Hubley Commercial: Baby

Hey, everybody. Kali Fontecchio has done a lot of work making these clips and uploading all the pics for you, so go over to her blog and check out her own fun filled drawings and paintings!

http://kalikazoo.blogspot.com/

Here is a Hubley commercial animeted by Rod Scribner.
Baby.

For me, animation is more than just smooth movement. It's not enough to learn a bunch of stock Cal Artsy moves and gestures and then move formula designed characters from one stock pose to another.
Animation is movement of interesting and inventive drawings. The drawings that make up the animation are as important as the movements themselves. Maybe more so.
It's even better when the drawings are not preinvented on model sheets or in decades of stock expressions.
Here's a great combination of John Hubley's designs and Rod Scribner's animation.
Hubley probably did a couple of the main drawings and the composition. A minor animator would have taken those poses and then just animated stock lip synch and moved the heads and arms to the accents in the soundtrack.
An inventive animator like Scribner does a lot more than that. He adds to the "design" of the scene by designing original custom made expressions and poses that fit the soundtrack.
Scribner also makes up his own mouth shapes, rather than rely on stock mouth shapes like you see so often.
This is the kind of animation that made me want to be an animator.
Custom made animation that isn't a formula. That shows what an individual cartoon animator made up just for that scene. ...That looks like a living breathing observant human did it, rather than a machine or a milquetoast.
Scribner must be the most creative animator ever. He's able to do all kinds of styles. When a lot of the Warner's animators couldn't make the switch to 50s graphic styles, he just jumped at it and created ways to move the characters that matched the graphic styles. His movements are as stylish (actually more) than the design themselves. He doesn't merely "squash and stretch" or "antic and overshoot".
These 50s commercials commercials are the best use of the UPA style that I have seen. They are lively and better paced than the entertainment shorts-maybe because they have to get the message across in 30 seconds to a minute rather than drag it out to 6 minutes or more.
I can't figure out why UPA didn't use Scribner in their feature shorts. He understood how to move these designs better than anybody. The shorts are barely even animated. They are evenly inbetweened key poses.
You can freeze frame animation like this and find a ton of great drawings and original graphic thoughts. Isn't that why we animate? To create new pictures? I can't understand the urge to repeat actions that someone else invented 50 years ago and that have already been copied over and over again ever since.
This animation is fun. Fun is what it's all about isn't it?
Well I can't think up enough words to describe each picture, so I'll just let you enjoy them.






Cute and specific at the same time!




Amid On Scribner Commercials

Wally VS UPA 4 - WHEN MILQUETOASTS REBEL

UPA TRIES A NEW WAY TO GET RESPECT

The animators who founded UPA tried a different tact than Disney. Most of them were highly accomplished animators who could do the rounded fully constructed flowing Disney style animation.

BOBE CANNON FOR TEX AVERY

Bobe Cannon was a fantastically gifted full animator who did animation for Clampett, Jones and Avery before he went to UPA.

bobe cannon

For some unknown reason, he decided to totally abandon what he was a genius at.

He and John Hubley (a layout man and BG painter)

http://www.pbs.org/itvs/independentspirits/john.html

and the other UPA guys decided to abandon animation, fun and lush movement and instead focus on "design".

And not always good design either. They just wanted to do something that rebelled against the look and more important, the attitudes of both Disney and Warners.

UPA DESIGN NOT NEW –IT EXISTED IN STILL CARTOONS FOR DECADES

It's funny when we talk about UPA and flat styles, that we refer to it as "design" at all. No one did before UPA. It was just called "cartooning".

The "design" that UPA did was nothing new to cartoons in general, just sort of new to animation. Chuck Jones had experimented with it in animation (with Bobe Cannon) in 1942 with The Dover Boys.

Magazine cartoons though and comic strips, had been done in similar flat styles and many other non-animation styles for decades.

http://www.animationarchive.org/2006/04/media-cliff-sterretts-polly-and-her.html

http://www.cartoonretro.com/

MILT GROSS SIMILAR TO GERALD MCBOINGBOING
To me,

Gerald McBoingBoing and Milt Gross' comics are very similar graphically.

