Trying To Give Back

More stiff caricaturesThese hotties would surely make Disney fans swoon in cartoon form.

That Taylor girl really does have an interesting head, but I haven't quite nabbed it yet. It might be too unique for animation, though.
Since anmated fairytales are in dire need of new designs for the lead romantic characters I thought I'd work on some. I am basing them on live action celebrities with proven hip appeal, because it would be immature to try to make something up out of nothing.

Johnny Hart and Specific Characters

SPECIFIC CARTOON PERSONALITIES ARE RARE BUT SPECIAL

One of the things about Hart that really influenced me is how specific some of his characters were. Most cartoon characters are pretty simple stereotypes, but the kind of cartoons I respond to most are the ones with the most unique personalities - and the artists who are able to draw the personalities, not just write them.

Popeye, Bugs Bunny, Yogi Bear, some Peanuts characters..there really is only a handful of complex characters in our whole history. Specific is naturally funny.

WHAT IS A SPECIFIC PERSONALITY?

What do I mean by specific?



I could also say a character who has a few traits that you would never think to put together, some odd contradictions and some random unrelated traits. That's how real people are.

Most people don't analyze things into their separate parts. If they did, they would realize that many things and people they think of as whole entities are really mishmashes of odd parts. We glue the mismatched parts in our heads and don't question them. The most interesting people are the ones with the most mishmash.

SIMPLE CARTOON PERSONALITIES

Think of how many generic cartoon stereotypes there are.
The big dumb strong guy. The little mean guy. The wiseacre. The normal guy. The 'tude guy. The assertive modern girl. None of those characters make up whole characters. There aren't enough mismatched unrelated traits.

Animation has the worst history of shallow characters. Mickey, Sneezy, Grumpy, Happy, etc. Characters who either have no trait at all, or just one.

JOHNNY HART'S RANGE OF SPECIFICITY

Johnny Hart has characters that range from the completely generic to the most specific.

B.C. has no personality.

Thor is a frustrated inventor who sometimes has a way with girls. Not enough to make a full character.

Peter is a snooty know-it-all. We've seen that many times.

Curls is sarcastic.

The cute girl is the cute girl. That's it.

The fat Broad is more interesting. She is a man-hunter. She loves men but also wants to dominate them. She hates snakes and beats them to a pulp.

Hart's most specific characters though, have the oddest traits.

CLUMSY CARP

Clumsy Carp is clumsy. By itself, not much of anything.

He also is an ichthyologist - he studies fish, especially rare prehistoric ones. He spends hours a day with his head under water watching the odd fish go by.

WILEY

Wiley is the oddest, most specific character of all. He has the most unique and unrelated traits:

He is a poet.
He hates water - actually fears and is repulsed by it.

He is scraggly and has a peg leg.

He is superstitious. Superstition is one of the funniest traits a human can have and Hart really draws superstitious fear and outrage with great conviction.

He distrusts anything new - especially women. The very fact that women are so appealing makes him distrust them. When Hart combines Wiley's phobias it's really funny.

I always wondered - how did Hart decide on these weird combinations of traits? They work great and real people are like that, but it's not usual to see it in cartoons. Did he just sit down and make a list of these traits and build a character around them? Or did he draw Wiley first and then come up with traits for him?

Other specific characters in comics and cartoons tended to evolve. Popeye wasn't quite as weird as he became later. Bugs evolved over a few cartoons. The Peanuts characters started as generic characters and little by little grew specific odd traits. Linus is insecure and needs to clutch his blanket. We accept that as normal now, but how did Schultz come up with that? Schroeder was just a small kid but then started playing the piano. I can't remember whether Lucy sprung into character full blown or whether she evolved.

Hart and Schultz' comics are not as funny as the best animated cartoons, or Don Martin comics, but they have something else that we instinctively crave in entertainment- characters that seem real - and by real, that usually means unexpected combinations of odd traits. We read those comics because we like to follow the adventures of the characters. We don't need a belly laugh every step of the way. The weirdness of the personalities and how they play off each other is entertainment.

CARTOONISTS ARE AT A DISADVANTAGE TO ACTORS IN CREATING CHARACTERS

When live actors create specific characters for TV and movies, they bring a lot of themselves to the character. Even if the script doesn't create fully blown personalities and quirks in the writing, an interesting actor can fill in the gaps with his own idiosyncrasies, look and voice.





We in cartoons have to come up with it almost from scratch and that's why cartoon characters in general are pretty stereotypical and simple compared to live characters. So when someone like Johnny Hart comes along and creates specific characters from scratch, it's mighty impressive.

STEREOTYPICAL GROUPS MADE UP OF UNRELATED RANDOM TRAITS

You could take this idea of unrelated odd traits a step farther and think of whole groups of people who are stereotyped. Like, you're either a "democrat" or a "republican". When you actually list the beliefs and traits that make up either group, you can find a lot of unrelated randomly selected attributes that the poor members have to believe and accept in order to belong to their chosen stereotype.

