Acting 2 Jackie Gleason - acting - reacting

Here is some stuff from the greatest sitcom of all time.

This is entertainment totally written for performers.

Watch how interesting and fun even the characters who aren't doing the talking are!

The one who isn't talking is still reacting with both body language and expressions.

This all can be helpful to animators. And fun to draw!

I use a lot of this character chemistry in my own cartoons. Characters should always feel like they are alive and thinking. Even Stimpy-as retarded as he is, thinks about each retarded thing he does and I got that not so much from watching cartoons (Warner Bros. excepted), but from watching people, and also from watching old movies and TV shows.



The Honeymooners, "A Woman's Work is Never Done" (1955)

The cartoon sitcom folks always compare their comedy to live action, rather than cartoons. They snub their noses at cartoon stuff. They think they are writing "realistic" situations. They aren't. They write mannequin situations in my opinion. Live action stories need to take the acting and performance into consideration and that takes a lot more skill (and experience performing) than the cartoon writers have. Have you seen any cartoon sitcoms that have scenes of acting and performance anywhere near this? Warm, alive... throbbing with engorged corpuscles?

The cartoon sitcoms to me, fail as cartoons and fail worse as live action. They don't even attempt to do what either medium is capable of.

The Honeymooners, All In The Family, The Beverly Hillbillies, Seinfeld are not only hilarious - they are gripping - because of the great performances and the writing that is geared to character, rather than writerspeak jokes and pop-culture references that could come out of any available open puppet mouth in the cartoon.

Alice Complains About Housework
Uploaded by chuckchillout8

Note how specific each character is in their design and their expressions and gestures. There is nothing generic about them. Note also, how often they go "off-model". Real humans are off model all the time. That's what's funny about us.

Only store dummies and modern cartoons are "on-model" all the time.



The Honeymooners, "Better Living Through TV" (1955)

Alice complains about Ralph's schemes
Uploaded by chuckchillout8

The strangest phenomena about modern cartoons to me is that they are not even as cartoony as real people are. I'll bet your Dad makes a million funnier expressions than any cartoon Dad you've seen.

Roger Ramjet - "Woodsman" - clip 2 acting-reacting poses

CLICK HERE TO WATCH ROGER RAMJET CLIP!
Here's a great example of funny opposing poses from Roger Ramjet:Here's what I mean by opposing poses:
http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2006/11/composition-7-compose-your-poses.html
The animator added a lot to the already funny dialogue track by drawing funny poses of the characters.

The poses aren't funny arbitrarily either. They are in context of the scene.

Roger Ramjet proves that having a severely low budget doesn't mean you have to have boring unfunny drawings. It just means you can't afford inbetweens. Many producers today believe that whoever can afford the most inbetweens has the best cartoon. So they'll have a lot of boring bland drawings moving smoothly into the next boring bland drawings. When I watch a cartoon, or even an animated feature, instead of marveling at how smooth some animation is, I ask whether the actual expressions and poses are actually original or entertaining. (I actually don't ask anything...I just twitch around in my seat when I see the same old expressions and unnatural "animation gestures" for the thousandth time)

If the acting is entertaining and smooth as in an old Warner's cartoon, then that's the best of both worlds! But we can't always afford that. I'd settle at least for some funny expressive drawings in TV cartoons. That would be a start!

Smoothness costs money. Talent is rarer but cheaper if you allow the talent to do what they are capable of.


If you had to choose between smooth motion of stiff drawings and funny drawings with character, which would you choose? I'm sure some will choose fully animated in any case, right?


I love animation, but I want drawings that would be worth the trouble of moving them.

Roger Ramjet - "Woodsman" - clip 1 opening scene

Look at these hilarious drawings!

CLICK HERE TO WATCH ROGER RAMJET CLIP!


This is great design. It has all the principles of technical good design, but on top of those it's funny looking too. It's like it's making fun of the 60s style.

You might think it's odd that I would get excited over that, but it's pretty rare to see funny drawings in the cartoon business.

Opposing poses-funny body poses, great balance of negative and filled space in the designs.

Funny voices, funny cuts.

