- Yesterday I focused on a couple of scenes Grim Natwick animated in his early days at the Fleischer studio. He was obviously experimenting with distortions, breaking of the joints, the visibility of inbetween drawings and how much he could get away with in “Rough drawings.”
This, of course, isn’t the animator that Grim became, but gives us some light to understand what did make up that animator. The scene here today is something I’d posted on my blog once before, in 2010. It features a lot of Grim’s ruffs as well as the clean ups by Richard Williams, himself.`
You can see Grim’s drawings erased and cleaned up. (The semi-erased semblance of Grim’s very large numbers remain on many of the drawings, as do Grim’s notes. The inbetweens were all done by Dick. (It’s Dick’s writing in the lower right corner, and I remember him doing this overnight.)
The scene is all on twos. There are two holds which Dick changed to a trace back cycle of drawings for a moving hold. It actually looks better on ones, but there was a lip-synch that Grim had to follow. It is interesting that both Tissa David, one of the five key animators on this film, and Grim Natwick, who Tissa had assisted for at least 20 years, both shared the one assistant on key scenes in this film – Richard Williams. Eric Goldberg assisted on many of Tissa’s other scenes.
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An inbetween by Dick Williams.
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A cleaned-up extreme by Grim Natwick.
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Dick Williams clean-up.
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Grim Natwick (sorta) cleaned-up rough.
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Grim Natwick rough.
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Williams inbetween.
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Natwick ruff, cleaned up.
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Dick’s clean-up inbetween.
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Definitely a Grim Natwick drawing – cleaned up by Dick (his handwriting).
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Drawings 44-47 are all Grim’s roughs with minor CU.
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Here’s a QT movie of the complete action from the scene.
The scene is exposed on twos per exposure sheets.
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Here are the folder in which the two exposure sheets
are stapled (so they don’t get separated.)
- In 1930, the animation in the Fleischer studio (as evidenced by Michael Barrier in his great book, Hollywood Cartoons) was pretty much controlled by the timing department. They supported a very even sense of timing and would expose everyone’s animation in the house meter. This virtually destroyed the timing within the studio. Their idea was that every drawing had to overlap the drawing before and after. It was done to such an extreme that it caused the even timing throughout their films.
There was at least one animator free of the timing department. Grim Natwick was the key guy in the studio, at the time. His animation was built, back then, on a distortion, a freedom of expression, that very much resembled what Bill Nolan was doing in Hollywood. The difference was that Natwick could draw, so his artwork was planned, designed to look that way. It wasn’t just a matter of straight ahead animation causing distortion. It allowed distortion with scenes going back to square one every so often to hold off the appearance of distortion. The inbetweens distorted and, in a way, smeared always to come back to a nice, tight pose of an extreme.
The film “Dizzy Dishes” is the perfect example of this style. This was actually the first Betty Boop cartoon, and Betty, a plump dog sings broadly. She really goes wild as she sings a song on top of a table à la Marlene Dietrich!. Here are some frame grabs from a couple of connected scenes to give you an idea of what was going on.
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If you jump ahead to Fleischer’s “Barnacle Bill”, also from 1930, you’ll find this wild scene where Betty is seducing Bill, you’ll see all sorts of distortion in the inbetweens which Grim has maneuvered for Betty’s movements on the couch. Note how well posed his extreme positions are drawn despite the distorted inbetweens, when she is moving.
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Look at the beautiful drawings (above) of this character in some of these extremes from this film. The character of Betty isn’t moving whereas Bimbo – I mean Barnacle Bill is all over the place. Yet your eyes are on Betty in that held position.
Now, let’s look at what the inbetweens are doing as Betty gets from one pose to the next. It’s really funny. Grim has found a way to create a sympathetic, adult and female character, yet he keeps her funny with the surface of the animation.
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At times in the animation, Betty’s hand may turn into a claw, but that might be that Grim delivered a rough which was poorly cleaned up by an assistant. Or perhaps the inker just inked from a rougher drawing, perhaps a Grim “clean up” if there ever were such a thing. He worked ROUGH. In fact, that distorted claw of a hand doesn’t matter. It’s the extremes that counted for Grim, and he was experimenting with this animation to see if that really were true.