Republicans believe in Guns and Jesus - 2 completely incompatible philosophies.
They believe in "right to life", until you grow up and then they send you to get your head blown off. They believe in unrestrained capitalism, even though a huge chunk of their group are poor rednecks who are the last to benefit from this belief.
Like Joe the Goddamn Plumber. Republican radio hosts have hard rock music for their intros. Someone explain that one to me. Shouldn't they only have country music?


Democrats believe in defending the rights of the poor, but wouldn't be caught dead hanging out with any of them. They also believe in political correctness and not offending other groups - even though the poor people they defend are probably the least politically correct people in the country.You could make a long list of the beliefs and traits of any group of people and find totally random unrelated parts that make up the whole we recognize as the group.

Do All Bland Movies Make Profits?

WordNet - Cite This Source

bland
adjective
1.	lacking taste or flavor or tang; "a bland diet"; "insipid hospital food"; "flavorless supermarket tomatoes"; "vapid beer"; "vapid tea"
2.	lacking stimulating characteristics; uninteresting; "a bland little drama"; "a flat joke"
3.	smoothly agreeable and courteous with a degree of sophistication; "he was too politic to quarrel with so important a personage"; "the manager pacified the customer with a smooth apology for the error" [syn: politic]

Here's a feature by the safest blandest studio in history:

Here's a "safe" cartoon movie starring an extremely bankable star:





Here are many more safe pictures.















Marc is probably not the only one to think that:
"Being bland is a strategy big studios use to guarantee audiences won't hate their product.
Thus guaranteeing a profit will be made."






Now in the last couple decades I seem to remember lots of bland cartoon movies that flopped. I quickly searched the web and found a few that made a lot less than they cost-and that's not counting the hundreds of millions spent on marketing.

I'm sure I left quite a few out, so help me out in the comments and link to some I forgot.

FROM-WIKIPEDIA:
I copied the following articles from Wikipedia, so you could see that some films made money and some didn't -regardless of whether they are bland or not.

FoxANIMATION-DON BLUTH

Fox Animation Studios was a short-lived traditional animation studio, a division of 20th Century Fox, headed by Don Bluth and Gary Goldman. The department was designed to compete with Walt Disney Feature Animation, which had phenomenal success in the early-1990s with the releases of Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King.

The studio's output was not as successful as the Disney films were. Only one of its two theatrical releases, Anastasia, turned a profit. The other theatrical Fox Animation Studios production, Titan A.E., made only USD$9,376,845 in its opening weekend—on an estimated budget of $75,000,000—and the studio was shut down as a result.

DON BLUTH

An American Tail (1986) and The Land Before Time (1988) did well in theaters and became animation classics. Each of these films launched a line of direct-to-video sequels, none of which Bluth had any involvement with. Although many of Bluth's fans loved his next film, All Dogs Go to Heaven (1989), it flopped, as Disney's groundbreaking film The Little Mermaid was released the same year, but it still became a cult classic. By the end of the decade and through the 1990s, Bluth films such as Rock-A-Doodle, Thumbelina, A Troll in Central Park, and The Pebble and the Penguin had dropped significantly when it came to box office returns. Bluth scored another hit with Anastasia (1997), which grossed US$140 million worldwide in part because it used well-known Hollywood stars as its voice talent and stuck closer to long-proven Disney formulas: a sassy and resourceful princess driven to become more than she is, a cruel and conniving villain who uses dark magic, a handsome and endearing love interest, and a comic-relief sidekick.

DREAMWORKS - THE SUCCESSOR TO FILMATION
Dreamworks is the big budget studio with the low-budget sensibility. They spend hundreds of millions of dollars to achieve creatively what Filmation spent 5 bucks on.

For years they spent and spent on 2d spectacular bland movies and no one seemed to notice. They finally hit by fluke with Shrek in CG, but has that made up for all the money they spent in their history of extravagant gambing with blandness?

DreamWorks animated films
Traditionally animated films (1998-2003)	The Prince of Egypt (1998) • The Road to El Dorado (2000) • Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron (2002) • Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas (2003)
Films produced with Aardman Animations (2000-2006)	(these are not part of my bland list-jk) Chicken Run (2000) ;• Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005) • Flushed Away (2006)
Computer-animated films (1998-present)	Antz (1998) • Shrek (2001) • Shrek 2 (2004) • Shark Tale (2004) • Madagascar (2005) • Over the Hedge (2006) • Shrek the Third (2007)

1997 - 2003: The rise and fall of Warner Bros. Feature Animation

Warner Bros., as well as several other Hollywood studios, moved into feature animation following the success of Disney's The Lion King in 1994. Max Howard, a Disney alumnus, was brought in to head the new division, which was set up in two studios: one in Sherman Oaks near the television studio, and the other in nearby Glendale. ^[2] Warner Bros. Feature Animation proved an unsuccessful venture, as four of the five films it produced failed to earn money during their original theatrical releases. The first of Warners' animated features was Space Jam (1996), a live-action/animation mix which starred NBA basketball star Michael Jordan opposite Bugs Bunny (Jordan had previously appeared with the Looney Tunes in a number of Nike commercials). Directed by Joe Pytka (live-action) and Bruce W. Smith & Tony Cervone (animation), Space Jam proved to be a success at the box office. Animation production for Space Jam was primarily done at the new Sherman Oaks studio, although much of the work was outsourced to animation studios around the world.