Milt Gross had been doing highly stylized comics and strips for a long time-only his stuff wasn't meant to be high-class, it was meant to be fun.

So what's the difference between "design" and "cartoon"? I guess if it's fun, it's a cartoon. If it's bland and sterile, it's design.
That was UPA's revolution. They took the life out of animation.

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSUMPTIONS OF FLAT UPA STYLE

If you don't know cartoon history and you just grew up watching Cartoon Network, you might think that this flat stuff is something new and "hip". It's not. It's much older than UPA and the more graphic styles in cartoons before UPA didn't come with the wimpy trappings.

Because of our association with UPA's beginnings, we assume that when we do something in a graphic style, we have to also carry over all the other attributes that came with UPA's particular cartoon vision-the blandness, the wimpy world view, the snootiness.

People usually don't analyze or break apart the elements that make up something they like. If we like it we assume that every ingredient in it is equally good.

Then when we develop our own styles, we copy the bad with the good.

That's what we need ANALYSIS for!

Like many artists, I have tons of influences. There are lots of things that inspire me. I try to figure out why they do and I break them down into their separate ingredients.

I then decide which ingredients are the ones that are useful and discard the others that might have just come along with it, but don't actually add anything. There are good things about UPA and Disney-Tex Avery combined them and added his own worldview to them and made cartoons more entertaining than either style.Avery was the exception. Most artists copied the bad part of UPA, the lack of animation, simplistic drawings' slow even timing and lifelessness.



What I dislike about trends and imitators is that usually when people copy existing styles, new or classic, they copy the faults, rather than the positive attributes of the styles they love. They copy surface elements and decoration and don't copy the underlying principles.

People do it with Disney all the time.

Animators who love Disney, copy all the worst elements of Disney, his faults-the sappy stories, the simplistic personalities, the terrible "animation-acting". The formulaic character design.

They can't draw and animate the difficult anatomy, perspective and construction, nor control elaborately composed crowd scenes-no one was better at that than Disney. But anyone can do fake pathos and memorize the arm flailing that we've seen in a hundred features.

This happens with everything that makes a splash. Everyone imitates the superficial aspects of the trend, without adding any personal observations or humanity to it.

There are Simpsons imitations, Ren and Stimpy imitations, Warner Bros. imitations and on an on...all without personal points of view, just shallow imitations.

In the 50s, that happened with UPA. And it happened again in the 90s. (My fault that time)

Why do young artists say they like UPA? Because it makes 'em cool. Hipster Emo time. (It's also easy to fake) It's like when teenagers discover communism. They think it's real cool to go against common sense and experience. But then when they meet the real world head on later, they realize it was youthful folly. You're supposed to grow out of it.

I too fell under the UPA spell for the 3 weeks I wanted to be cool. Then I realized I kept falling asleep during the cartoons. Don't wait till you're 30, still drawing flat and it's too late to learn anything else.

Personally I think it's way cooler to have an open mind and lots of drawing skill, so that you can actually make cartoons with your own point of view.

But I still like a lot of the UPA style commercials!


By the way, it's possible to have construction and design at the same time.

to be continued...

UPA - flat stylized cartoons I like

This Wally VS UPA stuff was all supposed to be the subject of 1 post, but I'm finding that to make my point is taking a lot more work than I originally thought it would. And some commenters are misinterpreting what I've been getting at.


I'm interrupting the thread to make something clear:

Probably many of you folks think I hate all stylized animation. Nope. I actually love the idea of it and love to see many styles of cartoon animation.
The best stylized cartoon animation was not in the UPA entertainment shorts for theatres, but in commercials and even TV for some reason.
Tom Terrific was a low budget TV cartoon that still used real animation, and didn't merely inbetween from pose to pose.


Just in case anyone forgot, I was the one who brought back the "UPA style" or as it's known now "Retro Cartoons".

Dave Sheldon designed many retro tribute fake commercials for me.

http://www.dksheldon.com/detected.php?page=&pass=

I added these little shorts just to bookend and offer a contrast to the style of the Ren and Stimpy cartoons, never knowing what influence they would have on the next 15 years.