This is the opening scene of one of my favorite Ramjet cartoons. The dialogue so far is mere exposition to set up the story, but the animator/director made it funny.





Even this seemingly simple background is funny. It's also great design and super organic, with lots of balance.

HEY BOB KURTZ! WHO DREW THIS ONE?

Milt Gross comics, drawing with every principle EXCEPT construction

I think Milt Gross is the most naturally gifted cartoonist in history.
On the surface, if you are just looking at his work for the first time, you might be shocked. It's so loose and cartoony and doesn't use strict construction. Not all the details wrap perfectly strictly around the forms. (They DO wrap around the shapes and compositions.)

BUT Milt had absolutely great natural control over a ton of principles and skills, he had a natural observant eye for the way things really looked, a gift for caricaturing them and a beautiful ornate style that had humor as its first element.

His graphic style is hard to peghole. It doesn't fit into any school of cartooning. It's neither 2 dimensional nor 3 dimensional. It has elements of both at the same time, but perfectly controlled. I guess it's 4 dimensional. He bends space to allow you to see what he thinks is important in the scenes.

He also had a very rare gift that few cartoonists have-the gift of life. His every panel and character seem alive and bustling and full of inner motivation. I don't even know if that can be taught. Some artists never get it, no matter how many principles they learn.

This panel below has:
Great page layout design - every panel is a different and organic shape, yet all the panels are composed to look good together.
Every Pose is different and fun.
Every Pose has a clear silhouette and line of action.

A funny observant take on dog anatomy- Milt takes the stiffness of a dog's limbs and bends them into human actions and situations. This is not like Bugs Bunny or Tom and Jerry, who are merely built of pears and tubes. Their poses are comfortable in human attitudes. Pooch here is struggling with his own canine anatomy, but is not at all deterred despite the awkwardness- genius!

Original Cartoony designs inspired by but not hampered by reality
Look at these hilarious designs of ferocious animal heads! They aren't stock Disney animals or stock anybody's animals. Milt needed to make a story point and did it as extreme and precise as his wild creativity let him.

Great backgrounds

These BGs are not only shown from very difficult angles-they are also very specific.
The characters are in a Craftsman house.

Gross must have done tons of drawings of real things. He must have looked at all different kinds of house, trees, lanscapes, cities, furniture etc.

He was interested in how everything looked and he thought everything looked funny so that's how he drew it.

He didn't draw the "stock cartoon house" or the stock Nelvana tree with the Sheridan college bark that looks the same as the texture on every object in the Sherdian college universe.

I think Milt does the best cartoon backgrounds ever.

Crazy Ideas and Funny execution of them
Compare these pages to the great Harvey Eisenberg pages in the post below. While Harvey's are technically great, they aren't particulary funny and the story is just stock comic book cartoon story fare.

The idea of a mutt wanting to be glamorous, so he cuts up a fox fur and glues it to himself in patches is funny by itself, but the drawings show the hilarious incongruity of how matted up and nasty the dog looks, yet he is prouder than a peacock.

Genius Page Layout

Great Compositions
Varied and contrasted character designs
Look how each character is made up of different shapes. The lady has a diamond shaped head with a pointy nose.
The man has a large forehead and a skinny produding jaw. The little character has an upside down triangle head and an upturned bulbous nose.
The man is organic and the woman is more angular.

Many animated cartoons recycle the same basic shapes for their designs and just change the ears to denote what animal you're looking at.
In a Jack Kirby comic, almost every man has the same square head design.
It's very rare for a cartoonist to have a lot of different custom designed characters.
Milt Gross seemed to never run out of them.

Wild Action
Milt's comics seem more animated than most animation-especially today's.

Control of details-look how in the middle panel, the lady with the out of control vaccuum cleaner and the horse all fly in an overall arc...the seemingly chaotic situation is carefully controlled to make it funny and easy to read and beautiful.

Funny Poses- no stock poses for Milt. Look at the pose in the second panel of the man with bent knee supporting the strectched right side of his body.

