Story: Writing Cartoons Pt 3- Structure

This post is the third in a series on Cartoon Writing. For the first two installments, see... Writing Cartoons: Part One- The Gag Session and Part Two- A Continuity Emerges


When we left off in our series of posts on cartoon writing last time, the initial "No No Session" had generated a pile of unrelated thumbnail gags on a basic premise which were starting to lead to the beginnings of a rudimentary plotline. Today, we'll explore how the cartoon writers brought structure to the story and began to flesh out the continuity in preparation for the storyboard artist to begin work.

In the mid-1930s, the notes from Disney story sessions were widely distributed among the staff. All of the employees, from the directors all the way down to the janitors, were invited to submit gags to the cartoon being developed. The only stipulation was that the gags had to be drawn- not written down. Walt and the story men sifted through the doodles and stick figure drawings to find inspiration for little bits of business that they might not have thought of themselves. If the gag was usable, the employee was given a dollar bonus. If the gag led to a sequence of gags, they were paid five dollars. Here's a typical "dollar gag" from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs...


In an interview many years later, Ward Kimball recalled that he would supplement his income by generating "dollar gags" in his spare time... His ideas were almost always used, but he soon discovered that he could get five times as much by simply attaching a "butt joke" to the end as a payoff. Inevitably, the "fanny gag" would appeal to Walt's unique sense of humor, and he would choose Kimball's gag as one that might lead to a sequence of gags- Bam! Five bucks!

Kimball wasn't the only artist who knew Walt's preferences when it came to gag ideas... Here is a short sequence of story doodles by Les Clark. This "butt joke" was created for a sequence that was eventually cut from Mickey's Grand Opera (1936)...


Clark is beginning to see an individual gag as a series of actions that relate to each other. His thumbnail sketches suggest enough for a storyboard artist to begin to tighten up his poses, focus the action and define the staging.

THE OUTLINE
As soon as the gags started to come into focus as a basic plotline, the story supervisor would begin arranging them into a logical progression, formatting the embryonic scenario as a written document in outline form. The outline was the equivalent of the "first draft script" for an animated film. But it didn't include dialogue and descriptions of actions the way live action scripts do. Instead, it defined the structure, continuity and intent of the action.

STRUCTURE

In preparing the notes for the storyboard artist to work from, the story supervisor began by establishing a structure to the gags. It was important to clearly define how the story broke down into sequences and how each sequence broke down into individual gags, because the storyboard artist most likely would not be boarding it in chronological order. The artist often drew up the payoffs to the storyline first- it was easier to create a strong setup when he knew where he was going to end up. The outline helped determine the breaks in the story, so the artist could work in an order that made sense for him.

Here we have an outline from Altruists prepared by Ren & Stimpy story man, Richard Pursel. John Kricfalusi's director's notes and doodles for the main setups appear in the margins...


Notice that the document begins with the statement of the premise, and is broken into sections defining the beginning, middle and end, as well as the sequences which fall within those sections. The structural detail goes all the way down to individual gags.


The line breaks make it easy for the storyboard artist to cut up the outline with scissors and pin the individual story beats up on his cork board as a placeholder for action he hadn't boarded yet.

John K recently shared this outline for Stimpy's Invention on his blog, All Kinds Of Stuff...




Read John K's detailed explanation of this outline.
CONTINUITY

The second element that the outline defined was the continuity- the basic flow and logical order of the action. The storyboard artist would receive the doodles from the "No No Session" to work from, so there was no need for detailed descriptions of action. As the old saying goes... "A picture is worth a thousand words" and nowhere was that adage any truer than in cartoon writing. Story artists were accustomed to working from thumbnail sketches, and they could extrapolate the essense of a gag better from a quick sketch than a whole script full of fancy prose.

Here we have an outline for The Return Of Duck Dodgers In The 24 1/2 Century by Mike Maltese, one of the greatest cartoon writers who ever lived. Although this document is from very late in Maltese's career, it clearly shows his creative process. This particular draft is a transitional document. Maltese had already begun boarding when this document was drafted. The first eight sequences and sequences 18, 19 and 20 appear to include dialogue transcribed from the board. The middle section, however is in raw outline form, with very basic descriptions only intended to remind him of which thumbnail gag drawing went where in the continuity. As the storyboard developed, these notes would be updated with dialogue, transforming the outline from being a structural document to being a dialogue script, ready for the voice actors to perform.





If one looked at notes like these out of context, without the knowledge of the visual devolopment that preceded it and the purpose this document serves to the steps that follow, one might mistakenly assume that the story is being written in words. But nothing could be further from the truth. The words merely serve to organize the drawings. The storytelling is all being devised visually.

INTENT

The third, and perhaps most important thing that a storyboard artist required from the notes prepared by the story supervisor was the intent of the action. The cartoon had a purpose, which was stated in the premise. The beginning, middle and end of the story all had purposes as well. If an event in the beginning set up a payoff later in the story, the storyboard artist would need to be made aware of that.

