Using subtlety and broadness together creates richness and entertainment.
"Pardon My Glove" (1956)
Variety is what makes things seem alive and certainly interesting. Some commenters have called this comedy acting "broad" and I have to challenge that. Yes, it's partly broad when Ralph screams and hits Norton, but even within the broad gestures there are very subtle nuances in the facial expressions and body language that make Ralph a specific character, not just a generic blusterer as you see in many cartoons.
Now these expressions are very obviously subtle to me but some would call them extreme, just because they are noticeable at all. We are so used to blandness today, especially in cartoons, that anything that makes a clear statement is considered broad or extreme. I disagree.
Subtle means nuanced to me. It means very slight twists and turns of details that add rich information to the main statement. The difference between "mad" and "sarcastically pleasant while trying to convince Norton that Ralph is not mad so he can lull Norton into blind trust and then strangle him".
That second emotion cannot be made simply. It can be done with a single expression though that you can recognize in an instant, just as fast as you can read "mad". But it's a lot funnier and interesting. Here is cartoon mad:
Gleason's mads have subtle nuances in meaning and appearance. And he has a million different ways to be mad.
And on top of that, an entertainer such as an actor or cartoonist has to do more than achieve merely a rich meaning with his skill of subtlety. He has to make it entertaining.
That's what Jackie Gleason and Art Carney do that the average person down the street can't and even 90% of professional entertainers can't. That's what makes them great and lasting. And cabable of extreme subtlety. They have a wide range of specific expressions, gestures, rhythms, vocal control and on and on. That's why they have lasted 50 years and are still laugh out loud funnier than most other sitcoms.
If you don't believe these expressions are subtle, tell you what. Try drawing them and see if you can capture the nuances in the expressions. Then post your drawings and we can all start to see why it's so hard to get specific acting in animation.
Kristen not only caricatures real people's heads, she caricatures their specific expressions. She oughta be an animator, if she isn't already.
It's admittedly very hard to animate subtle specific nuances, but I'm not sure why so few have tried. I don't expect every animator to even want to. Animation is primarily about motion. Acting is another thing to add on to all the skills it takes just to move something smoothly at all.
But I'm hoping that once animators start to see the difference between specific and generic acting, some may be interested enough to want to add specific acting to their own characters.
What makes a character a specific personality?
Specific personalities are only specific in the evidence that our senses take in.
Personality cannot be explained in words as richly as it can be shown in actions by a creative skilled performer. You can promise in your script that a character has a rich personality, but someone has to prove it with evidence that our senses agree with.
Visual evidence. Audio evidence. An actor and an animator has to tell the story with pictures and some of the time, with added sound.
Their design, their unique and varied mannerisms, but first of all their expressions are what the visual evidence is. This has to work in context and coordination with the dialogue- the sound evidence.
These artificial artistic signals have to relay a clear and entertaining message to the audience. It can be broad like most classic animation, subtle like some old animation, or a combination -like the best of Warner Bros. cartoons, or it can be extremely bland, limited and formulaic as in most of today's cartoons. (Yes, you can find exceptions but too few.)
Animation tends to re-use the same expressions over and over again, many of which are not even general human expressions. Instead we rely on "animation acting" which is very limited because we animators blindly choose it to be. Probably not even on purpose. We are just so used to it being done the same way over and over again that we don't stop to question it.
The expensive studios even spend a lot of money pretending to study from life, but then make the final decisions to just animate and design things the same way they did in the last 15 pictures.
I put this live action acting up to show how much higher we have to aim if we truly want to have our animation heralded as good acting, or "realistic" acting.
This is great acting. It reminds me of many real life incidents I have personally been part of or have witnessed-with the boring parts cut out. That's what entertainers and artists ought to aim for- relate something about their view of the world to you in their style, but cut the damn boring parts out.
Great performers are also great editors. If they were perfectly realistic, then what would be the point of them? You can sit around the house and watch realism all day.
All this applies equally to "serious" actors but I'll leave that for another day...
Look what Gleason does with exposition. Exposition is generally considered a bad writer's sin, but in some comedy it can be very funny. Moe Howard was great at reading exposition; he made it funny and obvious that he was just telling you an elaborate setup for a great payoff.
Tex Avery started almost every MGM cartoon with the boldest exposition, just to get the idea of the story over with fast so he could get to the jokes.
Clampett made many of his setups entertaining without exposition ... through character, atmosphere, music and tension.
In this great episode of the Honeymooners, Ralph just tells Norton (and the audience) the setup for a gag, and he does it with such entertainment that we aren't bored by it. At least I'm not.
I'm not very conservative myself-in fact I'm the opposite. I usually think the conservative tendency is evil-at least when conservatives are in charge of anything. I do however have a respect for highly skilled conservative practices, and here are two examples of such from America's Golden Age.
They are both Bugs Bunny scenes from the 1940s, and from Warner Bros.' 2 top directors-Bob Clampett and Chuck Jones and each of their top animators, Bob McKimson and Ken Harris. At first glance you might think there isn't much different about the approaches to both these scenes. I will explain the vast differences in approaches by the directors and the animators. Better pay attention. These are tricky concepts to grasp.
Both these scenes are what you would call 'subtle' animation. "Subtle" is a very misunderstood word today. Most people think it means the lack of anything happening-and they think that's good. It actually means that lots of things are happening but they are happening not blatantly obviously and they are conveying meaning even though each individual subtle move is hard to detect.
This scene is from a Bob Clampett cartoon: Falling Hare. It's animated by Warner Bros.' best animator, Bob McKImson. The combination of the greatest director and the greatest animator is pretty powerful.
First, let me explain how they worked together. Clampett worked differently with McKimson than he did with his other animators. For most of his animators, Bob would draw rough "energy sketches" indicating where he wanted the characters to move within the scenes, what their important expressions and poses would be and how extreme or subtle he wanted them to go.