Ever since we did the fake commercials in Ren and Stimpy, that became the dominant style of kiddie TV cartoons.

I remember all through the 80s trying to get my bosses at Filmation, Hanna Barbera and the like to let me do flatter more designy characters and styles. I would always come up against this argument "John, these characters are too flat and cold. Nobody wants this old fashioned stuff anymore. Kids won't be able to identify with them. They want round 3 dimensional characters like we do here":

Anyway I like stylized stuff that's fun and animated, that isn't bland and stuffy. The UPA entertainment cartoons were to me, the least entertaining form of stylized cartoons because they were designed blandly and didn't animate very well. Meanwhile their industrial films were great and lots of animated commercials were done by classic full-animation animators who did very creative stylized ads.

Here's a real irony. Rod Scribner-who I think was the most talented and versatile animator in history did some stuff for UPA, but not for the entertainment shorts.

He did the title sequence for some of the shorts, and that animation and design was way more fun and interesting than the shorts themselves.

ROD SCRIBNER WAS THE BEST "UPA STYLE" ANIMATOR

He also animated some shorts for the UPA TV show- which would have been much lower budget than their theatrical shorts. His TV shorts are full of amazing design and animation- he figured out stylized ways to move the characters. He didn't just do keys and then evenly inbetween - them like in the award winning theatricals. Does this make any sense to you?

If this had become the trend for stylized animation, UPA might never have killed cartoon animation. It would have invigorated the medium and given us lots more variety and directions to go in.

Scribner also animated lots of stylized commercials:

http://cartoonmodern.blogsome.com/category/r0d-scribner/






NEXT: WHAT DID UPA DO THAT WAS NEW?

Wally VS UPA 3 - Walt Craves Respect

Does this look like a wacky cartoonist?

Walt’s Bid For Respect

In the 30s, Walt Disney caught the respect bug. He wanted to be up there with the bigshot Hollywood celebrities, not down here with the lowly cartoonists.

That's why Walt Disney kept trying to imitate live action and why he continually toned down the cartoony impossible stuff. The real magic. By the way, I didn't make this up. Lots of people thought that even at the time.

Realistic water is more respectable than cartoon water.
(wouldn't it inevitably follow that a camera is more respectable than a pencil?)

He made Fantasia to try to get high brow critical respect. (Or maybe to convince his low brow audience that he was above them?) He figured if he did classical music in cartoons, real critics would consider him high class and hoity toity.

It backfired. He couldn't stop himself from inserting naked babies’ butts, cutesy pie fish with sexpot girl eyes and hippos in tutus into the classics.

This outraged serious music critics, which is OK with me. But it also bored the general audience who wanted cartoons to be funny - and that's the real shame.

Fantasia's Reviews

Alas, Walt's method of gaining artistic respect didn't really work.

Now, I have to say that I like a lot of stuff in Walt Disney pictures.

I even like Fantasia, despite the extreme kitschiness. I mean I'm as kitschy as can be. I love pop culture and entertainment. I'm a cartoonist with no pretensions of trying to be a serious artist.

But I admit it and am proud of my cheesiness.

The thing that really helps Fantasia - for me - is the great music. I love Stokowski's highly caricatured emotions. I love his rendition of the Nutcracker Suite. Combine that with the Disney artists' design and color styling and I'm completely swept away.

If I actually stop and think about what the ideas are behind the art, it's pretty damn embarrasing...


Mushrooms with Chinese faces, little naked imps that change the seasons, fish with human girl eyes, Russian Cossacks made of weeds...I mean now, that's just brutally DUMB, isn't it - content-wise?

Funny cartoons can be dumb too, but they're not trying to have you take them seriously. Dumb is funny, it's not high-class. It's hard to take low brow stuff seriously.

I DARE YOU TO SAY OUT LOUD WHAT IS HAPPENING IN THIS CLIP

Can you imagine anyone could possibly take this seriously and call it art? I just like all the techniques and the way everything moves to the fantastic music. It's superficially pretty.

But it's neither a cartoon nor art...and that's the best part of Fantasia.



