ART CLASS (WITHOUT THE CLASS)

My son Daniel playing, from Summer 2008.

From time to time I get requests to look in on people's artwork and give evaluations, which I try to do, although I don't always have as much time or ability to allow toward this as I wish, especially lately. It does tell me however, that there is a healthy appetite for information on drawing and animating, and that the internets can be a handy provider for such, to an extent. Certainly fine people like Mark Kennedy, Mark Mayerson, John K, and Peter Emslie and others devote a lot more generous time and personal talent to these issues than I can, but for my part, here's the first of a few general tips that seem worth offering.

TIP #1:

"Draw from life, as often as possible."

This sounds simple and pat, but it can't be stressed enough, even to myself. We all love to draw from imagination, and we also love decoding the established formulas of our heroes, often by copying their work for exercise. Both are fine, but the act of drawing from reality is where you can learn some of the most foundational information about your subjects and yourself.

I confess as kid I never drew from my surroundings. It was only slightly less rare as a young adult and even now I really don't do it as often as I should. It's a common mistake and a tragic one. Here's what Andrew Loomis, one of the premiere commercial artists of the mid-20th century has to say:

"All of us tend to discount our own experience and knowledge-to consider our background dull and commonplace. But that is a serious mistake. No background is barren of artistic material. The artist who grew up in poverty can create just as much beauty in drawing tumble-down sheds as another artist might in drawing ornate and luxurious settings."

Wow. That's for sure. When I was a kid, I was under the impression my surroundings were too boring for words, which may have been true from a certain point of view, but Mr. Loomis is here to suggest that from an art perspective, that is really never the case. Go outside and draw the people around you. If that isn't possible draw your family. Draw your pets, look in the mirror, draw your houseplants and your furniture, take off your shoes and draw them! Look at what a master like Philip Guston could do with shoes, and he could draw as elaborately or as primitively as he chose.

For the sake of learning, you don't even have to worry about making "good" drawings. What you are doing is opening pathways in the brain that will teach you to observe what you actually see, not what you want to see, but what is really there. When you can train yourself how to capture that accurately and with authority, everything you draw from there will get that much more well-informed.

A Ronald Searle sketch done while he was a prisoner of war.

Again, Loomis:

"Technique is not so important as you think - the living, emotional qualities-the idealization you put into your work-are far more important."

I'm not sure about the "idealization" part, but the rest is true. If by "idealization" he means creating solid personal ideals about conveying reality, then all to the good. If he means trying to put your sensibilities into a context of what someone else might consider "ideal", then that's open to conjecture, taste, and the context of your times and social conventions.

In any case, practice makes perfect. A lot of people can talk (or write) about achievement, but being able to achieve something is far more important. There is no substitute for time and experience, and there is no experience more instructive than learning to draw from the immediate surroundings of your own life, time and place.

Fish art

Technically not a fish, I know.

Existential goldfish.

Also not a fish, I guess. Too lazy to re-title this post tho.

Write Ways, Wrong Ways

John K has a very interesting post on writers and writing in cartoons that is worth reading and he has more to come. At the end there is an astonishing clip where someone gives animation writing tips that are so vapid they challenge parody (see Monty Python's classic "How to Do It" skit HERE).

As for me, I am of two minds, for two separate situations:

Where shorts are concerned, I agree with John. I have no doubt that the best short cartoons I love were all evolved from storyboards generated from the hearts, minds, hands, guts and mouths of cartoonists. These people just happened to also be natural born writers, even if they never got within shouting distance of a typewriter. As for experience, I've storyboarded my share of 9 minute TV episodes and it is always the most productive when the script is loose (prefreably an outline) and open to liberal interpretation. Generally the tightest, most over-written and demanding short scripts have tended to be the worst, from inception to outcome.

Most of my career has been in features though, and I have a minority stance here: I am actually in favor of full polished scripts, written in advance of the storyboard process. A lot has been made of the fact that the most of the classic Disney feature stories were worked out piecemeal on boards, developing from a key sequence somewhere in the middle and working out in both directions from there. All evidence indicates SNOW WHITE and PINOCCHIO were done this way, and even later pictures like CINDERELLA and JUNGLE BOOK. But conversely, there is also the account given that Bill Peet wrote a full, standard screenplay of 101 DALMATIONS before he embarked on storyboarding. It seemed to work out pretty well there. And there were hybrid attempts in between.