Scale.
Amazing design, composition and control of where to put details to make this mansion look huge and magnificent.
Note the trees in the forground are different kinds of trees than the ones in the background.


Dynamic Angles!
Comic Story Pacing
The angles get progressively more extreme which helps build the pace of the action.

Opposing Poses

The poses of the characters contrast and react to each other. They don't just stand there straight up and down. They are alive and thinking.

The best animal Designs
This bulldog kills me. He isn't your stock Preston Blair bulldog that you see many variations of in old cartoons. This one is totally original. Actually, maybe it's a boxer, but look at what an asshole he is!

Extreme Cartooniness
These pages are just pure brilliant cartooniness. Milt is obviously totally into his story and having a lot of fun drawing it and that fun translates to us.

Cartoons are supposed to be fun, aren't they?

UPA really missed the boat on this point. Graphically, the UPA (and Disney's "UPA Style cartoons) cartoons are similar to Gross'. They are both "designy", yet the UPA and Disney cartoons are missing the element of fun and exhuberance for life that leaps off of Milt Gross' pages.

Great Crowd Control

I always wonder what Clampett would have done had he stayed in cartoons through the graphic 50s. He loved Milt Gross and his cartoons were always very alive. I imagine they would have looked something like this only with that great animation you only see in Clampett cartoons.

Designy cartoons don't have to be flat or boring.

These pages are works of fine art and should be hanging in a museum somewhere.





A 15-page Pete the Pooch comic is reprinted in ART OUT OF TIME!


Discover more Milt Gross and lots of other great cartoon art at Shane's wonderful site!
http://cartoonretro.com/




NEXT! .....The Rise and Fall of Construction in Cartoons, an inspiring and sad story.

Composition 7 - compose your poses together - also very important!

a broad example of action pose causing reaction pose
This is a super clear example of characters in a broad pose causing another character to react to the pose. It's a broad gag and the broad pose helps to drive it home and make it as funny and ridiculous as it can be.
A bland pose would weaken the effect of the gag.
Use this tool to make your characters come alive, to seem as if they are real and that they affect one another.

Opposing poses and lines of action will take your cartoon characters away from being mechanical puppets whose only function is to recite verbal nonsense that cartoon "writers" could tell you themselves in person without ever spending a nickel on a cartoon.

The poses of your characters can work together to create pleasing compositions and tell the story and define the characters emotions.. Usually one of the characters in a scene is the focus.
The character who is doing the "acting". Usually the one talking but not always.
The other characters are "reacting". Their poses are being affected by what the focused character is doing and saying.

A subtle example of action causing reaction
Ren is not directly talking or causing a reaction from Stimpy. He is not even aware of Stimpy in this moment - but Stimpy is aware of him.
Ren is thinking about the evil fun he could have if they have a baby. Stimpy has done his best to try to convince him and he is waiting with baited breath to see if Ren decides yes.
His body pose shows him slightly leaning towards Ren, but not so much as to risk making him mad and deciding against the baby. The pose shows his eager hesitation.
On top of the clear body poses are very specific expressions also helping to tell the story.
Your poses and careful drawings can tell the audience way more information that a pile of script pages can.

Owen Fitzgerald below is a master of not only "girl art" but he's great at posing and composition. Look how natural and alive his poses are, and how the acting character causes reactions in the other characters' body language. Owen was an animation layout artist who worked at Disney's and for Chuck Jones, and he brought a lot of classic animation principles to his comic art and added his own wonderful style. He also influenced Bob Oksner and Mort Drucker who worked with him in the early 50s.These kinds of poses are much more interesting than characters standing straight up and down,
or characters that have random poses that don't relate to each other....that look like they were each drawn separately, then just pasted into the scene.

Harvey Kurtzman creates fantastic compositions and designs using his characters' poses and emotions. Look at the great positive shapes of the characters and the negative shapes between them. Harvey also uses many of the other principles I have been talking about. Can you see them?

Harvey is most famous for creating Mad Comics and Mad Magazine and the talented artists he developed- Wally Wood, Jack Davis and many others did their best work for him. Harvey did rough layouts or compositions for many of their comics and it made their work read better and have a lot more life than much of the work they did for others or even themselves.
Harvey didn't like his own drawings and it's too bad because I think he was the best of the bunch and wish he had drawn a lot more comics himself.