The stories for cartoon short subjects generally broke down into a beginning, (which first established the characters and then the situation they found themselves in) variations on the theme of the premise in the middle of the cartoon, (referred to at Warner Bros as "blackouts") and the "topper gag" and resolution to the situation which formed the end. Every individual gag had to serve the purposes of the sequence it was a part of- all of the parts worked together to tell the story.

In our next installment on cartoon writing, the stage has been set for the storyboard artist to begin blocking out the action and establishing the cinematics...


You won't want to miss the amazing examples of thumbnail boards that I've unearthed in the collection of the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive!

A SIDE NOTE: I've recommended it before, but if you haven't seen the DVD of The Unknown Chaplin, you owe it to yourself to pick up a copy. The process of writing for animated cartoons grew out of the way slapstick comedy shorts were written. In fact, several animators and cartoonists served as gag writers for famous comedians in their younger days. This DVD breaks down Chaplin's creative process and shows you exactly how his films were written. The program that deals with Chaplin's masterpiece, City Lights should be required viewing for storyboard students at every animation school.

For more on cartoon writing see... Writing Cartoons: Part One- The Gag Session and Part Two- A Continuity Emerges

See also... The Greatest Cartoon Writer of All Time, Alvin Show Pilot Board, Alvin Show: The Whistler Storyboard, Clair Weeks' Banyan Deer Storyboard, Louise Zingarelli's Cool World Board, Ren & Stimpy Big House Blues Board Part One, Part Two and Part Three, Stimpy's Invention Board Part One and Part Two.

Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive
.

Stumble It!

Story: Writing Cartoons Pt 2- A Continuity Emerges

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see the bonus reason on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great posts featuring animation art.


When I was beginning to draft this series of articles, I remembered a folder of thumbnails that Grim Natwick's family gave me. The folder was labelled "Valiant Tailor Gags". I thumbed through the drawings several times over the years, but I only looked at the drawings individually- I didn't look at them as a group. I pulled the folder out this week and upon closer examination, I discovered that the drawings formed a clear record of a gag session from 1934. This set of sketches is particularly important because it shows how the gags were created, how they evolved and grew as the artists discussed them at the story meeting, and how they found their way into the continuity of a finished cartoon.


The basic premise of this sequence is... The King is being chased by bees. He dives into a lake to escape them. The Giant arrives and harasses the King. The Tailor defeats the Giant and saves the King. Grim Natwick directed this cartoon, and his notes appear on the drawings in red. A check mark indicates that the gag is approved for the film. A question mark indicates that he isn't sure where to use it yet.

Here are some of the gags that the staff of the Iwerks Studio came up with for this premise. At the end is a Quicktime movie of the complete cartoon, so you can see how these plans were realized in the finished film.


William Hamner suggests a gag where the King is swallowed by a whale and is shot out his blow hole. (Since the character design hadn't been established yet, Hamner draws the character as Otto Soglow's Little King!)


An artist named Hudson elaborates on Hamner's basic idea, adding a tail flip to the end.


This gag suggests that the King be underwater, hiding from the Giant. The Giant tries to catch him like a fish with a gold watch as bait.


Underwater, the King uses a looking glass as a teeter totter.


The Giant blows on the water and a passing octopus offers him Listerine.


Ed Friedman suggests a gag where the Giant breaks a limb off a tree and uses it as a boomerang.


Another variant on the broken tree branch- The Giant uses it as a straw to drink the lake dry.


Several unrelated gags: The King runs out of the lake with streams of water from his crown. / The King is poked in the butt by a sword fish. / The Giant gets honey poured on his head. / The King is stung by bees on the patch on his butt.


The Giant runs from a swarm of bees and stumbles over some wagons.


Grim suggests a gag where the Giant takes a header into the dirt, plowing the ground in a furrow.


He attempts a topper gag with a farmer using the Giant to plow his field.

Now comes the really interesting part! Here are Grim Natwick's thumbnails showing how he takes the random gags and works them into a rough continuity. The drawings are very rough. You might want to print them out so you can compare them to the finished film.


(32) The King enters scene and does a trout dive into the lake to escape the bees. We pan with the soldiers as the pursue the Tailor and chase him up a tree.
(33) The King bobs up and down in the water as the bees circle in a repeating cycle above him.
(34) A thunderous laugh is heard in the distance. The Giant steps over the crest of the hill and takes a few steps over them.
(35) The Giant scares the soldiers away. He looks at the King and laughs. The King ducks.
(36) The Giant blows on the water and throws a stone at the King.
(37) The King reaches up into the tree and grabs a branch. The Tailor jumps to another branch.


(39) The Giant uses the branch like a gaffing hook, reaching to catch the King with it.
(40) The hook at the end of the branch catches in the patch on the King's butt.
(41) The Tailor sees what is happening and ducks into a hole in the tree. The camera pans down the outside of the tree to its base, where the Tailor crawls out of another hole.
(42) The Tailor sneaks past the Giant and runs off screen
(43) Dissolve to: Interior tailor shop. The Tailor grabs a jar of honey.


