Funny Walks in Limited Animation

Here's a normal Ranger Smith HB walk. Upper Body and head is 1 drawing that pans up and down while the arms and legs move.
a slight variation...torso is held while legs move. No up and down motion.


http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/01Principles/walks/ranger/walk1walk2.mov


another variation- upper body is a held drawing, but the butt and belt moves up and down as he walks
now it starts to get obvious and stupid

Limited animation can be really fun if you take advantage of it.
I love making arbitrary decisions about which parts of a drawing to be held, and which to move. That's what they did in the original HB cartoons to try to fool you into thinking it was actually animated. The difference is, I don't want to fool you. I want it to be obvious and entertaining that only parts are moving. The stupider, the better, I say.


http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/01Principles/walks/ranger/walk3walk4.mov

It gets even stupider...I'll prove it

Don Martin - In a Department Store

Continued from....
http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2009/01/don-martin-in-department-store-4.html

Boy, Don Martin sure was nice to kids. He just knew what we thought was funny.
Women's undergarments are inherently funny and we would have to read gags like these under the bed. We really thought we were getting away with something.
I wonder why so few animated cartoons are this purely entertaining? Maybe Sponge Bob is the last one to try to do crazy stuff that kids naturally crave.

Hot wet fertilizer is good kid's fodder too of course.
If you go back and read this whole story, you'll see that there is no story - not in the way animation execs and "writers" think stories should be - predictable. Do Martin loves to set things up to make you think the story is going to be about something predictable, the takes you into left field.
There's a place for plots and resolutions if you are good at writing them and can make them actually entertaining, but I think most kids would take pure controlled lunacy over formulaic animated cartoon plots any day.





In the classic tradition of the Three Stooges, there is no resolution or happy ending to this great story. The protagonist (Fester Bestertester) just gets shot off into the distance and we don't know what happens to him. We also forgot his best friend Karbunkle.
In an animation studio you'd be made to go back and explain everything. you'd also have to explain Bestertester's and Karbunkle's personal histories and why they have the personalities they do, what traumatic events in their childhoods caused them to be such unbalanced creatures. We'd need some pathos too. By the time you stuff your stories with all this filler, there's no time left for "hot Wet Fertilizer", Fat Lady or lingerie jokes.

And the latest horror that is inflicted on cartoon creators is "aspiration". Execs in the last few years have decided that kids want to watch cartoons about characters they can look up to, rather than laugh at. I can't imagine anything so counter-intuitive. "The Three Aspirational Stooges".

Don Martin - In a Department Store pt 3

Don Martin uses techniques similar to Tex Avery's.

1) Extremely clear simple staging, focused on the gags.
2) One idea is presented at a time.
3) He sets up each main idea clearly first, then builds on the gag, making it more and more ridiculous.





The gags are crazy, but the control over the audience is completely logical. Very common sense conservative execution.
Don Martin, like Avery, knows what he wants you to look at and laugh at. He doesn't leave his pictures, ideas or continuity to chance.

I've seen many storyboards and comics that stage stories randomly, cutting to new angles for every panel, filling every panel with detail and clutter and never focusing on anything important to the story, character, atmosphere or gag. Clear staging and storytelling is indeed a rare ability. Not every artist can do it.

When you see it done well, it seems so simple that you almost think the artist is cheating. Certainly executives feel cheated when good storytellers give them clear simple logical storytelling. They feel that they paid for their elaborate clutter and confusion and deserve to get it.