Crazy Cute

I love when Scribner draws cute characters. They are reaaaallly cute - but kind of crazed too. It's like he's making fun of cuteness but at the same time likes it. he's torn - as am I.

This frame is genius!
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I have a theory about how Scribner evolved this jittery cluttered style.
The action in much of his work after Clampett happens within very confined spaces.

When he animated for Clampett, he was free to use the whole screen to move his characters in. Gestures could reach all across the wide open spaces.
The characters could jump all around within the big movie screen canvas.

When Clampett left, McKimson tried to control Scribner's animation - to "bring the characters back down to earth" as Friz once said to me.

Scribner's work in McKimson cartoons seems very claustrophobic - as if McKimson drew an invisible box around the characters and told Rod :"Don't let your characters stretch beyond the walls of this box." The box can pan across the screen, but the character can never take up more than 40% of the n/s, e/w axis.

FROM MCKIMSON'S "OILY HARE"Scribner's poses never quite make it to the extreme frame in McKimson's cartoons. -like they are not allowed to fully extend their arms.

FROM CLAMPETT'S "CORNY CONCERTO"
" No more of this Clampett stuff!"

Scribner's immense creative energy had to express itself somewhere, so now his characters began twitching and pulsating within the invisible conservative closet that McKimson confined them in. The characters' arms could no longer completely straighten out. Characters couldn't make broad distinct silhouettes anymore. Lines of action became crumpled and jagged because the characters could no longer stretch all the way to a final pose.
You can see in this commercial and in the animation Scribner did in McKimson's cartoons the results of the spacial confinement. The characters' eyes keep bugging out in accents, characters begin to move in one direction - but never complete their action, instead they bounce off the edge of a force field and recoil in the other direction. They can't move too far left, right, up or down, so instead they boil and throb with extreme energy and lifeforce within a small area. It's very frustrating!
It's also very funny but in a way that seems to be Scribner's way of rebelling against the post Clampett conservative landslide that eventually smothered the whole animation business.

With each passing year and decade, animation got more and more creatively confining. Other animators went along with it, some crumbling, others making due. Scribner held on to his full animation and cartoony roots the only way he could within the ever tightening straightjacket. His characters wriggled and fought to break through their arbitrary bonds.

This commercial may have been almost his last gasp. I have other Koolaid Bugs commercials like this that look like he worked on them, but that someone else went over and toned down.

WATCH BUGS AND ELMER TWITCH AND THROB


Note: the second half of the commercial is animated by a Chuck Jones animator- I'm guessing Benny Washam. It's very handsome, expertly timed and posed. If I had not seen the Scribner stuff next to it I would probably say it was great. I have only one problem with it. Unlike the Scribner animation, it's missing an essential ingredient of cartooning - it's not entertaining.






Very professional and crisp animation, but not very interesting.

The Entertainment Value Of Movement

One thing you see a lot of in cartoons from the 1930s and 40s is movement that is entertaining for its own sake.

You can tell this animator had fun making this cat shadow box.

The still drawings don't really convey the movement.

Clampett encouraged his animators to make every bit of their work move in a fun way. He figured it was "animation" and that was the main thing audience watched cartoons for. It wasn't enough to merely connect the narrative points, which more and more became the trend in later animation - even as the stories themselves got less entertaining.

The magic of animation is largely in the performance. Animated characters at their best move in unrealistic yet beautiful ways.

HEP CAT SHADOW BOXES

Book Revue - Wolf With Axe

I think it's pretty obvious that Clampett was the most influential 40s animation director. His "looney" energy, character driven comedy and wild invention dragged Chuck and Friz along practically against their will for years. The whole attitude of Looney Tunes is based on Bob's personality (and some of Tex's). Everyone was influenced by and imitated Clampett superficially, but there are some things he did so well that almost nobody followed up on them. His style of custom movement for example. He directed the motion in his cartoons like nobody else. By the mid 40s, it was never enough to just tell the joke or get the character from this pose to that pose. The motion itself is mesmerizing. It's not merely "cartoony" as in early 30s cartoons. It's cartoony and unrealistic, but unlike early cartoons it has weight power, emphasis and control. It feels more real than reality. Clampett found a way to combine the magic and invention of early cartoons with the skills and principles of Disney animation.

Book Revue, like Tokyo Woes is a practical encyclopedia of amazing animation techniques that he just dumped on the whole business to let everyone pick up on them - and no one did. I don't get it.

Here's a scene that has a ton of energy and power, and it's totally cartoony.




















Antic, Bounce, swing and antic
This would merely be an antic in anyone else's cartoon, but here it's like an animation tour de force. The wolf actually antics a couple times as the axe bounces from its heavy weight.




..then instead of just going from the antic directly to the tree, the wolf swings the whole axe all the way around first. This builds up way more energy than a direct antic and hit. - he uses this same technique to get the characters into the scene. They don't just run directly to the tree - they go all the way around first, but it's animated so fast that you don't really see it. You feel all that extra speed and energy though.
Clampett packs more action into a scene than anyone, yet he does it with such perfect timing that you don't miss anything important. All the actions take place within a structured hierarchy.

Axe Hits and Recoils

When he finally hits the tree with the axe, he generates more power with this crazy long vibrating recoil...

CUT: Wolf wobbles and hat pops off

This scene always baffled me. I never quite understood what was happening, but it's animated so powerfully and with such great timing and fun that it just stands out like a piece of pure animation candy. The animation is the reason for it's existence. It's not exactly needed for story or even for the completion of the point of the scene. It's just really Goddamned cool.










http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/Clampett/46BookRevue/WolfRevueAxe-desktop.mov

The only person smart enough (that I can think of) that ever took advantage of Clampett's great animation techniques was Brad Caslor - almost 40 years later in his NFB cartoon "Get A Job". After Clampett left Warner Bros. in 1946 his style of movement was replaced (or abandoned) quickly with pose to pose animation and formula. Even his own animators never did this kind of thing again-probably because no one would let them.

To me, this is the whole reason to even do animation. -To make things move with such inventiveness and vigor that no other medium can compete with it. It should be fun to watch even with the sound off. Story, characters, design, backgrounds and the other arts we use to supplement our medium are all extra gravy, but without the basic ingredient of customized magic movement we are not taking advantage of what it's all about.

You can find better stories in books and movies. Better illustrations in magazines and on book covers, richer characters in Dickens and in classic sitcoms. Where else can you get get magic moving eye candy but in animated cartoons when they are in top form? - and why do so few places and people want to give it to you?