(44) Exterior Tailor Shop: The Tailor runs down the street with the jar.
(45) Dissolve to: The Tailor diving back into the hole in the tree trunk.
(46) The Tailor, standing on a high limb of the tree, drops the honey jar.
(47) The pot of honey dumps all over the Giant's head.
(48) The King comes to the surface of the water as the bees go after the Giant.
(49) The Giant runs from the bees. He shoves his head in the dirt to escape them. He runs through a barn and a church over the hill and into the distance.

The sequence went from here to the storyboard stage, where the action was defined better and the gags were plussed. Watch the film and see how it came out...


The Valiant Tailor (Iwerks/1934)
(Quicktime 7 / 7 minutes / 18.5 megs)

PLEASE NOTE The text and media files on the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive Blog are not to be duplicated, redistributed or hosted on other websites without the prior written permission of the Board of Directors of ASIFA-Hollywood.

The next article in this series will show how the structure of cartoons became more sophisticated in the mid-1930s, and the development of organizational tools that made that possible.

For more on the Iwerks Studio, see... Grim Natwick's Scrapbook: The Golden Age, Berny Wolf: Iwerks Model Sheets, and Grim Natwick's Job Offer From Disney

For more on cartoon writing see... The Greatest Cartoon Writer of All Time, Alvin Show Pilot Board, Alvin Show: The Whistler Storyboard, Clair Weeks' Banyan Deer Storyboard, Louise Zingarelli's Cool World Board, Ren & Stimpy Big House Blues Board Part One, Part Two and Part Three, Stimpy's Invention Board Part One and Part Two.

Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive
.

Stumble It!

Story: Writing Cartoons Pt 1- The Gag Session

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see the bonus reason on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great posts featuring animation art.


Disney Studios
If you're anything like me, you've probably daydreamed about going back in time to be a "fly on the wall" at a golden age cartoon studio. Imagine getting the chance to witness how your favorite cartoons were written and see the twists and turns they took from initial idea to finished story. Unfortunately, that isn't likely to happen. But we can find out an awful lot about the process used to write classic cartoons by looking at the scraps of paper left behind by the great artists who wrote them. I'm going to do just that in a series of posts over the next few weeks.

The specifics of the process of writing cartoons in the classic era varied a bit from studio to studio and from time period to time period. Like every other part of the production line, there was an evolution as experimentation led to the development of more effective techniques. But the general outline of the progress of a story from raw idea to boards ready to put into production didn't vary all that much. I'm going to show you some specific examples that illustrate these general concepts in the hopes that you might come away with a better understanding of how cartoons were created.


Warner Bros.
THE GAG SESSION
The idea for a cartoon would start with a simple premise- a sentence or two that described the general theme of the cartoon. For example... "Porky is a bullfighter." or "Mickey, Donald and Goofy are ghost exterminators." In the premise there would be no real attempt at describing a plot, just a simple statement of a situation that might offer entertaining possibilities.

Once the premise was chosen, a group of artists would be called together for an initial gag session to come up with ideas. At Warner Bros, this meeting was referred to as a "No No Session", which meant that no one was allowed to say "no" to an idea- any suggestion was fair game. At this stage, the gags were generally isolated variations on the basic theme of the premise, with no attempt to put them into any sort of continuity or plot. The goal was to come up with funny situations that could be expanded upon and reworked into something more specific further down the line.


Terry-Toons
The artists would sit with pads and pencils or lap boards, jotting down notes and doodling up thumbnail sketches of what the ideas might look like. The sketches might be pinned up on a cork board so the other artists could work gags off if it. One person would be responsible for taking notes for the group, so after the meeting was over, the story man could go back and refresh his memory of a specific gag. As the doodles and notes piled up, certain themes would form, gags would lead to follow up gags and build to "topper gags". A continuity would begin to take shape.

EXAMPLES
The notes taken at early story meetings were usually for the artists' own reference, so the sketches were loose and the notes were scribbled down quickly. This makes them quite difficult for the layman to read. A certain amount of deciphering is required. At the bottom of each example, I summarize the contents of the notes. You might want to print them out. It's easier to study them in a hard copy than on the computer screen.

Here are story notes from an unmade Fleischer Screen Song cartoon from the late 1920s. Based on the song, "Mysterious Mose", this premise was shelved and revived a couple of years later as a Betty Boop cartoon.


It appears that a little bit of development had occurred by the time this document was created, but not much. The lyrics are typed out with lots of space for drawing out the action between each line. The character of the piano player is to be in live action, while the moon and the cat are animated. The first page refers to the location of the beginning of the song on the bar sheet and indicates that a scene of the moon on the second page should be moved forward to this page, to allow the cat to be the focus of the shot the second time up.


The notes say that the second shot on this page should be focused on the cat, and he should jump from this scene cut to the next scene for the bouncing ball sequence.


