Media: Ren & Stimpy Big House Blues Seq. 02

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for more amazing animation related articles.



Earlier this week, Sue Kroyer visited the archive. She's teaching a class on storyboarding at Woodbury University, and she was checking out our collection of storyboards. Her students will be stopping by soon to pore over the material in our physical archive. It's great to be able to provide this resource to our local art schools.

BIG HOUSE BLUES

These days, very few studios write their stories the way cartoons in the golden age were written. Spumco cartoons are the exception, using the exact same process as the one used by just about every animated film produced prior to 1960. These cartoons were written visually using a storyboard, rather than being written in words as a script. If you compare this particular storyboard to the finished cartoon, you'll instantly see the advantages of using this system. The story of Big House Blues is told through the compositions of the scenes and the expressions and acting of the characters. Dialogue is only used to enhance the action, not to serve as bald exposition. The panels are drawn very loose, but the basic information for each scene is all there. Each subsequent step of production strengthens the original visual idea presented in the board. The flow from scene to scene is clear, and the challenges of staging have all been addressed in thumbnail form on the storyboard. There's no need to rework and rethink the staging in layout.



The trend of writing cartoons using scripts started at Hanna-Barbera in the early 1960s, and the dependance on words to tell the story alone is largely responsible for the sorry state of animation on television today. "Snappy dialogue" has replaced cartooning, and a bastardized non-visual form of animated film has been born. Chuck Jones referred to this sort of thing as "illustrated radio", but in recent years, television cartoons have become even less visually expressive and even more packed with irrelevant verbal "jokes" than ever before. Hopefully, the students who study this storyboard will be able to reverse the trend and make cartoons that are visually literate again.

ASIFA-Hollywood is very fortunate to have in its collection all of the boards from the Spumco cartoons. The animation community owes a debt of gratitude to John Kricfalusi for generously sharing this material with us. Here then, is the second installment of the storyboard to the pilot episode of Ren & Stimpy, Big House Blues. If you missed it, see Part One of this storyboard.



















If you would like to see more of this storyboard, let me know in the comments below. I'd be happy to pick up the board where I left off in a week or two.

For the first part of this storyboard, see... Big House Blues Seq. 1 and Part Three. For more Ren & Stimpy stuff, see... John K's Stimpy's Invention and our profile of Vincent Waller

Thanks
Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive

Stumble It!