I’ve remembered over many years an interview with Dick Huemer,* who worked alongside Grim on some of these films. Huemer gets credit for inventing the inbetweener to use in the animation process. It allowed him to turn out more animation and not worry about the many drawings that would paste the scenes together. In that interview, Huemer said that it didn’t really matter what the inbetweens looked like. You could draw a “brick” and it would still work. They actually may have believed this, at that time. Grim is using the inbetweens to get somewhere else in putting the scenes together.
(Tomorrow, I’ll post, again, a scene Grim did for Raggedy Ann with Dick Williams’ clean ups alongside so you can see the variance.)
* In Recollections of Richard Huemer interviewed by Joe Adamson, [1968 and 1969] Huemer said:
And i decided that I would save all that work of inbetweening by just having a bunch of lines or smudges, just scrabble, from, position to position, When something moved fast. To prove it, I had an alarm clock flying through the air, and right in the middle of the action I put a brick. And vhen they ran the finished
film you didn’t see the brickl It proved that you didn’t really see what was in the middle. But I overdid it.
- I wrote about this stylistic animation device not too long ago. I was leading up to the master, of course, Bill Tytla. He distorted things, alright, and in the way he did it, he changed animation forever, as far as I’m concerned.
But I started that story by writing about traditional animation and where it came from and where it was going; leading to a sort of rebellion as animators started distorting things, generally, in working closely with their unconventional directors. I purposely skipped a step there, and I should go back a tiny bit and talk about a couple of animators from the silent/early sound days. Today I have Bill Nolan in my sights; tomorrow, Grim Natwick. It’s kind of important before going on to Bill Tytla.
In the animation community in 1927-1930, there were two key animators who were considered the leaders in the business: Ub Iwerks at Disney (until he left to open his own studio) and Bill Nolan (at first with Pat Sullivan & Felix the Cat, then with Mintz’ Krazy Kat, and then onto a series of topical gag films called “Newslaffs.”
Both were considered the fastest animators in the country, and it was debatable as to which was quicker, though Iwerks was probably the guy. When Disney learned that Iwerks was leaving, he interviewed Nolan in New York to see if he were interested in replacing Iwerks. Disney offered a high salary of $150 per week for the job. It didn’t work out; Nolan was doing an unusual series, but ultimately went to ________________Nolan’s Krazy Kat looked original. Oswald the Rabbit after Universal had taken
charge of it. Nolan just about ran the studio under Walter Lantz and allowed them to turn out an enormous amount of footage.
Nolan gets abstract in “Permanent Wave,” a Universal Oswald cartoon.
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Nolan had developed a style known as the “rubber hose” style in that the limbs of a character were like flexible hoses and joints would be broken wherever the animator wanted. The style also featured very circular drawings. Stylistically, this fought the angularity of some other films that were being made and allowed Nolan to turn out many more drawings than usual. The roundness offered a faster line, and there was also quite a bit of distortion in Nolan’s drawings. Quite often the characters, Oswald, for example, didn’t even look like the character on the model sheet. In fact, you’d have to wonder if there was a model sheet, given the look of the animated character. Both Nolan and Iwerks were straight ahead animators, which meant they could easily go off model. Iwerks was better at holding things than Nolan, who seemed to enjoy being wild. Nolan would go back through his wild drawings and correct a couple of them, but would leave any other changes to lesser artists.
Nolan’s work was somewhat similar to the work of Jim Tyer, but I don’t think Tyer was drawing/animating that way to turn out faster work (though he was a very fast animator.) Nolan had to push the work out, and the rounded, distorted drawings enabled him to animate very quickly. As he went on, the artwork grew more and more wild, and it varied somewhat from the other animators’ work. Tyer tried to get his art to distort, as it does; Nolan just ended up there.
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I’d chosen a lot of stills from several of the
Universal/Lantz Oswald cartoons, animated by Nolan.