The rest of the movie is even more kitschy and less appealing at least to me. Like I said I like kitsch- but there are two kinds of low brow taste: Fun, unpretentious kitsch and then there's gay kitsch- the kind of stuff you might see in a man-couple's love nest.
Much of Disney to me is gay kitsch, surely not very highbrow. What a strange style and what fruity content to force straight grown men to animate! I'll never figure it out. It's weird enough that one single cartoonist would want to animate babies' butts turning into hearts and that kind of stuff, but what's unfathomable is how many others copied him!

Whole studios abandoned what they were good at to blindly follow the gay kitsch cartoon parade - just because Walt was doing it!

That's the ungodly power of trend-thinking, which is not thinking for yourself, but rather following what everyone else is doing unquestioningly. (Look at how many animated features today are all the same formula! And still gay-kitsch!)



By contrast, Ub Iwerks' cartoons of the 30s, though influenced by Disney are more imaginative, fun, earthy and cartoony:

Other resources...

http://www.filmreference.com/Films-Ey-Fo/Fantasia.html
... In the Bach Toccata and Fugue portion, for example, Disney artists were encouraged to experiment visually and boldly, in ways never before imagined. This sequence, early in the film, signals its experimentalism, departing from the usual Disney style and moving in abstract directions, imitating the techniques of Oscar Fischinger, who was originally to direct that sequence but left the project before completing it, after discovering the studio had altered his original designs. Other experiments are elsewhere in evidence, as when the sound track is visualized through animation midway through the film, recalling the abstract experiments of Len Lye and anticipating those of Norman McLaren. More conventional Disney whimsy is elsewhere in evidence, however, and there is perhaps the danger of vulgarizing the music through the imposed visual patterns. In fact, the sequences are diverse and uneven.

The film has been criticized for its "ponderous didacticism" (the visualization of the "paleontological cataclysm" in the Stravinsky Rite of Spring sequence, for example, and the simplistic contrasts of the final sequences—Moussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain against Schubert's Ave Maria, with Good triumphing over Evil in a finale of Christian tranquility) and praised for those sequences in which Disney contented himself with being Disney and avoided self-conscious attempts at being "artistic."

...

For the first time, moreover, Disney became his own distributor with Fantasia, since, as Variety reported, the film was so different as to require a different sales approach. It premiered on 13 November 1940, at the Broadway Theatre in New York, and was not an immediate success. Its original running time, with an intermission, was about 130 minutes, later cut to 81 minutes. It was reissued in 1946, but it would only build its audience strength over time. By 1968, for example, it had earned $4.8 million in North American markets, more than doubling its original investment, and finally taking its place among the top 200 grossing films.

In musical terminology, a fantasia is "a free development of a given theme." Disney's achievement, though often impressive and no doubt ahead of its time, has nonetheless had its detractors. Stravinsky was not pleased that his music had been restructured and that the instrumentation had been changed. "I will say nothing about the visual complement," Stravinsky remarked, "as I do not wish to criticize an unresisting imbecility . . . "The film succeeds best when it is at its most playful—the hippopotamus ballerinas in the "Dance of the Hours" sequence, for example, which Richard Schickel has described as "a broad satirical comment on the absurdities of high culture." The visuals for Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony strain contrivedly for a mythic charm in an Arcadian setting populated by fabulous creatures. Far more interesting are the animated dances from Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite, and the whimsical treatment of Ponchielli's "Dance of the Hours" or Mickey's struggle with the dancing brooms in "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," the conceptual core of the picture. John Tibbetts has written that the results of Mickey's "union with high art were questionable for some, just as Walt's collision with the likes of Stravinsky, Beethoven, and Moussorgsky raised (or lowered) many a brow."

Disney's undertaking Fantasia brings to mind an artisan who has only a superficial knowledge of religion undertaking to sculpt a monumental pieta out of sand as the tide moves in, threatening to erode it. Some passers-by will no doubt pause to watch out of curiosity, but the spectacle will not for most of them constitute a conversion. If anything, Fantasia does not teach a musical lesson, but it often fascinates and delights the eye.