Here we have all the lyrics of the song, and a quick outline of the sorts of gags the artists should come up with for the bouncing ball section of the film. By the end of the meeting, the director would have a stack of gag drawings to choose from. In the early days of animation, the story process was very informal, and the individual animator was often expected to flesh out the specifics of the action in his scenes on his own, co-ordinating with the animator of the preceding and following sequence on the hookup between sequences. Dave Fleischer was known to add gags all the way up to the animation stage.

There aren't a lot of doodles on this next document, which dates back to the Charles Mintz Studio around 1934. Some gags are indicated by just a few terse words. This probably means that these notes were accompanied a pile of drawings, which the story man was trying to order into a basic continuity. The action has been divided into seven segments, each one representing approximately a minute of screen time.


The First Segment shows a circus parade arriving in town. A drum major disappears into his oversized hat; a french horn player pops out of a tuba to take a solo; a team of horses pans through pulling a street sweeper behind, a lion cage is propelled by the lion's own legs- no wheels; and a polar bear drowns in an ice wagon full of melted ice.


In the Second Section the parade continues. A clown in a horse costume sticks his head out the tail and gives the crowd a razzberry; a clown jumps through a paper hoop- but it's actually a Chinese gong; a parade of elephants- each one smaller than the one before- ends with an elephant so tiny, a clown has to use a magnifying glass to see it.

The Third Section includes a giraffe whose neck extends to eat the fake fruit off the hat of a lady in the crowd; a fat lady riding a hippopotamus wagon, and a gorilla who plays the harp on his cage bars, then escapes and kidnaps a girl. He snatches her up to the house tops.


Part Four: The circus performers attempt to rescue the girl. A tightrope walker walks on telegraph lines to reach the ape; a man is shot out of a cannon and the ape socks him in the nose; the ape perches on the top of a building and bees buzz around him like the airplanes buzzing King Kong.

In Part Five, an elephant shoots peanuts at the ape like a machine gun as an organ grinder's monkey dances on the rooftops.


Part Six: The ape scares a flagpole sitter away from his perch and replaces him on the top of the pole. The organ grinder monkey cuts down the pole, gives the ape a big kick in the ass and marches him away.

Part Seven: The ape sees his reflection in a mirror and makes faces. The reflection swats him. The ape, who we expect to act like a he-man, acts like a pansy instead. The parade marches off into the distance as the ape rubs his sore ass from where the monkey kicked him.


In the next installment of this series on Cartoon Writing, I will show you a batch of sketches that document a story session at the Iwerks Studio in 1934. Read it now: Story: Writing Cartoons Pt 2- A Continuity Emerges

If you found this article to be interesting, see also... The Greatest Cartoon Writer of All Time, Alvin Show Pilot Board, Alvin Show: The Whistler Storyboard, Clair Weeks' Banyan Deer Storyboard, Louise Zingarelli's Cool World Board, Ren & Stimpy Big House Blues Board Part One, Part Two and Part Three, Stimpy's Invention Board Part One and Part Two.

Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive
.

Stumble It!

Cartooning: How To Draw Funny Pictures

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 8 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great info on the history of animation told through the careers of great cartoonists.


Last week, I discussed Zim's Cartoons and Caricatures. Here are some more examples of the genius of Zim from another vintage "how to" book... How To Draw Funny Pictures by E.C. Matthews. This chapter deals with a topic that is widely discussed today, racial stereotyping.

Ethnic humor was Zim's stock-in-trade. He once joked that he and his fellow cartoonists at Puck magazine treated the various races and creeds that made up America with gloves... the kind boxers wear. Perhaps this is why he is virtually unknown today. But it's unfair to sit like an armchair quarterback a century later judging an entirely different time by our own standards. Zim approached every person as a peer. He made fun of all of them equally.

Stereotypes are still part and parcel of caricature and cartooning. Pirates have eye patches and parrots on their shoulders. Surfer dudes wear baggy shorts and have long blonde hair. These are the generally understood symbols that represent specific types of people. How does a cartoonist utilize these common perceptions to communicate clearly while still remaining honest? Here is an important first-hand document of how Zim himself explained the purpose and limits of ethnic caricature in the "melting pot" of the early 1920s.















Take note of this advice from the conclusion of this chapter...

Greatness makes one tolerant. Great men are not ashamed to stop on the street and talk to the man in overalls. They recognize the bond of friendship between the common people and themselves. The social sheik who feels above talking to a mere laborer is fooling only himself.

Take this little sermon to heart and treat every man as your equal; it will help you get ahead. How truly the Bible says, "The greatest among you shall be the servant of all."