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But so many of these from the short, “Permanent Wave,”
are good enough to illustrate my point.
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His body moves out in front of his head
as it climbs up the water he’s spitting onto the boat.
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A logical action!
“The Hash Shop” was about as crazy as the animation and the gags went. Here’s one that ends the film.
“The Hash Shop”
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By 1930, Bill Nolan seems to have settled down a bit. He still abstracts and distorts his animation, but he tries to fit in a bit more with other animators who aren’t drawing their animation quite so abstractly.
After Disney’s “The Three Little Pigs,” other studios tried to catch up with this new type of animation. Nolan and, to a lesser extent, Lantz, didn’t try very hard to change. They liked the way things were going. However, it didn’t take long for Lantz to move for a change in Oswald’s design. They went cuter and whiter on the rabbit.
Here are some frame grabs from “My Pal, Paul.” In it Oswald wants to play music with jazz conductor/musician, Paul Whiteman. As it happens, Whiteman’s car breaks down while he’s driving through the woods, and the two get a bit of a duo as Whiteman plays the steering wheel like a clarinet. (Maybe that’s abstract enough.)
- Casino Royale (the 1967 original) was the fourth credit sequence animated by Richard Williams‘ Soho Square studio. Prior to this he’d directed What’s New Pussycat (1965), A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966), and The Spy Who Came In From the Cold (1966).
Continuing the presentation I’ve done of other title sequences by Williams, here’s Casino Royale. The other Williams credit sequences of the period are generally rambunctious items with almost too much happening on screen. It often gets hard to read the credits – in a theater, never mind trying to do it on TV. (God bless imdb.)
Theses are all frame grabs off a TV airing. My apologies for the horrendous quality. It aired on one of those cable channels that adds plenty of promos at the bottom of the screen (which I cleaned out of these images) overlapping many of the cards. They might have taken a bit more care to try to eliminate some distortion on the screen. The image skews, and the type gets distorted. I did my best with what I had. If I ever get my hands on a good dvd of the show, I’ll correct these images.
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____Joseph McGrath, Robert Parrish, and Richard Talmadge also directed but I
____eliminated their screen cards as repetitious.
The YouTuber versions are here:
Dick Williams’ version of the opening titles
And for the sake of amusement here are
The credits from the 2006 version of the film
Designed by Daniel Kleinman
I can’t think of many artists who have supporters as solid as is Richard O’Connor toward the brilliant artist, Fred Mogubgub. Certainly Fred deserved and deserves the attention and support and pleased I am to see it given.
Richard will exhibit some of Fred’s bits of genius in the studio of Ace and Son. This coming Thursday, March 28th at Ace & Son. 7pm. RSVP@aceandson.com
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How to Animate the Fleischer Way
Ignacio Carlos Ochoa recently placed this video on his blog. He said he wasn’t familiar with it. I saw the video about a year ago and thought it really nicely done. I’m not sure why I didn’t share it back then, but Ignacio’s comments make me feel like I should post it now, as he has already done. (By the way, his is a good blog and always worth a visit. Keep it in your eyesight; I put it on my sidebar.)
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Crood Reviews
I guess Dreamworks’ The Crood opened on Friday, yesterday. The reviews felt so after-the-fact that I almost didn’t notice it in the NYTimes. The reviewer Neil Genzlinger wrote that “The Croods” is “. . . colorful and has an appealing central character and — who knows? — might even give the little ones something more challenging to think about than its tired main plot.”
Not the sort of review one might hope for. It contines that “. . . the movie is at its most interesting and amusing when riffing on how cavemen might have reacted to new experiences and ideas, like fire and shoes.”
Flintstones . . . meet the Flintstones . . .
How many remember the Fleischer series called Stone Age? 12 shorts that couldn’t keep the Fleischer brothers together.
Great ideas just keep living on. I was a bit surprised a while back when Iwent to a party for How to Train Your Dragon; Chris Sanders said he’d be going on to The Croods, which was having a bit of trouble getting started. I thought his talent will probably not be best exploited there. But I don’t know. I can’t review the movie until I see it; that will be on Tuesday – that I see it. I’ll try to say something shortly thereafter. The film has to be better than Rise of the Guardians – talk about wasted material. I truly hope The Croods will be the bright spot of my coming Tuesday.