Reviewing Fantasia in 1940, Otis Ferguson called it "a film for everybody to see and enjoy," despite its "main weakness—an absence of story, of motion, of interest." Bosley Crowther was less harsh, remarking that the images often tended to overwhelm the music, but praising the film for its "imaginative excursion" and concluding that it was a milestone in motion picture history. Despite its sometimes elaborate pretensions and its many innovations, the boldness of its concept quite overrides the "disturbing jumble" of its achievement. It is, indeed, a "milestone" in the history of animated film.

—James Michael Welsh

DISCLAIMER: WHAT WALT IS GOOD AT

This post isn't really about Walt Disney. I'm just using him as an example of cartoonists abandoning their roots in search of something higher.

I don't even blame him for doing it. Maybe he sincerely loves his fruity content. That's just fine. If I had to be mad at someone, it would be at the cartoonists who actually liked funny stuff who followed what Walt did just because Walt did it. I wish more artists would follow their natural instincts and be more personally observant, rather than blindly doing what someone else is doing.

Every time a new trend comes along it sweeps away the good things that existed before, rather than absorbing some of the new things and combining them with the best traditions.


OK, just to go off on a tangent, I will tell you that I have seen every Disney feature at least 20 times, studied them all on many levels. I have almost all the short cartoons in my collection. I have watched the shorts in order year by year while watching the films of the other studios during the same years to compare them.

Walt was definitely good at some stuff, a genius at some. He just didn't seem to like cartoons.



MARKETING-PACKAGING

Walt probably invented the whole concept of marketing. He marketed his characters, marketed himself and made everyone think his stuff was better than everyone else's. Everything he did came in a shiny package and promised that it would be the greatest thing ever-his cartoons, his TV Show, Disneyland, they all promised magic. Sometimes they would deliver a bit, but his marketing and packaging was his true creative genius. I don't think anyone was ever better.

HE SOLD US SPACE

His space series from the Disneyland Show in the 50s convinced regular folks that we could actually go to the moon, and explore Mars and beyond. Before these shows appeared, space travel was strictly science fiction. I think his marketing of space travel did more than anything to get us to the moon.

To me, that's his greatest achievement.

DRAMATIC ANIMATION

He had one creative storytelling ability that beat everyone else. The dramatic scenes in his movies- the ones he didn't water down with comedy relief really do approach and sometimes surpass the drama even in the best live action pictures.

The witch in Snow White.

Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty. (although they lessened the dramatic effect whenever they surrounded her with the wacky Ward Kimball style demons.)

ORGANIZATION

He built an amazing studio and production system specifically geared to his own very finite tastes. Everyone in the studio was a specific tool to put on film what he couldn't himself.

The system had a lot of waste built in and was extremely expensive, but that's inevitable if you yourself can't put your specific ideas down on paper.

All the animation movie execs copy this system today but have exaggerated all the excesses, having less vision than Walt.

HYPNOSIS

He was able to convince millions of people of anything he felt like convincing them of. Even of things that the evidence did not at all support. That an animator is an actor with a pencil. That his characters had rich personalities. That animation is magic, even conservative animation. That no other studio did anything good.

This is such an interesting topic that I'm going to devote some posts to it: The difference between taking someone's word for something and using your own physical senses to observe and analyze to see if you come to the same conclusion that someone else's words did.

Most people believe words more than physical evidence. Especially words in books. That's why I post so much art and clips to let you decide for yourself what you think and like. My words just offer you another view than the traditional "non-artists writing about art" one.

TECHNICAL ACHIEVEMENTS

Obviously, his best films have amazing camera moves, fantastic background layouts and paintings. The scene planning and music is intricate. All that flash and intricacy does a lot to convince you that everything about the films is equally as good.

REALISTIC ANIMAL BODIES WITH CARTOON HEADS

The animation Disney's artists do of deer, horses and dogs walking and running is amazing and otherwordly. Is it entertaining? I don't know, but it's impressive that anyone can animate difficult complex problems like that.