If you found this post to be interesting, see the... W. L. Evans Cartooning and Caricature Course Brochure, Lesson One and Lesson Two, Preston Blair and John K's $100K Animation Drawing Course, Gene Byrnes' Complete Guide To Cartooning Part One: The Men Behind The Newspaper Comics, Part Two: How To Get Ideas / Studies of Comic Strips, Part Three: Single Panel and Sports Cartoonists, Part Four: Editorial Cartoons & Comic Books, Part Five: Sketching, Part Six: Magazine Cartooning and Part Seven: Magazine Cartooning (continued); Nat Falk's "How To Make Animated Cartoons" Part One: The History of Animation, Part Two: The Cartoon Studios, Part Three: How Cartoons Are Made, Part Four: How To Draw Cartoons and Part Five: How To Animate, Willard Mullin on Animals.

Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive
.

Stumble It!

Theory: Chuck Jones on the Art of Animation

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see the bonus reason on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great posts featuring animation art.


Assistant Archivist, JoJo Baptista brought in some magazines for the archive donated by his teacher, and long-time ASIFA supporter, Dave Brain. Among them was an AFI publication with this great article by Chuck Jones...

ANIMATION IS A GIFT WORD
By Chuck Jones
A young man was once sent fresh from Columbia University with a mutual friend's introduction to Robert Frost. Frost scanned the young man's writings, then looking quizzically up through his craggy white brows he asked, "What do you do, son?" The young man drew himself up proudly; he was, after all, one with the great Frost. "I am a poet," he said. Frost gently answered, "The term 'poet' is a gift word, son; you cannot give it to yourself."

The term "artist" or "animator" are gift words too, and yet they are employed as self-description by an astonishing number of our colleagues.


The Marx Brothers, Laurel & Hardy, Harold Lloyd, W.C. Fields, as well as Chaplin, are now considered to be artists, but I grew up in Hollywood when they were in the height of their power and I know that the term would have staggered and surprised them. They were honestly and simply trying to make funny pictures and were about as aware of dramatic and comedic theory as a bunch of otters. They were a joyous, funny, often drunken, usually wild and impetuous group and all I wanted in the whole world when I grew up was to be one of them. This horrified my mother, who felt that the mayhem and violence of the Keystone Cops, Larry Semon and even Chaplin when, for instance, he gassed or blew people up, was hideous fare for my budding libido.


She was right. When I did kind of grow up my hideously budded libido found that the one-reel comedy was no longer around, but I managed to stumble into another company of comedians who would have been just as unaware as their great live-action predecessors to find themselves characterized as "artists": the animators. Tex Avery, Friz Freleng, Ham Hamilton, Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising, Hanna and Barbera (when they directed the marvellous Tom & Jerrys), Grim Natwick, Bob Cannon, Ted Sears, the Fleischers, Walt Lantz, Paul Terry, Shamus Culhane, Bill Littlejohn, Ken Harris, Pete Burness, Emery Hawkins- to mention only a few who were doing animated short subjects- were all working in a field which was a logical extension not only of the motion picture itself, but of the old one-reel live action comedy.

If as a child you drew stick figures on the edge of a tablet or a school book, then flipped the pages to get a spastic and funny little dance, you were animating. Anything beyond that is only sophistication and embellishment. For even today those dancing sticks are absolute in the art of animation, just as the unique essence of the art of painting is the application of pigment to a reasonably flat surface, and the essential isolating quality of sculpturing is a three dimensional representation in some solid material. These are the disciplines that isolate these methods of creativity. Therefore, animation can be created without any embellishment whatsoever, for an audience of one and without a camera. Anything that squiggles, wiggles, waggles, will likely excite in us a feeling of stimulation, an emotional reaction, even a revulsion. We all know that such reactions cannot, or should not be aroused by inanimate things. We should not be angered by a rake when stepped on in the dark since it has no quality of life. Breaking a golf club or throwing a tennis racquet is a natural reaction against seemingly human qualities in an inanimate object. Inanimate objects are diabolically funny indeed in animation. Remember Disney's piano in Moving Day or the clock in Clock Cleaners or Norman McLaren's A Chairy Tale?


McLaren's delightful laughing squiggles and strokes brought universal and deserved praise. Each of us drew our own conclusions as to what the films meant, but very near the surface was an area of response that had very little to do with rationality, and depending upon our area of interest all of us react to other forms of life in quite different ways: a tumor may be beautiful to a pathologist; herpetologists have small, sinewy, evil snakes where other people carry watches; an entymologist may stroke a tarantula with more thoughtfulness and understanding than a parent spends on his own child.

Animation's potential and scope is literally boundless. In many parts of the world today great experiments in the field are taking pace- new thoughts, ideas, wild flights of fancy, much of it in surface techniques. Color; graphic breakthrough; startling, sometimes shocking in cruel subject matter; animation is being used as political commentary, abstract expressionism, pop and op art experiments, stop live action, painted stones, self-cannibalism, the black experience, textural adventures and sex. Many of these animated films are shown only in garages. But in many countries, notably the United States, most studios have been captured by an avalanche of network demands for low cost Saturday morning television.


One team in Hollywood which once turned out eight to ten seven minute shorts a year now turns out four half-hours a week during the production year, an increase from one hour a year to at least 130 hours, or a 13,000 per cent increase.

