wacko.
You see I’d been an ardent enthusiast of Mr. Tyer’s work for years, and here they were – stills. Plenty of them. So there were lots and lots of links. You can’t really write lots of words when processing Jim Tyer’s material. As a matter of fact, I can only think of one pwerson who did that job and did an impeccable turn of it. Mark Mayerson.
As a matter of fact, you might want to stop reading here and go to Mark’s comments, now. He had two key things to say and no one else has had much more to say to me. It’s a paper he wrote in 1990 and with it he had more to say about Jim Tyer‘s work than had anyone else to that date.
I meant for this piece to be much more exhaustive, but the problems I’m having with my internet are annoying. Unfinished pieces have been thrown up as complete. This is one of them, the Provenson piece (though that’s much more finished) made it to post, and others as well. I may quit writing at all until Verizon finally comes to my door to correct my phone service. (I still don’t have an operating phone number after three weeks and my internet is intermittently up and down based on its own whim.)
I apologize for the sloppiness of the whole thing.
on 07 Jul 2013 at 3:08 pm 1.Roberto Severino said …
Yup! I loved Mark Mayerson’s summary of Jim Tyer and his work. An incredible, innovative animator indeed that hardly anyone has gone close to match ever since in terms of his distortions. Someday if I learn how to animate, I might pay tribute to Tyer in some way.
on 07 Jul 2013 at 4:18 pm 2.Zagnut Poltroon said …
Not to troll here, but even when I was a little kid Tyer’s stuff jumped out at me. I blindly accepted pretty much anything animated then, but his stuff made me uncomfortable. It looked “wrong”. Later, thanks to articles such as this one, I found out this singularly distancing work was done by Tyer. Oof. It’s surprising what gets adored in a cult setting sometimes.
on 07 Jul 2013 at 4:44 pm 3.Roberto Severino said …
“Not to troll here, but even when I was a little kid Tyer’s stuff jumped out at me. I blindly accepted pretty much anything animated then, but his stuff made me uncomfortable. It looked “wrongâ€. Later, thanks to articles such as this one, I found out this singularly distancing work was done by Tyer. Oof. It’s surprising what gets adored in a cult setting sometimes.”
I prefer Tyer’s animation to having the animation look lifeless and on model absolutely all the time like in a lot of mainstream television animation. It’s refreshing to look at and get inspired by. I haven’t seen too many shrink takes done in cartoons outside of one of the scenes in “Stimpy’s First Fart.”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LVMGA650BM
I have the same opinion of Milt Gross, though I understand why there would be people who would feel uncomfortable from looking at both of their drawing styles. What do you exactly mean by a cult setting, by the way?
Jim Tyer’s comic book work reveals that he was a solid draftsman who could also draw very fun, loose and cartoony to me.
on 07 Jul 2013 at 6:33 pm 4.Veikko Suvanto said …
Isn’t “the most well-known animator” a bit of an exaggeration? I guess the sad truth is that among the general public no animator has achieved the kind of recognition as Walt Disney, Hanna & Barbera and a handful of directors (Avery, Clampett, Jones) have, though probably Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston are pretty close. But even among animation aficionados it seems to me that a number of animators are better-known and more written about than Tyer is (Blair, Culhane, Harris, Bob McKimson, Scribner, Tytla and the nine old men are the first to come to mind). At any rate, I discovered Tyer relatively late, and still have a lot of studying to do as far as his work goes.