Simpsons Interview pt 2: Models and Abandoning Inbetweens

CHARACTER MODELS

So I did some character models to give them an idea of how I would draw the characters as caricatures of the Simpsons and then explained that even drawing them that way wouldn’t be enough to achieve what I wanted to do.
I’m even bored with the pose to pose style animation we did at Spumco where the only control we had over the look of the cartoon characters’ acting was in the held layout poses.

My whole experience in TV animation has been to chase a production around from department to department to make sure the original storyboard poses don't get toned down.Which is why I always made sure we at least made lots of layout poses for the animators (across oceans and continents) and instructed them to not redraw them "on-model".The effect of that system was: the characters would strike a funny pose, then basically inbetween into the next funny pose, but between the poses, not much interesting happened. It was a compromise between the 40s cartoon system and the practicalities of Saturday Morning television budgets and schedules.

Bob Camp Layouts from Space Madness

The few episodes that were animated at Carbunkle had much better animation and they added visual interest in the way the characters moved but still based the actions on the held poses. –Held poses by the way that didn’t always work from pose to pose and Carbunkle had to invent some very clever ways to connect them smoothly.

On the Simpsons I wanted to try moving the characters in crazy fun ways, not just looking funny each time they come to a stop. I tried doing layout poses that looked just like this storyboard and the layouts kept looking like toned down versions of the original sketch. And when I began animating I couldn't make it work anyway. So I abandoned trying to interpret it literally and just animated the cycle straight ahead and let it take me where it went.
The intent of the action is the same as the storyboard but the details are different and took advantage of movement rather than just a basic pose with moving legs.
I loved animating Marge's hair so much that it kept threatening to take all the attention away from the walk. I had to fight to keep the hair action as a secondary supplement to the main action.
This project has given me a whole new outlook on hair personality, by the way.
Hair is a feature, just like the eyes and mouth. Hair can reveal intimate secrets of the character living under it.




WEIRD INBETWEEN TRANSITIONS

When you are animating you don’t draw the same kinds of poses as you do when you are drawing layouts. (Just like you don’t write the same kinds of scenes on a typewriter as you do when you storyboard them) You are using a different part of your brain; you are flowing from action to action. This is hard to put into words, but you just draw differently and you think of a lot of things you wouldn’t think of if you were merely drawing individual instances of emotions.

I try different paths to get from one place to the next – but I’m always aware of the context. I don’t change what the characters are doing, I just try to give more specific meaning to how they do it. The inbetweens are as fun to me as the bookended emotions you are aiming at.

No one is happy one instant and then mad the next without some kind of unique transition. Pure inbetweening makes the transition mathematical and cold (even with slow ins and outs and slick timing). In reality, a lot of indecision and emotional torture can happen between 2 different emotions or even just 2 thoughts. I learned this by freeze framing my favorite actors, in particular Kirk Douglas.

next...Kirk Douglas' tormented transitions...

This is Kirk leaving one emotion and on his way to another. It always seems to hurt him to move from feeling to feeling. A real man hates his feelings. Half his muscles try to hold them back, while others crawl towards the next intense one. There's a war going under under the twisting skin of his face. Some of his features resist longer than the others and it makes for wonderful emotional pain and distortion of flesh.

Regular People Instead Of Models

It's easier to caricature someone who isn't a professional model.
Trying to figure out how the body works under all those lumpy clothes is a problem.More lumpy clothes but a good head to draw.
These caricatures are still conservative because I am drawing the people for the first time and only from one angle.


Whoops, I see I got lazy and drew at an angle instead of looking straight at the paper. That makes my drawings look skewed.
Here, I cheated and skewed it back in photoshop.

More Hair

Warm up 1: Bland slow Filmation style realistic study.2: Still stiff, but the drawing on the right is starting to loosen up
3: 1st drawing to begin to approach what I am striving for
4: Starting to get there, but I see lots of mistakes when I compare the drawings to the photos this way
Drawing real humans is a lot harder than drawing cartoon characters out of simple shapes (like that's not obvious)

I especially struggle with being able to see the subtle tilts in the head positions.
Translating those positions into 3 dimensional space is not what I was born to do.

I don't know why anyone would want to try animating this kind of thing, but it's good to study. The results of trying to animate humans never looks worth the effort.

Slowly but surely, some of this is starting to make sense to me. I'm beginning to see the logic in how hair styles form around heads and how gravity affects them - depending on their length and the style of the cut.

I'm having some trouble with the faces though. The way these are lit, it's hard to see the shadows that might reveal the subtle planes in the faces. Instead, I just see wide areas of flesh color between the features of the eyes, nose and mouth. This tends to make the features look like they are floating in space. Just like animated humans.

I'd probably learn more drawing ugly faces.

Things I've gleaned so far:

1: Longer hair is generally tighter at the top of the head and wider at the ends. Because it's lighter at the bottom. Hair at the top is being pulled down by the weight at the bottom.
In shorter hair cuts, the hair tends to spring up at the top, presumably because hair has some upward motion to it when it's not being pulled by stronger gravitation.