The NYTimes has a slide show about the design of the film. A violently colored watercolor toward the end of the slide show piqued my interest.
The review in the NY Daily News: “There’s a peculiar violence in the comedy in this CG-animated family film, similar to watching a loud, slapstick football game played by extraordinarily ugly plastic figures.”
“The film is best when speculating on the origins of human nature. Why, for instance, do we keep pets or love watching the horizon? When it gets past the Stone Age humor, this weird film manages to find some gentle revelations.”
The NY Post writes: Nothing Prehysterical Here – 1 star – “I’d like to take back all those times I said Nicolas Cage was one of the most annoying actors on film. It turns out he’s equally terrible when he’s only on the soundtrack.
And yet Cage is the least of the problems with “The Croods” . . .
63% from Rotten Tomatoes. That’s not too good. But then Oz the Great and Powerful got a 61% and has been the blockbuster these last two weeks.
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Lutz
J.J. Sedelmaier has posted everything you want to know about the E.G. Lutz book, Animated Cartoons: How They Are Made (including a scan of the entire book).
The article, actually, is called How Walt Disney Used His Library Card, which is a more appropriate article, because it shows us other books that Disney probably checked out of his local library when growing up in Kansas City.
With some material borrowed from Mike Barrier‘s book, The Animated Man, we get a good picture of the young Mr. Disney staking out the world of the animated cartoon in the early thirties.
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A New Face for an Old Effect
Finley, the flying monkey – Billy Bletcher with natural colored lips
Recently while reading Post Magazine in an article about the Effx for the new Wizard of Oz movie, Oz the Great and Powerful, I stumbled upon something interesting. Actually, it was only interesting because that same day I’d read a small piece in Mike Barrier‘s Hollywood Cartoons, and I found an interesting juxtaposition of the one story to the other.
According to Barrier’s book, back in 1934 Disney had chosen a Silly Symphony to direct, The Golden Touch. It would be the last animated film he’d take credit for directing. Disney had the two best animators of the day, Norm Ferguson and Freddie Moore scheduled to do all the animation in the film. A lot of time was given to every stage of this movie. When it came time to record Billy Bletcher as King Midas, they painted his lips white and filmed him so that Ferguson could use his lips in animating the character. The animation took a particularly long time and didn’t go well. Disney, himself, called the film “a tremendous flop.”
They didn’t paint his lips white, but they did photograph Walt Disney acting as the voice of Mickey Mouse when he did the track for “The Pointer.” The stills were used by Frank Thomas for the one big dialogue scene in the short, and Frank spoke several times, when I knew him, of this tactic.
Jump almost 80 years to shooting the monkey sidekick of the Wizard, James Franco, as he travels down the yellow brick road, seeking to become the Wizard of Oz. The two of them have a long conversation. The film’s visual effects supervisor Scott Stokdyk talks about the flying monkey partner of James Franco‘s wizard.
“Finley is the monkey who becomes Oz’s companion on the journey. He’s played by Zach Braff. The modern way for doing a CG character is to have them on-set, interacting actor to actor, and then paint out the stand-in actor and replace him with CG. We tried to do that whenever we could. But our CG Finley was three-feet-tall and had wings, could fly around, and was very active. So we couldn’t put Zach’s face where the monkey’s was.”
“We came up with this thing called ‘puppet cam.’ We had a puppet with a rod, and a monitor and camera on the end of it. We had Zach in the same booth that Joey was in, and he was interacting. We set up a virtual video conference, but it was executed through a monitor on a stick on-set. James had an ear rig, and he could talk to Zach, but was looking at a video monitor on a stick, put in the place of where the monkey’s head would be. And in the monitor he’d see Zach’s head in the booth. It gave us a proxy for having Zack on-set with his head in the right place.â€
All the time that has passed and not much has changed. They don’t paint Zach Braff’s lips white, but they do paste his video image onto a cardboard puppet on set. It all amounts to the same thing; it just costs a lot more money.