Is it a bit weird that they plop cartoon heads on top of realistic anatomically correct hindquarters?
It's kind of on the furry side of life, isn't it?

HEWWWOOOOO!

"MAY I PWEASE HAVE YOUR WESPECT, MR. DISNEY"

This post isn't about whether Walt's Cartoons are good or bad, it's just pointing out the sad need for respect that makes cartoonists ashamed of what their real abilities are.

NEXT: UPA HAS A DIFFERENT WAY TO GET RESPECT

WALLY VS UPA PART 2 - Skilled Cartoonists Take Their Skills For Granted

OK, here are my theories as to why UPA happened, and why animators abandoned what they were good at. They might not be right, but at least it's a stab at an explanation for something so crazy to have happened. Maybe you have some theories too.

1) SOME SKILLED ANIMATORS TAKE SKILLED ANIMATION FOR GRANTED

By 1948 there were many many brilliant animators who could do totally sophisticated rich cartoon movement. Their animation and drawings had level upon level of intelligent artistic principles, ideas and planning in every scene. To the audience it would be magic. Maybe by the 40s this brilliant stuff was so easy for them that they started to take it all for granted. It was second nature to them, so they were no longer impressed by their own sophistication.

I know that in the 80s, I brought some tapes of Clampett cartoons to Bill Melendez to show him.



He had previously told me how proud he was of his UPA work and how revolutionary it was. I seem to remember that when he saw the Clampett stuff, he had forgotten how amazing and sophisticated the animation was. In 1985 (as now), any animation from the 40s would look like superhumans from space did it, because everything had become so primitive by then.

We told Melendez how much we loved the 40s stuff and he then agreed that it was the best animation ever done. The UPA stuff was more about the design and just doing something different and he was still very proud of that. He said it cost as much to do a limited animation UPA cartoon as it did to do a fully animated funny cartoon. I still can't figure that out, but of course I believe him.





Maybe some of the animators who could do such amazing feats of cartoon magic just got bored with their own skills and wanted to do something different.

2) SOME ANIMATORS CRAVE SERIOUS RESPECT

Real cartoon animation-the full stuff of the 30s and 40s is very sophisticated, but only animators would know that. The audience and the critics just thought of it as cheap throwaway entertainment, and as history teaches over and over again, entertainment and fun doesn't get serious critical attention no matter how obviously skilled it is. It sure doesn't win awards.

Some animators and directors needed to know they were doing something that was above cheap mass entertainment, something that had a higher meaning. Something that could get respect. Some cartoonists wanted to be "artists", not realizing that they had previously invented a whole new artform that could do what no other was capable of.

Pleasing hundreds of millions of people around the world with obvious astounding skill and talent is not good enough to get you respect.


NEXT...2 DIFFERENT WAYS FOR ANIMATORS TO BEG RESPECT - DISNEY'S AND UPA'S

Wally Walrus VS UPA part 1.

WALTER LANTZ PRESERVED PURE ANIMATED CARTOONS LONGEST

I've been watching a lot of Lantz cartoons lately, particularly the late 40s films. These cartoons sort of represent full animation's last gasp before the 50s when flatter, stiffer, less animated cartoons became the style.

At Warner's in the late 40s, Jones was making his funniest films, but his animation style had already become less fully animated. His animators were mainly traveling from one Chuck Jones pose to another, but the stories Jones was directing were less geared towards allowing the animators to be the stars of the show, as they were just a few years earlier.

IS CREATIVE CONTROL A GOOD THING OR BAD THING?

It depends.

Lantz had a really interesting studio. It didn't have a central style or any major creative force directing the overall studio philosophy or style. Having no strong central control I think in his case was a really good thing.

Disney on the other hand, was a studio completely controlled by his personal taste - his naive ultra-Christian bumpkin point of view. There wasn't much room for his animators to do their thing. They had to second guess or follow Walt's every kitschy tasteless whim.


Warner Bros. was also a "control" studio, but the control was split up between very different directors. Each director had free reign (as long as he made funny films) to do his cartoons the way he wanted.

Total strict control can be good or bad, depending on who's doing the controlling.