A few animators are getting wealthy- which is a happy novelty indeed.

Some of the best work being done in animation, both in the United States and throughout the world, is in the field of animated commercials. Some are brilliant, nearly all are exquisitely timed and cut. This field may be the best training ground available for animators, directors, writers and designers. The disciplines are implicit in the United States: the film is one minute or less, it must tell a story, display a product, make a sales point, have a beginning, middle and an end, be unique yet comprehensible and bear constant repetition.

It is a pity that the experimentalists and the commercial animators could not exchange personnel occasionally, because the disciplines of commercial production would serve the laboratory animator well. Art and experimental and even student films usually run three times too long. The commercial animator would benefit from a little soul-waching and freedom from the very disciplines his opposite needs. The average commercial director would feel grossly sinful if he had an extra 14 seconds to play with.


I believe that every studio that makes a substantial income off this market, or the so-called "kid-vid" market, owes a serious obligation to the future to pour part of it back- five to ten per cent- into training programs, internships, but above all to pure research. The trade unions support the idea; it is just common sense, not altruism.

There is a tendency in the history of any art form when a preoccupation with new instruments or unusual techniques preoccupies the time of the practitioners of that art form, and we get quaint and cacaphonous sounds and sights in our galleries and halls. This is a natural occurance, to be expected and enjoyed, but the tools of the artist have remained very much the same for hundreds of years and I cannot remember when the last valid musical instrument was introduced into an orchestra, perhaps because my father could not remember either.

It is well, I think, to learn from an Edward Steichen, I believe it was, who undertook a photographic assignment from Life magazine limiting him to a 30-year-old Brownie box camera. The result should have surprised no one: a series of exquisite, striking Steichen pictures, because Steichen does not confuse a convenience with a necessity. Steichen and Lincoln's Matthew Brady are the same cut of man, and each would have flourished in the other's time.


Occasionally, an artist should look at his tools and ask himself what he cannot do without -the essentials- what he must have to pursue his form of expression in animation. In animation as different from other art forms, he must have only three things: a pencil, a number of sheets of paper and a light source. With these things he can animate, without them he cannot.

All other additions are conveniences and embellishments which shade his art form toward others. He does not even need a motion picture camera. The first valid animation, indeed the first motion pictures, were without such cameras. Do you remember the photographic flipping machines at penny arcades?

One of the odd misunderstandings about animation even by those who work in the field is the supposition that an individual drawing in animation has the same importance as doing an illustration.

In animation, drawing is indeed important and great draftsmen as well as great animators are required for such episodes as Bill Tytla's Night on Bald Mountain or Art Babbitt's Mushroom Dance. But a single drawing to an animator represents a time interval of 1/24th of a second.

Animation is a chorus of drawings working in tandem, each contributing a part to the whole of a time/space idea. If a single drawing, as a drawing, dominates the action, it is probably bad animation, even though it may be good drawing.


So many of the greatest animators were and are men who became masters of their craft without once having to resort to cleaning up a single drawing. They simply didn't think that way. Norm Ferguson, the great "Fergie" of Pluto fame who worked in a kind of fluid shorthand, catching the elements of motion in dazzling simplicity, was probably the outstanding example of the animator in his purest form. But Ham Hamilton, Ben Clopton, Ken Harris and many, many others could not draw and found no need to draw, in the conventional sense, which in no way diminishes their artistry; it simply identifies the form.

Different kinds of animation are suitable and correct for the needs of different products. John Halas has been quoted as saying that animation can now get along with four drawings a foot where it once required 24. Actually, animation can get along with no drawings a foot if the subject requirements are such- but it should not be denied 100 drawings per foot if they are needed. The Four Poster required only two actors, but staging Julius Caesar with such restrictions might prove difficult. The point is, if you can only afford two actors, don't do Julius Caesar.


Animation
The simple question we must ask ourselves about limited animation is this: would we use better animation if we could do so? I contend that the average director on Saturday morning television or in his experimental or laboratory film would rather- far rather- employ the finest animators available and have them deliver not 200 feet but 20 feet a week. And everywhere I have gone in Europe and the Orient the hunger has been for animators, animators in the grand tradition, because a great animator can do anything from a dancing dot to a dinosaur- and every director dreams of working only with great actors, or great animators, as well as great graphics, set designs, lighting and cameramen.

All of us must eventually do what the matador does: go out and face not only the bull, but the crowd. It does the matador little good, provides him little satisfaction to make beautiful passes alone in a moonlit pasture.

If in animation we are to advance our craft we must each eventually face the terror of creativity and each of us must some day do it before the great crowd, for animation is not only an art form, it is also a method of entertainment and a method of communication.


MODERN Animation
We are fortunate, all of us, that animation is so appealing in its verstility. All over the world the most extraordinary things are happening. From Yugoslavia to Japan, South America to, I suppose, Lapland, young men and women are trying new ideas of the most imaginative sort. The medium is springing into life on a thousand fronts with a million facets.