As a matter of fact I also think about the cardboard cutouts that James Baskett dealt with when shooting the live action sequences for Song of the South. It sounds very similar to what they did on the new movie.
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ASIFA East Festival Judging Screenings
This week several nights will be devoted to judging the entries for the ASIFA East Festival. Remember that all members of ASIFA East are eligible to vote for the awards from the films to be screened. Get out the vote.
There will be four screenings:
1. Wed., March 27th – 7pm – Student films
2. Thurs., Mar 28th – 7pm – Commissioned Films
3. Fri., March 29th – 7pm – Experimental Films
4. Tues., April 2nd – 7pm – Independent Films
These are the films competing:
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(click on any page to enlarge for legibility.)
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Proposed Production Routines
As an extra added attraction today, here’s a paper that was distributed at the Disney studio in early 1934, which outlines how their productions will move forward through the studio. They’re merely trying to set up some kind of organization, and they start by telling everyone how it will operate.
This document came from someone who would like to remain anonymous, but we thank him, just the same.
Maynard Dixon was a wonderful artist of the old West. His beautiful landscapes, his extraordinary posing of the figures in those landscapes, his ability to connect us to the scenes he so beautifully creates are strong reasons for caring deeply about his art. Bill Peckmann has this book, and he shared it with me/us. Is there anything more I need say? I hope you enjoy this artwork as well as do I
Here are Bill’s comments:
This book of Maynard Dixon’s wonderful western art is not exactly a coffee table book, at 9 x 6, it’s more like a night stand book, but don’t let its’ bantam size fool you, it packs a very potent punch! This well written, perfectly researched and very enjoyable to read biography by Donald J. Hagerty, has it all. Profusely illustrated, with lots of pictures that I’ve never seen before. (The best part about that, is the fact that the illo’s are in sync with the text, you read about something and there’s a picture right there to illustrate the point. That doesn’t happen that often in books.) The price is a steal on Amazon, so whether you are a fan and have all of Dixon’s exceptional, well worth, over sized art books, or, you are new to the art of Maynard Dixon but want to find out what the noise is about, this IMHO is THE book to get!
Here are some of the illustrations that appear in the book. If you remember that Dixon was born in 1875 and then look at the dates of the illustrations, you’ll see what this mostly self-taught artist was capable of doing at a very young age.
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Here is the deftly done cover design, a composite of
a sepia photo of MD and one of his works in color.
2 Carson, Nevada (Oct 1917)
A Dixon oil sketch that appears on the book’s back cover.
3 Dawn, Coronado (1891)
Jackass Meadows (1894)
Pencil and pastel on paper
4a Indian Sign (1893)
Pen & ink on paper
One of my favorite Dixon sketches. It’s a haunting
piece of art, a sketch of another work of art.
4b Sycamore, El Alisal (1900)
Pencil and charcoal on paper
5 Murrrieta’s Gold (1901)
6 Oregon Cowboy (1901)
pencil and pen & ink on paper
7 Indian on Horseback (1903)
Pastel on paper
This sketch done in 1903 looks like it came out of a 1950′s magazine.
8 Fire and Earthquake (1906)
ink on paper
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Sunset Magazine (1907)
10b When a Giant Sequoia Falls (1907)
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12 The Texican (Dust Jacket)
13 Bar 20-Days (Dust Jacket)
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Finally a portraitofte artist, himself, around 1943
- One of the better pluses of working on Raggedy Ann, back in 1977, was the information available to us. There was circulated, there, a book of notes Richard Williams had kept during the lectures Art Babbitt had given at is studio in Soho Square. These still act as a unique bible I have on my shelf. (Unfortunately, these days it’s on a shelf in storage.)
There was also another set of notes. These weren’t 8½ x 11, they were 14 x 17 sheets of paper, and only a few had access. As one of the bosses there, I had access. (Basically, we couldn’t have everyone copying 14 x 17 sheets of paper; that got expensive.)