However, I believe it is all but obvious that Walt Disney's uncanny story sense and his innate and intrinsic intuition of general audience taste played no small part in all of these cases. And it should also be noted that even he was not infallible, even by his own assessment.

So in the absence of such a person, I believe in full, detailed feature screenplays. That they be good ones should go without saying, but that turns out to be a surprisingly subjective topic, although I don't know why. It should seem that a good script reads well to the majority of people and a bad one doesn't but for some reason it isn't always the case. The best positive example I can give from my own experience (and I don't mean to keep harping on this picture) was THE LITTLE MERMAID, which was scripted by Ron Clemments and John Musker. I remember reading a second draft that was so solid that it was unbelievable. You could just see the whole thing in your head as you read it: it was funny, heartfelt, gripping... Although the songs hadn't been written yet, Howard Ashman had made his input to the script as well and the song sequences were described in enough detail that they clearly promised what was delivered.

Metaphor time: A short film is like getting in the car and saying: "Let's go get some ice cream." Unless you are in the middle of nowhere, and even if you are a stranger in a strange city, you can probably drive around a bit and find a place to get ice cream, maybe even spectacular ice cream. If dad gets too anal about which streets to take, what toppings are and aren't allowed, etc, it's going to take all the fun out of even the best laid plans, however. Conversely, making a feature is more complex: you're getting in the car and saying: "I want to take everybody on a mind-blowing, two week vacation." With no map and no real idea, you might succeed, but you might just as well drive around aimlessly for weeks and get nowhere particularly exciting. It seems to me to make far more sense to commit to a destination and plan an explicitly favorable and scenic route, maximizing your budget regarding expenses like gas and lodging, etc. You can certainly be open to scenic sidetracks and shortcuts, but in the end, you will at least arrive where you intended. Your intent may turn out to be disappointing, but even if you failed, you failed on your own terms. It seems that taking the random route you are hoping to succeed by sheer luck. Seems like that is what they invented casinos for.

It should also go without saying that even an excellent script need not be a straight jacket for the story crew and as such, on MERMAID, the storyboards contributed considerably to the evolution of the film. A lot was improved, deleted, expanded etc. over the course of storyboarding and editing, but the script was the best foundation I have ever seen and it still holds up today. BEAUTY AND THE BEAST was fully pre-scripted as well, but my recollection was that it underwent a great deal more enhancement at every step beyond that point, from story to recording. I can certainly attest that David Ogden Stiers ad libbed some very funny material that made it into the film and story talents like Roger Allers, Brenda Chapman, Kevin Harkey and the directors Kirk Wise and Gary Trousedale contributed extensively too.

During ALADDIN, after a first pass was done and discarded, animation production got underway with only a partial story and as a result, the old "triage" method began to work its way to the fore again. The finished film is still solid, but I do recall a lot of energy expended on scenes, songs and ideas very late in the game that never quite panned out. Had these issues been worked out ahead of production, it may have been more ideal for everybody. On several subsequent features, my impression is that the scripts began to get less specific, sketchier on crucial details, more schematic, and as a result the story was often in shambles right up to the eleventh hour of production and then somehow came together at the last minute. I think the industry got addicted to this rush and tends to follow that practice in pursuit of it ever after. Even though as a road to success it has turned out increasingly to be the exception and not the rule.

I've had a hand in the stories to one extent or another on many of the nearly 20 features I have worked on, and I have even gotten writing credits occasionally. For the most part, my most extensive writing contributions were done in cases where it was piecemeal, either by the studio's choice or production necessity. I won't go into detail, since these were all collaborations and I don't mean to speak for everyone involved, and the amount of overlap is considerable. As a method, however I don't agree with the piecemeal approach to a long form story. I've often compared it to building a house from the inside out with no blueprint: you can't see it until it's done and that can turn out to be too late. There are some live action filmmakers who can improvise their way to success (Robert Altman springs to mind) and maybe it isn't impossible in animation either. But unless the movie is supposed to have an anarchic, improvisational feel, it is just too much to ask of an animation crew to spin their wheels any more than necessary.

Or as one astute collaborator put it (in regards to the piecemeal feature approach): "I thought it was supposed to be 'Ready, Aim, Fire!' not "Ready! Fire! Aim!' "

CTN expo

I am pleased to support and promote CTN eXpo, a gathering of animation luminaries including many good friends and legendary colleagues, and featuring a host of panels, seminars and other goodies. The event will be in Burbank, CA next month during the weekend of the 20th. Please see their website for more details, just CLICK HERE.