But if we ignore our heritage, if we forget or allow to lapse one of the most important factors, the art of pure animation- a drop of water, a dinosaur, a paramecium, a McLaren dancing line, a blob a silver wind, a silver flute, a beautifully animated, delightfully floating mass of our own introspection- if we forget that these wonders cannot be accomplished by simple means, if we use limited animation only because we can get away with it, then we are overlooking the very essence of our craft and callously destroying history itself.

Chuck Jones
AFI Report (Vol 5, No 2)
Summer 1974

Many thanks to Dave Brain for this great article, and thanks to the Van Eaton Galleries for allowing us to digitize these wonderful Chuck Jones drawings for our database.

If you found this article to be interesting, see also... Chuck Jones on Modern Animation, The Animator Newsletter 1946, Bakshi Speaks To CGI Animators Part One and Part Two, Bob Clampett in Schlesinger's Exposure Sheet, Early 50s UPA Model Sheets, Herb Klynn The Shrimp, Grim Natwick's Post UPA Commercials, Alvin Show: The Whistler Storyboard and Jules Engel's Color Keys.

Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive

Stumble It!

History: The Animator Newsletter 1946

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 8 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great info on the history of animation told through the careers of great animators.


Today's post is for animation history buffs. Fans of the amazing artwork that usually fills this page will have to sit tight until the next post...

Here's a fascinating document- an animation union newsletter from 1946. There are a lot of interesting things in these pages... Page two has plans for an animation award, an idea which finally came to pass when June Foray created the Annie Awards in 1972. On the same page is an item about Ronald Reagan warning cartoonist veterans about the imminent threat of an atomic World War III! Pages four and five feature chatty updates on all of the doings at the local cartoon factories. Page six has a review of Nat Falk's How To Make Animated Cartoons, which we have posted in its entirety here on the site in the past. (Part One: The History of Animation, Two: The Cartoon Studios, Three: How Cartoons Are Made, Four: How To Draw Cartoons and Five: How To Animate)








You may not realize how remarkable it is to be able to see documents like this. When I first started studying the history of animation back in the late 1970s, I never imagined that information like this existed. Back then, the only way for a cartoon fan to learn about the subject was from books and newsletters written by other fans. These usually consisted of detailed descriptions of cartoons interspersed with the author's personal opinions about which ones were good and which ones weren't. We read it all carefully, because many of the cartoons being discussed weren't available to us, and second hand descriptions were the only way to learn about them. Trivia dealing with the subject matter of the gags and evolution of the characters were discussed endlessly, but there wasn't a lot of solid information about how the films were made or stylistic analysis of individual artists, because most of the writers weren't animators or cartoonists themselves.


Photo of the Lantz Studio staff recently posted
to Jerry Beck and Amid Amidi's Cartoon Brew
Until I was in college, I had never seen an MGM Tex Avery cartoon, nor had I seen Snow White or Pinocchio. That may sound surprising to you, but things were quite different back then. Features were only screened theatrically in a 7 to 10 year rotation. Each television market had its own syndication package of cartoons that aired in morning and afternoon time slots. One city might have Tom & Jerry and Mighty Mouse, but no Woody Woodpecker or Tex Avery cartoons. Another city might have an entirely different lineup. The cartoons shown on TV were film chained live from beat up 16mm prints, and were almost always edited to fit four cartoons into a half hour slot instead of three. The same couple of dozen titles were aired over and over again. If you were interested in the filmography of a particular studio, you were limited to viewing just the titles in circulation at your local TV station. The only way to view other cartoons was to purchase, rent or borrow 16mm prints. This was beyond the means of all but the most serious collectors.


Drawing lesson based on "Heckling Hare"
by John Kricfalusi from All Kinds Of Stuff
There were a few excellent sources of information that stood out and offered a real glimpse of what it was like working in the golden age of animation... Funnyworld presented interviews with animators telling about their careers in their own words. Leonard Maltin's landmark book Of Mice And Magic was like a bible to me, as was Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston's Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life. A little later, John Canemaker's Felix: The Twisted Tale of the World's Most Famous Cat opened my eyes to the fact that things behind the scenes weren't always the way they appeared on the surface. Bendazzi's Cartoons blew my mind with information on animation from around the world. (I'm still searching for copies of films to view that I've only read about in that book!) All of these sources were invaluable, and still are. But first hand information like this union newsletter was as scarce as hen's teeth back in the early 80s.

Today, technology has changed everything. Thousands of cartoons are readily available on home video, cable TV and the internet. Primary source research turns up all the time on blogs like Cartoon Brew, Mayerson on Animation, A Film LA, and right here on the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive blog. Animation professionals like John Kricfalusi, Will Finn, Michael Sporn, Mark Kausler and Peter Emsley generously share their vast collective experience in their blogs, raising the level of discourse dramatically.