DISNEY AND JONES BOTH WERE RESTRICTIVE WITH CREATIVE CONTROL

Chuck Jones and Walt Disney both exercised extreme control over their films. The difference between them is that Chuck had talent and Walt didn't. Chuck could actually do most of the things he was asking his artists to do. Walt couldn't. He had to talk them through it. He couldn't do the drawings or stage the scenes or time the cartoons. All he could do was restrict his artists from exercising what magic, personal abilities and surprises they might have had. Disney bent everyone to his will and poor artistic taste. His philosophy is he didn't want anyone or any idea to stand out:

"We allow no geniuses around our Studio."
Walt Disney
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/w/waltdisney131635.html

Clampett had a very different type of control over his cartoons. He could draw and had a really strong personal style, but instead of forcing his crew to draw and think just like him, he inspired everyone to add their own personal inspirations and quirks to his cartoons. They combined their styles with his. Clampett gave people the context to work within and he creatively cast his artists and managed to get everyone to do the best work of their careers. McKimson did better animation in Clampett's cartoons than he did in his own! Clampett unleashed the amazing creative powers of Rod Scribner, while every other director tried to tone him down. Mel Blanc did his best voices for Clampett. Stalling did his best music.

Clampett's style of control, to me is the optimal way to make cartoons...BUT! We need another way too. The random uncontrolled studio way.

WE NEED UNCONTROLLED ARTISTIC EXPERIMENTATION TOO

There were so many extremely talented and skilled animators in the 30s and 40s that it would be a shame not to have ways to let them all explore what they themselves could invent if they were let loose and didn't have to be slaves to trends. Too much control over talent can lose a lot of great ideas and personal inspirations.

Luckily for history there were some studios that had great talent coming through them and no one putting the clamps on them. Terrytoons and Walter Lantz are 2 of those studios.

Jim Tyer could never have done his kind of animation at any other place but Terry's.

JIM TYER CRAZINESS

Even at Famous his stuff seems toned down, as if someone is really leaning on him to try to be normal. At Terry's, as long as you made your footage quota each week, you could do your own style and he sure did!

Walter Lantz himself, was probably not super talented, but he was a cartoonist and animator who obviously loved his profession and loved other cartoonists. Animators from all over the cartoon business would take breaks from other more controlled studios and work for awhile at Lantz. His directors were not strong visionaries or personalities and the cartoons that came out of Lantz' studio-especially in the 1940s are basically the products of the animators' personal styles. All kinds of different styled animators worked on the cartoons in various orders and the cartoons all look different.

The Lantz cartoons aren't really funny, not like Warner's or Tex Avery, they are basically fun stuff for kids. But some of the most fun cartoony full animation in history happened under this loose system.

Dick Lundy probably was the director with the most personal style or look of his own and you can see that he did a lot of the poses, but he still let the animators put their own personal stamps on the animation.

Stars like Grim Natwick, Freddie Moore, Ed Love, Pat Matthews and many more all had wildly different personal styles and they all obviously liked full animation for its own sake. They liked to make the movement itself shine. Under more restrictive directors, they didn't always do their best stuff, but at Lantz you can see these great full-animators doing beautiful, sometimes funny, but very lush and creative animation that just rejoices in the art of the animator. Not the art of the director, not the art of the writer, not even the art of the layout pose artist. The sheer joy of fun appealing character movement and cartoon magic. Which is what cartoon animation is primarily about.

Chuck Jones explains:


In 1948, Lantz made a whole pile of beautiful, fully animated cartoon classics, all featuring virtuoso performances by some of the all time great animators.


WATCH WALLY STRUGGLE

Now compare that scene to what happened to cartoons just 2 years later.

UPA DESTROYS THE WORLD

That's a UPA cartoon. Doesn't it make you wanna kill yourself? After a couple decades of really fun, upbeat cartoons that brought a new form of art into the world - complete magic designed to make you happy, now we have depressing downbeat dreary, creatively stifled drizzle. WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED? I have a new theory about it.


To be continued...

AND DON'T FORGET TO WATCH THE HILARIOUS SOUPY SALES CLIP UNDER THIS POST!