Hot for CLOUDY

I saw CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS today and really enjoyed it. My 10 year old was also in attendance and he gave it a thumbs up, which is not always the case. My congratulations to the filmmakers for pulling off a very difficult task.

From what I know (which is far from everything) this movie went through the all-too typical bloodbath of hired and fired crews and directors before it found its way to the screen. Many who got burned during prior iterations were friends and colleagues of mine, which is a genuine shame. At one point early on even yours truly was invited to be considered to direct it, (they were probably kidding) and after a quick look at the book I practically ran out of the room shaking my head "NO!" It just seemed, as I told people at the time, that there was no story of any kind there: short, long, animated or otherwise. To me the book had the feel of something a particularly boring adult would find 'Imaginative': "Just think, children, if giant food fell from the sky one day!" To that adult I would say: "You know what else is funny? Big foam hats. Think about it: one day everybody wakes up wearing big foam hats! The president, Tyra Banks, Kofi Annan... C'mon--it's funny!..." Anyway, in a word: ugh.

None of the studio ideas that were on the table for getting around the book's inherent problems seemed promising to me, in fact they made it worse. Happily, the finished film's writer-director team (Phil Lord & Chris Miller) came up with a solution that tends to be so radical in the world of animation that it is usually rejected out of hand, or at best turned to only after everything else has failed, as a matter of dire last resort:

They allowed it to be a cartoon.

Because it is ultimately impossible to make the woefully dumb premise credible any other way. So at the concept level, they simply let it unfold in a cartoon town, on a cartoon island, in a cartoon world not unlike the ones in which many of the old Rankin/Bass or Jay Ward classics unfold. Somehow, just as radical: the cartoony sensibility (heaven forbid) even translates to cartoony visuals, which is a 2 for 2 situation that I have found rare. It is amazing how often I have heard this uniquely ubiquitous executive zen koan: "Well this is such a cartoony idea, we have to make it look realistic so that the cartooniness will be believable"...at which point my mind turns back to thinking about foam hats again.

Happily, that somehow didn't happen here: the characters are just about the cartooniest CG ones I have yet seen , and in a kind of 1970's Paul Coker MAD Magazine way: like those very rare very graphic 2D designs that somehow all get sculpted and articulated correctly. It's a genuine breakthrough and I hope it becomes a trend. God knows the Muppets and Rankin/Bass did it well over 40 years ago, so it can be done, even with pixels, as these guys have proved. After this, people won't be able to say: "Well, you can't do hair (or fingers, or eyes, or mouths etc) that way in CGI..." with the same conviction, even tho they probably will try...

As for the story, yeah it has all the familiar usual story beats studios have been programmed to demand and audiences have been hard-wired to expect, but it does the dual trick of servicing the beats legitimately on one level and using them just as an excuse for being funny on another. In addition, a lot of detailed care has been taken to make many of the throw-away visuals funnier than some movies' main jokes: a deliberately cheap TV ad with awful bluescreen effects and graphics, a recurring poster for a stage show called "FIVE GUYS WITH UMBRELLAS" and a graphic sensibility that is skillfully cribbed from the late 1970's and early 80's. A number of the situations, such as the hero phoning his roughneck dad to simply log on and email him a vital climax-clinching line of code, a binge-eating villain, a hopelessly clueless home-town has-been, and a reverse ugly duckling story for the female lead are especially clever.

Nice work, everybody. My next step is devouring the "making-of" book, as my way of coming back for seconds.

Syverson dog

Not that great a gag, but what wonderful drawings! Click to enlarge

Somewhat Grim: LITTLE MERMAID pt.2

"Lord Grimsby"

Final model artwork by me. Drawn as models only,
not taken from actual scenes.
Cleanup by Gail Frank

I previously wrote about my partial involvement with preliminary designs on "Sebastian" the crab in Disney's LITTLE MERMAID, which hit screens 20 long years ago. Of course Duncan Marjoribanks deserves all the credit with the design, animation and physical characterization and I considered myself lucky to get some scenes to animate, with Ducan's supervision. Sam Wright's outstanding voice was of course a big part too.

The inimitable Duncan Marjoribanks
Animating on RESCUERS DOWN UNDER circa 1990

The rest of my animation time was spent animating 99% of a minor but delightful character called "Lord Grimsby" -- the grim, powdered-wig-wearing sidekick of "Prince Eric". Eric by the way was named after Eric Larson, who was so instrumental in mentoring so many in my generation.