I think these were notes Dick was keeping for a potential book he’d write. They pulled from everywhere, whether it was Preston Blair‘s book or the Disney after-hours studio lecture notes. There were also notes Dick kept from other pros that had given lectures at his studio. Here’s a good sampler of some of these pages. There’s a Milt Kahl talk, a John Hubley talk, notes on an Ollie Johnston talk (typed by Jill, Dick’s assistant as well as notes of different walks from Dick, himself.
I won’t interpret them for you, but will just dump them on you. So here they are. Make sense of them, as you will:
- Today marks the 80th birthday of RIchard Williams. To celebrate, I’ve chosen to post these images from the credit sequence of A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum. My first introduction to Richard Williams and his work came by way of a BBC documentary from 1965, The Creative Person: Richard Williams. It aired on WNDT’s ch 13 in New York (PBS before PBS existed.) Within the sequence there is once scene of a girl smelling a flower. (The Annette Andre credit.) I remember this as part of that doc, and Richard said that at times you should slow down the animation of a character if you want it to seem more real. There’s a dissolve animation going on here.
This is a great theatrical show and a mediocre movie. Despite the great cast, the brilliant people working behind the scenes (from Tony Walton‘s sets and costumes to Nicholas Roeg‘s extraordinary photography; from the incredible song score by Stephen Sondheim to Ken Thorne‘s excellent incidental music), somehow it all doesn’t really work.
However, animation enthusiasts would be primarily interested in the animated credit sequence by Richard Williams‘ fine animation. This was a sequence that brought Williams out of the cartoon world and into the more serious fold. Suddenly, his studio grew up.
Since we didn’t get to see his brilliant ads in the US, we had to seek out his title work. Credit sequences for future films such as The Charge of the Light Brigade, The Pink Panther sequels and What’s New Pussycat easily demonstrated how he really lifted his studio into the big time.
I’ve made frame grabs of the sequence from my recording, and thought I’d post them for your amusement. Sorry that the copy I have isn’t the most pristine and that the frames available are a bit soft. But I guess the idea comes across.
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The sequence starts at the end of the film. Buster Keaton runs on a circular treadmill, and dissolves to an animated version of himself.
He grows in the frames as some large-sized flies enter from the left.
Cut out to see a small Buster disappearing. The camera whips across to a picture of fruit. The flies zip over there and eat the picture. (This image of fruit was very dark on screen.)
A fly lands on the nose of a CU caricature of Zero Mostel. His eyes cross watching the fly.
Flies land on Phil Silvers’ bald head and march across.
Buster runs across a painted frieze on the way to a series of inlayed boxes.
Zip to the second box credits Michael Crawford. Pan to the third box which features Jack Gilford’s name.
Dick talked with me about this scene in the film. He felt that to create realistic
characters in animation one had to slow everything down. He did it with dissolves.
It’s a technique he came back to often, quite noticeably in The Charge of
the Light Brigade.
A fly crawls up a column.
Errol LeCain’s art seems to be featured in this elaborate scene. The entire group – top
and (upside down) bottom – dance.
An animated version of Zero Mostel chases a female through and across a painted wall moving into and across the cracks.
The cornucopia of fruit starts in full color but goes to B&W before it’s done, in honor of the great cinematographer.
A very large cast of shilhouettes runs around this credit for Ken Thorne. There is no cycle here. This is a Dick Williams piece, so they’re all fresh drawings. They turn into flies for the next credit.
A Roman version of an Escher wall painting animates, confusing the fly trying to walk across.
The animated Buster Keaton runs toward us on one side
and away from us on the other side.
For the editor’s credit, a female looks at herself in a mirror. A hand comes in and clips off her pony-tail.
A slew of credits rots in one spot. This falls off revealing the choreographers’ names.
I’m always fascinated by the credit the designer gives himself. No sign of anyone else
who worked on this sequence. Titles have changed since then.
This is the first time I remember seeing letters from the type of one card falling down to match letters from the next card.
This card, the least significant one, comes back several times.