Clampett more than any other director really cast his animators. He knew what each of their strengths were and really took advantage of them. Unlike Jones, he would not restrict them to animate only what he himself could do.
Every other director had turns using McKimson, and McKimson's strong dynamic and solid style is always recognizable, no matter who he animated for.
But in Clampett's cartoons he would do things no one else ever realized he (let alone anyone else) was capable of.
Not only was McKimson a great solid draftsman, but Clampett quickly realized he had a photographic memory and figured out a way to take advantage of it.
Clampett understood Bugs Bunny more than any other director and realized that the key to his personality and believability was that unlike most cartoon characters, he was like a real down to earth guy - someone you might know and want to hang around with. The way to make Bugs seem so real was to not only write down to earth dialogue but to have him move and act like a human, rather than relying on stock animation moves.
When you draw, you tend to rely on "animation poses" and expressions, but when Clampett directed McKimson, instead of doing that, he just acted out the scenes in real time in front of him. He would act out the scenes like a human, using human gestures and street poses and expressions. McKimson instantly memorized every move and expression Clampett made and then sat down and drew the whole thing out-with no roughs!
Watch the scene again. Look at every head move, every hand gesture. Notice that every single move communicates a meaning of what Bugs is trying to tell you. He isn't relying solely on the dialogue to tell you what he thinks about the gremlin business. "Oh Muuuurder" he says flopping his hand towards camera and rolling his eyes. Look at how he holds his knees and laughs calmly and sarcastically. And all this subtle stuff is drawn completely solidly.
There is no overt exaggerated Disney-esque squash and stretch, no overly floppy blustery hand gestures like Bill Tytla or Freddie Moore would automatically inject into every scene because "that's the way animation is supposed to move". This McKimson-Clampett style of movement and acting is completely unique in cartoon history. It has never been done by anyone else.
McKimson never in his own cartoons had scenes so convincingly natural as this and likewise Clampett never had scenes like this except with McKimson's animation. Every animator at Warner's did his most outstanding work with Clampett and they all animated in their own styles-styles they weren't even aware they were capable of.
Again-look carefully at every head move and gesture Bugs makes-you can describe in words what each one means. It is a visual language-more powerful than the words accompanying them.
I'm going to be posting more McKimson scenes soon. He is one of the all time greatest animators and completely unique. He is strangely underrated by cartoon "historians" and it kind of makes sense why. Most cartoon historians are not artists, let alone animators, so when they write about cartoons they don't write about the drawings and animation, because they don't know what they are looking at. I'm going to try to correct this blatant disregard of one of the most amazing talents in animation history.
There are some talents-like McKimson, Scribner, Jim Smith, Katie Rice and a tiny few others who learn things that aready were discovered by other artists, and can be analyzed and explained to an extent to other artists, but then on top of that they have something else that just can't be explained in any logical sensible way - magic.
Bob McKimson's ability seems just supernatural.I can make you aware of some of the things he is doing, but the rest...well..just look and be dumbstruck by the heights that some humans are able to achieve.
This next scene is from Rabbit Punch - a Chuck Jones cartoon. Jones directed very differently than Clampett-not just in the kind of content that he chose, but in the way he worked with his talent. Basically, Jones was the star of his cartoons. He really only used his animators as glorified inbetweeners. They are there to link the poses that Jones himself draws. In his earlier cartoons-from 1938 to 1940, the animators had more leeway to animate their own ideas-particularly Bobe Cannon and Ben Washam, but Jones soon evolved a style of pose to pose animation which was more creatively comfortable for him.
Jones is a stickler for every pose in a cartoon looking like he drew it himself. It is somewhat possible to tell the different animators apart if you study very closely, but it is harder than picking out Clampett's animators.
Jones is satisfied as long as the action is fairly smooth inbetween getting from one of his drawings to the next. I would imagine this would be frustrating to creative animators, but maybe some animators like having all the creative work spelled out for them, I don't know.
This scene from Rabbit Punch is pure acting. There are no backgrounds, just Bugs standing alone delivering his lines.
Every pose and expression that conveys a meaning was drawn by the director, Chuck Jones.
Now inbetween these main poses, Harris animates subtle movements of Bugs' head rolling around. These extra movements though, unlike McKimsons' scene - convey no meaning. They are just happening to "keep the scene alive". Like smacking a bobblehead.
This is an actual animator's term. Keeping a scene alive is to protect the scene from being labeled as the derogitory terms "limited animation" or "illustrated radio".
To me keeping a sceene alive with random movements isn't any better than limited animation. Any drawing or idea that doesn't have meaning or entertainment value in of itself is a waste of time and money. If it doesn't add anything, why pay for it?
Harris, also unlike McKimson was not a good draftsman. (Everyone, including Jones says so) He couldn't control solid forms moving slightly and slowly through space. If you watch the scene again, see how Bug's eyes and head shape and features warp and float around-now go back to McKimson's scene and look at how solid Bugs looks throughout.
Subtle animation is a very dangerous thing to do if an animator is not a good solid draftsman. That's why there are so many full-animators -especially today- who use tricks to avoid the problem of any of their drawings reading as moving holds. Animation that overly squashes and stretches way past the key poses means no pose is held long enough to establish itself as a non-stock-animation pose or expression. Poses that zip from pose to pose and everything is "snappy timing". This kind of stuff to me is all animation cheats. It's all over modern "full-animation".
It takes brave men like the old Warner Bros. animators to commit to their poses and expressions and not run from them as in modern Disney movies or Cats Don't Dance.
Go to Thad's great site to see more Harris and McKimson and other great old-time animators' scenes and look upon them with new eyes! http://classicanimation.blogspot.com/