2: Asian heads:
So far I'm observing that they have wide and large cheekbones, small mouths and chins
Their lower faces give the illusion that they are longer than their upper faces (above the eyes)
The tops of the bridges of their noses are lower than what I would have expected.
Their eyes seem wider apart than what I'm used to drawing. Although maybe it's that us white people have close set beady eyes and too tall noses. Maybe we look like baboons to people of other lands.

All this could be illusory though because I am looking at models, rather than average people. I also think that these models might have been chosen because they tend to conform to western standards of beauty.

I would need to draw tons of people before I would swear to these generalities.

More Hair : Asian Girls

My "realistic" drawings are about as bland as bland can be. I'm ready for when Filmation starts up again. My goal is not to learn to draw realistically, but to understand why things look a certain way in general logical terms so I can then simplify and cartoon them.

I gave myself a double problem with these studies. I want to add some hairstyles to my pretty girl palette and am using a Japanese hairstyle magazine. So now I have to figure out how to draw Asian faces on top of having to figure out how hair works.
Yikes, here are some really warped faces below.

A good thing about the magazine I'm working from is that it shows the hairstyles from different angles so it helps me see what the forms are. (Tip: Try squinting your eyes when looking at a form that is made up of lots of distracting details like individual hairs) The most important fact I've discovered so far is that hair has to have a distinct form to look good. ...and that form has to feel like it's really partly made by the shape and position of the head.The drawing on the left stinks to high Heaven. I made her look like a Flounder - but I got something out of it. I tried taking the shapes I struggled to draw realistically and redrew them faster and simplified them into a more cartoony face. That drawing on the right, while not great is less strained than the study. It's a step toward my goal but there is quite a way to go yet.
I find that when I am studying something, I miss important elements. In this one, I made the face too wide. When I see the drawings next to the photo, I realize that the girl has a longer face and that her hair should be wider on the sides compared to the face area.

I share these nasty embarrasing drawings not to teach anybody how to draw realistic girls (which I haven't figured out) but instead to show students that there is a way to methodically force yourself to learn something that doesn't come easy. It's to analyze what you think you see, then to slowly draw it over and over again and see if it starts to make sense and later to try to cartoon it.

ATTACK OF THE ANIMATION HAIR

I have always been fascinated by "animation hair". (meaning hair styles in animated cartoons from 1980 and likely into the next couple centuries) You probably have too. If you ever met anyone in real life who had animation hair, your first instinct would be to beat the crap out of him.
Characters in these modern animations do not have natural instincts though. They just magically accept the galling hairstyles - and sideways nipples.For a few years in the 1980s teenage suburban boys who hung out at the Galleria actually had a form of animation hair - hair that was half shaved and half long. I used to call it the "2 Barber Style" - as if 2 barbers had fought over what kind of hair style would look best on you and ended up compromising.
The style didn't last long in the real world (probably because of the instinct mentioned above) but it has been reverently preserved in animated features (animated features are a veritable museum of archaic and mummified atrocities). Someone in charge of how to raise your kids believes that regular folks would want to hang out with people who have this hair.


Girls have their own forms of animation hair too. This one above has "Furry Hair" - which is actually not hair at all, but a character from Disney's Robin Hood curled up asleep on top of her head.
Here's a fine example of animation hair below. It's so wacky I can't even find words to describe it.What if your Dad came home one night with this hair style?

ANIMATION EXECUTIVES REVERE SHEMP

As everyone knows, Shemp was the pillar of hipness and animation executives have always liked his hair sense. A lot of them even wore the Shemp cut themselves. Shemp lives on to this day in animated features.To offset the Shemp hair style, some animation executives have devised the "Too far away nose".I had dinner one night with a Disney TV executive to discuss some show ideas. I had trouble concentrating because he had Shemp hair, and it was flopping around in front of his face and flinging his soup at me. One thing he said did sink in though. We were talking about how we got into animation. He said: "You're lucky John. You've always known what you wanted to do and you have the talent for it. Me, I have no talent and I wandered around aimlessly from job to job for years until, by accident I just sort of fell into a job as assistant to a rich guy who had just bought Harvey Comics. He made a deal later to make some cartoons and lo and behold, we were in the cartoon business! So I just fell into it and here we are! But I don't really know anything about cartoons, myself."

Paper fold out hair was big for a while too.
This animation hair style is the natural habitat of the Cardboard crunching Bug.Under those luscious blonde flaps lives a horde of these dung rolling creatures.






Here's another indescribable animation hair style. Even Shemp wouldn't try this.

The low forehead goes well with animation hair and too far away noses.
Animation hair is so hard to keep in order that even the tiniest movement could get it out of place, so animation characters are careful to keep their facial muscles under strict control; any sudden expression might mess up their flaps or even worse - reveal their emotions.

Feel free to print this blog post out and bring it to the barber the next time you want to look as hip as the boys in animated features. - or if you want regular Joes like Moe to tear your tonsils out.

"I refuse to go out of style!" - Shemp Howard, 1952