Of course it’s overanimated though it looks like a cycle.
The camera moves in on a fly crossing a checker board.
That legal card, again.
Truck in on the copyright card.
The legalese changes as the MPAA card is lifted.
Truck out from “End” past “The End” to reveal several more boxes.
Finally, the MGM lion roars.
Happy Birthday, Richard. Thanks for all the wonderful gifts you gave animation, not the least being the obvious: a new respect for a medium that was dying when you stepped up to the plate. You restored its dignity at least once.
It took a full twenty years for the industrialized animated cartoon to develop into anything approaching a professional, never mind artistic, level. Thanks specifically to Walt Disney‘s efforts, in the twenties and thirties, animation developed as a process with guidelines, rules and specifics designed to create the most consistency. To have those characters moving in anything resembling the elements of real life, it took a real education. And the development continued past the zenith of Snow White so that things grew faster and faster in leaps and bounds. Studios outside of Disney’s were slower on the uptake fighting the inevitable costs that this better animation required. Just as a Paul Terry held off on turning to sound or color, until he had no choice if he wanted to compete in the marketplace, so, too, did he not approve pencil tests to better the animation in his films. The second largest studio at the time, the Fleischer studio, likewise was slow to agree to the new developments. Whereas the Color Classics exploited color film, the successful series, Popeye and Betty Boop stayed B&W. Likewise Fleischer’s animators didn’t get to see pencil tests except on more important product.
However, once we hit the early forties, animators started doing their own variations on differing ways of introducing “quality” to the animation. The artists wanted to explore the “Art” and ways to get there.
A sample of John McGrew’s work on The Arist-o-cat
Maybe they didn’t think they were doing “Art”, but that’s what I’d say they were doing. And god bless the soul that gets in the way of an artist and his dream works.
Chuck Jones was always looking to better his product; so was Bob Clampett. They had different ways of going about it. Jones’ work with John McGrew meant that the filmmaking was pushed beyond the obvious and the artwork got unusual and daring. Check out the insane film cutting from 6:40 on in Conrad the Sailor. The artwork also turned more abstract in the layouts and backgrounds.
With Jones’ film, The Dover Boys, the animation was drafted to be daring as well. The animator, Bobe Cannon introduced smears. To pop a character from one extreme to another, accenting and parodying the 19th Century dramatic style Jones had sought. The character could move from one position to the next by smearing a couple of inbetween drawings and coming to a properly composed “hold.” It brought an unusual comedy bit to the scenes.
Frame by frame Cannon hurriedly smeared the artwork so that the character . . .
. . . could zip from one pose to another. This put the melodramatic action . . .
. . .blatantly into the action in a funny and purposeful way.
It also helped by accenting the peculiar track readings that Jones had caught from his actors. Immediately following The Dover Boys, the Jones team tuned out The Case of the Missing Hare. Smears abound as Bugs Bunny fights a magician against very stylized backgrounds. Cannon, Rudy Larriva and Ken Harris animated. No doubt Cannon’s smears were controlled a bit more as Chuck Jones experimented more with holds and freezes on his characters. John McGrew and Eugene Fleury designed them.
Cannon brought these “smears” into UPA with him, as an animator. He also started experimenting with the rule of “breaking of the joints” which meant that under no circumstances would an arm bend except at a wrist, elbow or shoulder. However, he allowed himself some distortion, flexibility to determine where the elbow was on the arm or how far the bend at the shoulder could be. Let’s just say he exaggerated. This was also an ideal form of animation for the limited animated practices at UPA. Grim Natwick had Nellie Bly corkscrew her arms around each other in Rooty Toot Toot. This was probably a direction Hubley called for in his quest for “modern art”. By this time, Cannon was already an Oscar winning director at UPA; Gerald McBoing Boing had won the previous year.