Following Space Jam's success, Warner Bros. Feature Animation continued production on its next feature, Quest for Camelot (1998), which proved an unsuccessful release. The third Warner Bros. animated feature, Brad Bird's The Iron Giant (1999), was not a commercial success, although it received rave reviews and performed well with test audiences. The Iron Giant would eventually became a modern cult classic. The studio's next film, Osmosis JonesTom Sito and Piet Kroon completed the animation long before the live-action segments, directed by Bobby & Peter Farrelly and starring Bill Murray, were begun. The resulting film was not a box office success, although Warners did produce a relatedSaturday morning cartoon, Ozzy and Drix (2002-2003) for its WB broadcast network. (2001) was another animated/live action mix which suffered through a troubled production. Directors

Following the releases of The Iron Giant and Osmosis Jones the feature animation staff was scaled back, and the entire animation staff - feature and television - were moved to the larger Sherman Oaks facility. The final Warner Bros. Feature Animation production was another live-action/animation mix, Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003), which was meant to be starting point for a reestablishment of the Looney Tunes brand, including a planned series of new Looney Tunes theatrical shorts.

After Back in Action, directed by Joe Dante (live action) and Eric Goldberg (animation), failed at the box office, production was shut down on the new Looney Tunes shorts and the feature animation unit was dissolved.

Two TV series based loosely upon the Looney Tunes property, Baby Looney Tunes2002-2004) and Loonatics Unleashed (2005-present) have assumed the place of the original shorts on television. (

Richard Rich
animation director

Filmography: Director

• Muhammad: The Last Prophet (2002)
• The Trumpet of the Swan (2001)
• The Scarecrow (2000; V)
• The King and I (1999)
• The Swan Princess (1994)
• The Swan Princess II: Escape From Castle Mountain (1997)
• The Swan Princess III and the Mystery of the Enchanted Treasure (1998; V)
• The Black Cauldron (1985)
• The Fox and the Hound (1981)

MY COMMENTS:

Personally, I think there are many factors that might affect the success or failure of a movie. Marketing, having a brand name luck...Blandness doesn't affect it at all. In an age of blandness when no one offers up any competition-like we have today, then some bland movies have to be successful- because Moms are always going to take kids to kid movies, whether they are good or bad.

They pick the brand name kid movies first. That used to be Disney, now it's Pixar. The rest of the Disney/Pixar wannabees make equally bland pictures and some do well, most don't.

IT'S A COMPLETE CRAPSHOOT.

I think this method of making movies is hugely risky and irresponsible. Most of the movies cost in the hundreds of millions to produce. That in itself is a crazy risky venture that no sane businessman would enter into.

NO, people don't make bland films on purpose: Bland people make bland films, period. It's the only kind they CAN make.

It would make a hell of a lot more business sense to spend less money-which would be easy, because most of the money in animated features goes to stuff that has nothing to do with entertainment:

Crowd scenes
Spectacle
Live Action Camera Moves
Too many lead characters
Ridiculously costly special effect like "realistic water". (I can turn on my tap for free and get realistic water, but who would that entertain?")
Live Action Star Salaries

What would be much less risky is to spend a third of what they spend now per picture, hire proven creative talent and let them entertain. That would be "safe". People will always want real entertainment made by actual talented entertainers. It is human nature. They only accept the bland because that is all they are given anymore.

The safest project I ever worked on is Ren and Stimpy. It cost around 6 million bucks and brought in a billion bucks or more. That happened in the last age of blandness and changed things slightly - for awhile.

All we did was make common sense entertainment for kids. We gave them what we knew that kids want. No market research, no focus testing, no marketing budget. We merely entertained. There was only one executive and she encouraged our natural entertaining abilities.

Then they took it over, spent way more money on it, killed it and it took them another 10 years and billions of dollars in non hits, piles of executives, market testing and more waste until they finally got another one. That was a very risky, illogical, crapshoot way to go.

Marc, in his Defense Of Blandness Post,

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2007/08/defense-of-blandness-by-marc-deckter.html

actually changed his argument halfway to a defense of Imitation, which is an altogether different subject. Maybe I will argue against that idea next.

Here's Jerry Beck's great resource if you want to see what animated movies have been made:

http://www.animatedmovieguide.com/