Initial rough sketch by Dan Haskett

I first saw sketches of Grimsby on the desk of Dan Haskett, the brilliant, one-of-a-kind character designer and animator, who had been hired to generate models for the film. I had been a big fan of Dan's ever since seeing his work in John Canemaker's excellent book on the making of the Raggedy Ann feature, and also from seeing Dan's caricatures pinned up around Disney back in 1979 (although Dan had already departed). A blog should be devoted to Dan's artwork alone, but for now you can check this blogpost by Shane Glines for a tiny taste of his talent.

Costume and character design: Dan Haskett
Cleanup artist unknown

Anyway I saw the drawing of this dour hatchet-faced dude on Dan's desk and assumed it was a character with maybe one or two scenes. He told me that no, the character was a kind of sidekick for the Prince, a cross between the Duke in CINDERELLA and John Gielgud's deadpan servant role in the comedy ARTHUR. I mentioned that I would have loved to animate something like that and Dan encouraged me to petition John Musker and Ron Clements for the opportunity.

Preliminary art by Dan Haskett
Cleanup artist unknown

I was considered a middlingly ok animator but after reading the script, I wasn't sure I could do it. The character wasn't really essential to the story, but it was a recurring role and written with a great deal of subtlety. All the same, Dan continued to encourage me and so I did some sketches of the character, which were enough to provoke the directors to give me the tentative go ahead for the assignment once the movie got rolling. When production did get going, I spent several months animating Sebastian but continued to thumbnail and sketch Lord Grimbsy as well. The first scene actually went to Mark Henn, who animated Grimsby floundering in the waves during the shipwreck, trying to find Eric. After that I got my first scene of the character, catching Eric's telescope and fumbling with it as he spoke. Little did I suspect, the fumbling had only just begun.

One of the many dozens of loose individual sketches I did of the character.
Not bad if I say so myself. Too bad I can't say the same for my actual animation.

I'd like to say it all went swimmingly from there, but it didn't. At this point I learned that it was one thing to make a decent sketch and quite another to make useful animation drawings. Simply put, the character was just too sophisticated for my skill level at that point. The voice by Ben Wright, who had voiced both Roger in DALMATIONS and Rama (Mowgli's wolf father in JUNGLE BOOK) was pitch-perfect, a performance worthy of Gielgud himself. The design was great and I was given time to study reference of numerous actors, and provided with rotoscopes as well. If it helped it only helped a little.

I did continue to animate the rest of the scenes with the character, but it was a year-long struggle from start to finish, and not an ultimately successful one. As much as I loved the character and wanted to do it well, I would say that I only got a few of the scenes right and both I and the directors knew it. At one point I noticed with a kind of despair that just about every time the character appeared in storyboard form, director John Musker himself had done the sketches, which was not typical. It dawned on me that this was exactly the kind of character that embodied his own dry sense of humor and he undoubtedly would have knocked it out of the park if he had animated it himself. Both John and Ron were world-class animators before they became directors so pleasing them is both a challenge and a reward. I knew that what they had in their heads was better than what I was capable of doing most of the time, but I kept on keeping on anyway.

More model poses by me. Cleanup by Gail Frank

Like I said it was a struggle. I am glad I worked on the movie, but I have always suspected if the character had been any less peripheral to the story, I would have been replaced by someone better. I think I did a handful of scenes correctly but too many, including crucial acting ones and all the single character close ups are sub-par. Some of the ones that don't make me cringe are the ones during the prologue aboard Eric's ship, and then the one where Carlotta the maid, beautifully animated by Tony Derosa, weeps into his scarf at the very end. Those were all done at the end of production. The bad ones are all over the movie and detailing their flaws would only state the obvious to some observers and ruin the scenes for others. I will say that one of my worst is a key moment where Grimsby encourages Eric to stop obsessing about the siren in his dreams and to consider wedding the voiceless Ariel: "Far better than any dream girl..." Again a perfect vocal and heartfelt storyboards (by Roger Allers) that I didn't come close to doing justice to. Luckily the audience is too busy watching Eric, who was animated by the great Matt O'Callaghan.

BTW: I recently learned that Grimsby is also the name of a fishing town in England, which is either an inside joke or a co-incidence. I always assumed it was to summon a grim faced character which he was. Ben Wright, the voice over actor referred to him as simply "an old poop."