It was at the same time Cannon and Jones were developing these smear tactics for their drawings that Bob Clampett was talking with Rod Scribner. Scribner was an enormous fan of newspaper cartoonist, George Lichty. Scribner wanted to pull the designed looseness of Lichty into his animation and allow it to take control. Distortions would represent inner emotions, and Scribner was desperate to try it. Clampett agreed as long as he, as director, was calling the shots. He would tell Scribner when to “Lichty” something. They first tried it in “A Tale of Two Kitties” (the first Tweety & Sylvester cartoon.) They immediately took what they learned into “Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs.” Scribner used it wildly in relaying the emotional intensity of the characters. Now, they were not only distorting the characters on the inbetweens, they were visibly distorting the extremes as well. Not only were the characters’ surface emotions visible, but the internal emotions were allowed to run rampant.
Rod Scribner had a different way of distorting.
The character would start off normally and distort by completely shifting . . .
. . . the masses of the character keeping the volume the same within . . .
. . . the body of the character who’d end up somewhat normal again.
The experiments between this animator and director were enormously successful, just as had been Jones’ experiments with Cannon and other animators under him. And these experiments continued to play into other films by both directors. The control was strong and personal and unique. Clampett and Jones were doing similar things for different reasons, however subtle.
On the East Coast, the animator, Jim Tyer was doing something altogether different. His style was bursting at the seams of control; he had been drawing his distortions more and more forcefully as his directors grew weaker.
I’m sure, at Paramount, he was kept under control. Assistants altered his drawings in their “clean ups” trying to pull Popeye back onto the model sheet. A number of them actually complained to me about it. The kindest animator in the world, Johnny Gentilella had a dig as well, “He had difficulty keeping his character on model.” Once Tyer landed at Terrytoons, that was it. All was clear for his graphic distortions. The characters never appeared on model, never mind their ever having been “cleansed” in “clean-up.”
There was a difference with Jim Tyer, though. It would seem to have been more a graphic adjustment rather than an emotional one that Tyer was drawing. The characters were not trying to break out of their skins emotionally, as they did under Scribner’s pencil. Here they stood out from everything else and every other animator’s style. There was no attempt by the Terrytoon directors to emotionally cast these graphic outbursts. A Tyer scene, wild as it might flow in its distortions, would be allowed to flow into the work of some very tight animator, then come right back to Tyer. One would expect his scenes to, at least, be the action scenes; but no, they could have been very quietly building up to the wild actions of another animator who would try to rein in the stylization.
The Terrytoons cartoons were all over the map, and in many a case they were held hostage by Jim Tyer. As a kid I enjoyed these outbursts, and I looked forward to watching another Mighty Mouse or Terry Bears cartoon to see what that crazy animator did. The problem, of course, was that Tyer’s animation separated from the film as a whole and broke down the entire short it came from. Mark Mayerson talked about this at length in his great piece, “Jim Tyer: The Animator Who Broke the Rules” (1990). As he points out, ” Tyer’s work is animation’s equivalent of a train wreck or a freak show. It’s not something you’d necessarily choose to look at, but once it’s caught your eye it’s hard to look away.”
This was unlike the work of Cannon or Scribner. All three are funny and to differing degrees. They, all three, have different levels of depth. However, whereas Cannon worked his style with one key director and Scribner did the same, Tyer worked against his directors – at least, one would guess that was the case. I can’t imagine a Connie Rasinski even talking about the style except to chastise Tyer, possibly to his face. I’m sure things got easier for Tyer after UPA and their “wild” stylization made his work more acceptable and possibly even more comprehensible for these directors like Rasinski, Eddie Donnelly or a Mannie Davis. Tyer seemed to have an autonomy over anything he was working on.I’m surprised, in a way, that he, himself, wasn’t more concerned about his work fitting more appropriately into the cartoon as a whole. It’s doubtful that he would have mentally dismissed the films he worked on – other than for his own animation.
Even Tyer’s still work shows signs of blowing up at any moment, as can be seen in this storyboard still or this comic strip. Paul Terry, himself, must have accepted, if not supported, this work. Tyer did it for so many years.
There was one other key animator who distorted his characters, but his was a greater example than any other. For a short time, he was producing some of the most important animation of is time. We’ll tackle him (again) in another post.Of course, I’m talking about Bill Tytla.
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