If you're anything like me, you're excited about what you see happening around you. We don't have to take another cartoon fan's word about the relative merits of a particular cartoon or depend on a written synopsis any more... we can view the cartoons and consider the analysis of professional animators before making up our own mind. The true context and history of the films becomes more and more apparent with every piece of first hand evidence that is digitized and entered into the search engines. We're living in a golden age of animation scholarship; and hopefully, this access to knowledge that wasn't available before will lead to a flowering of the art of animation.

This is a great time to be interested in the history of animation!

If you found this interesting, you'll want to check out... Dispatch From Disney's Part One and Part Two, The Building Of The Disney Studios, Clair Weeks Goodbye Book, the 1938 Disney Artists Tryout Book, Clair Weeks: Pioneer of Indian Animation and Clair Week's Animal Studies.

Also, see... Chuck Jones on Modern Animation, Walt Disney Goes To War, John Canemaker on Bill Tytla and Musical Timing Rediscovered.

Thanks
Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive

Stumble It!

Pantomime: Churchill and Chaplin

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 8 on our The Top Ten Reasons To Support The A-HAA for links to more great art instruction posts.


Charlie Chaplin and Winston Churchill may have both shared the same country of birth, but they aren't people you would normally associate together in your mind...


Today I was scanning Colliers magazines that Mike Fontanelli has on loan to us, and I ran across this article authored by Winston Churchill from October of 1935. Titled "Everybody's Language", it is both a film fan's homage to Charlie Chaplin and a history of pantomime in Western culture. I hope you'll take the time to read it, because it has some important things to say to animators...

"Twenty five years ago, when the young actor crossed the Atlantic, life in the States was more fluid than in England- more fluid perhaps than it is today. Its forms had not set. Personalities were more important than conventions. Democracy was not only a political institution, but a social fact. Class distinction mattered comparitively little when the hired hand of today was so often the employer of tomorrow, and the majority of professional men had paid for their university training with the work of their hands."

"Every cinemagoer is familiar with the Chaplin tramps, but I wonder how many of them have reflected how characteristically American are these homeless wanderers..."

"No mere clown, however brilliant, could ever have captured so completely the affections of the great public. He owes his unrivaled position as a star to the fact that he is a great actor, who can tug at our heartstrings as surely as he compels laughter... I believe that, had it not been for the coming of the talkies, we would already have seen this great star in a serious role. He is the one figure of the old silent screen to whom the triumph of the spoken word has meant neither speech nor extinction. He relies, as of old, upon a pantomime that is more expressive than talk."

"Pantomime, of which he is a master, is capable of expressing every emotion, of communicating the subtlest shades of meaning. A man who can act with his whole body has no need of mere words, whatever part he plays."

"I should like to see films without voices being made once more, but this time by producers who are alive to the potentialities of pantomime. Such pictures would be worth making, if only for this reason, that the audience for a talkie is necessarily limited by the factor of language, while the silent film can tell its story to the whole of the human race. Pantomime is the true universal tongue."

"It is a favorite cliche of film critics in discussing pictures to say that we cannot go back. In effect, they suggest that, because technical progress has given us sound, all films must be talkies and will continue to be so forever. Such statements reveal a radical misconception of the nature of progress and the nature of art. To explore the possibilities of the non-talking film, to make of it a new and individual art form, would not be a retrograde step, but an advance."

Churchill was mistaken about the return of silent filmmaking. Talkies were, and still are here to stay. But "a new and individual art form" based on the ancient foundation of pantomime was just beginning to make its mark when this article was written. I'll give you three guesses as to which art form that was!

Charlie Chaplin wasn't the last gifted pantomimist. Many others followed him... Jackie Gleason, John Cleese, Rowen Atkinson... and these two giants from the early days of television, Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca. Here is a brilliant bit from the mid-1950s from the The Sid Caesar Buried Treasures DVD


Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca:
The Cocktail Party (1954)
(Quicktime 7 / 17 megs)

PLEASE NOTE The text and media files on the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive Blog are not to be duplicated, redistributed or hosted on other websites without the prior written permission of the Board of Directors of ASIFA-Hollywood.

Many thanks to Mike Fontanelli for the loan of this magazine and Dr. Macro's High Quality Movie Scans for the wonderful Chaplin images that illustrate this post.

If you found this article interesting, see... Chaplin's Shadow: Inspiration vs Ripoffs, The Application Of Inspiration / How To Properly Use Reference / Incorporating Natural Forms / (Visual) Literacy / Why Do We Need An Animation Archive?

If you want an incredible insight into the mind of a brilliant filmmaker, you will want to get the DVD of Unknown Chaplin. Using never before seen outtakes, these three programs reconstruct Chaplin's creative process from the ground up. This is one of the greatest documentaries ever made. Check it out!

Stephen Worth
Director
ASIFA-Hollywood
Animation Archive

Stumble It!

Design: Grammar of Ornament Part Four

This post is just the tip of the iceberg... see reason number 8 on our