Here is an example of what happens so often in the crazy inefficient, wasteful animation production system we have today. There are so many steps in the animation production process, where about 5 different artists all work on the same scene and each one in succession has to draw the same pose that the previous artist drew, and each time the scene gets watered down, until the final scene is completely stiff and lifeless and has lots its original purpose and meaning.

Here's the basic process:
A storyboard artist (if he is a good one) draws rough scenes but with some life and poses that are recognizable as poses-with lines of action and specific expressions and sillos and maybe some suggestion of composition.


A BG artist takes the storyboard and draws the BGs with no regard to what actions and poses the characters have to perform in the scene. He never leaves room for the pose artist to actually move his characters around. If there is a composition in the scene or interesting BG ideas, he disregards them and pastes in drawings from the background model pack that are filled with distracting non-descriptive details.

This storyboard and BG then goes to a layout artist who has been brainwashed to draw everything "on-model". He swears under his breath at the storyboard artist for drawing off-model, swears harder at the BG artists who gave him no room to pose the characters in the scene.

Then he tones down all the poses and takes out the expressions that aren't on the model sheet.


A Prop artist (usually someone who was a security guard a couple weeks earlier) designs a separate "prop-model-pack" that's 6 feet high full of every imaginable hammer, fly, rubber chicken, blade of grass and ridiculous details-but draws them poorly and too big and wonky to actually fit into the poses and compositions that the storyboard artist and layout artist drew.

The storyboard and layouts and BGs and prop packages are then given to foreign animators who then trace all the poses from the layouts (without looking at the storyboard to see if they have been toned down) and proceed to lose another generation of life.

Then the animation drawings go to the assistant animator who traces the animators watered down drawings of the watered down layouts and waters them down again.

As if this isn't enough, after all the animation and assistant animation is done, all the scenes then go to the "on-model" department for one last check to make sure that no drawings in the cartoon stand out from each other, that nothing at all looks interesting or amusing or tells the story effectively.

The final cartoon eventually comes back to "civilization" and everyone who worked on it hates it and blames everyone in every other department.

It's no wonder artists get jaded so fast in this business. It's hard to care about your work, once you see that it never reaches the screen the way you meant it. You have to really dumb-down your expectations in order to survive.


Here is an example of the first stage of watering down, from storyboard to layout. Now imagine this happening 4 more times in 4 more departments farther and farther away from you.
I've spent 20 years designing and honing a system that tries to fight this natural watering down tendency and encourages creativity and punching-up in each successive department in the studio. Other studios like Nick and CN adopt my system and then year by year throw more monkey wrenches into it, and undo it until the time comes when they still use all the terminology and superficial play acting of pretending to make "creator-driven" cartoons, when in reality they've almost reverted to the Filmation/ Hanna Barbera factory system of the 1980s, but now all the execs and front-runners act all retro and have big wacky pitch meetings, then send the storyboards overseas -DON'T EVEN DO LAYOUTS- and use "voice-directors" and "story-editors" to make sure no director or creator has any control over the characters he created and make everyone draw "on-model" and keep all the creative people in each important creative department from communicating with each other.

This costs a heck of a lot more than having a small crew that works together under a director who is in charge of all creative aspects of his cartoons, by the way, although they will tell you otherwise because they don't count their own salaries and the salaries of all the department heads and story editors and the years of wasted "development" and market testing that went on before anyone drew a single frame of film.


These below are not as crystal clear as the good examples of the work of my heroes above, but I try to show the best examples of a concept as I can to drive the point home. I don't expect everyone to be Harvey Kurtzman or Chuck Jones. I just hope to get artists to try things they might not have been aware of before.

To get poses this specific on the screen, through the production sytem is very hard. It is set up to undermine whatever your creative intentions are.

If you want to see this principle in action from a real sitcom check this out. Even without the sound you can see how great the acting and reacting is:

Buy the best sitcom of all time and laugh your guts out!