Experimentation by Chuck Jones on Looney Tunes Shorts - the "smear"

Technique 1: "Smears"

In my last shorts program post I talked about the value of experimentation and progress. This was built into many classic shorts programs, particularly Disney and Warner Bros.'

http://johnkstuff.blogspot.com/2009/04/goals-of-shorts-program-8-developing.html

Chuck Jones was an interesting character. He seemed torn between extreme experimentation and conservatism. The things he chose to experiment with are mostly of secondary importance to the entertainment value of the cartoons - background stylings, and inbetweens.
For awhile in the early 40s you can see a lot of what we now call "smears" in the inbetweens. Stretched inbetweens that carry us from one layout pose to the next in just a couple frames.
Bob Jaques first showed me this stuff by slowing down old cartoons to study them - and he may have been the one to coin the term "smear" to describe it. We of course loved it because it was something unique to the cartoon form. Real people don't smear in front of you.
Chuck's drawing style in the 1940s was a slight variation of Bob McKimson's drawing style, only a bit softer.
In the slow scenes, the characters are drawn with pretty solid construction and conservatism.
Then they break into these wild smeared inbetweens to get to the next solid drawings. Chuck didn't invent this concept; you can see it even in 30s Disney cartoons. But Jones' crew took it to much further extremes than anyone else - to the point where you can actually see it in real time. He toned it down in the late 40s, but it was all the rage in his unit for a few years.
What's important to note, is that they didn't do it the same way every time. They had fun with it and tried to tailor each smear to the context of the action.
I find this bit odd. Daffy falls into scene without a smear. Instead they chose to use drybrush to add to the effect of the fast action.
...which brings me to another point: variation keeps things from becoming monotonous or formulaic. Jones didn't use the same technique for every action. His crew constantly experimented, studied and discovered new techniques and used them all according to which technique they felt suited a particular action best.
http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/Jones/43duckornottoduck/1DaffyFallsDogSmears.mov

Technique 2 - Bobble Head acting from Chuck's Layout Pose

Here's another technique you see a lot of in Jones' cartoons, a much more conservative technique.Jones usually posed out the cartoons for his animators. For example, here's Daffy in a basic layout pose talking to the dog.
This would be a good place for the animator to use multiple facial expressions to get across his acting, but instead he uses head bobs and actions to mildly punctuate the accents in the dialogue. I don't think Chuck wanted his animators to put too much of themselves into their scenes. Not where the audience could notice it, anyway. The animation tends to stay within the framework of Chuck's layouts. This animator didn't even try to animate lip-synch for the dialogue.
When young animators first discover smears, they tend to have the urge to do everything using smears. I think it's important to remember that it is just one trick in a huge potential bag of animation techniques. When you use the same technique to bridge every pose to the next, it becomes a formula, monotonous and predictable....and DEAD.




http://www.cartoonthrills.org/blog/Jones/43duckornottoduck/2DaffyTalksNoSmears.mov

Experiment to discover and practice new techniques
Vary your techniques
Apply Techniques in context wherever possible

Goals of a Shorts Program 8 - developing new techniques

TO DEVELOP NEW TECHNIQUES - TO PROGRESS

Shorts Can Build In Technical Progress (Silly Symphonies model)
Cartoons in the 1930s and 40s advanced every year noticeably. On purpose.

Which company today can say their cartoons are more advanced than any other company's? None. The TV cartoons actually get more primitive every year at a steady rate. Even obscenely big budget CG cartoons barely change from year to year. They may grow more hairs and pores but remain primitively designed and acted within the context of the same old stories, puns and cliches retold a thousand times.

Is this an expensive one or a cheap one? I can't tell the difference.

There is no progress built into the system, no competitiveness built into it.
Walt Disney actually made a science out of progress. He built it into his studio system by creating a series of cartoons just to discover and develop new techniques. He instituted art classes and created "action analysis" to improve his animators' understanding of the way things move.

His Silly Symphonies almost seem boring on purpose, because they are so intent on pushing new techniques forward. I don't think you have to make boring cartoons in order to advance. I prefer the Looney Tunes method of trying out a few "one-shots" every year: highly entertaining cartoons that don't necessarily use the star characters but allow the directors to put more money and time into a couple of cartoons to try new things out. What they learn, they in turn can apply to their more formulaic star vehicles and in the process the cartoons get better and better overall at a noticeable rate.

At MGM, Tex Avery was an experimenter, while Bill and Joe's more conservative Tom and Jerry series was a beneficiary of Tex's (and Looney Tunes') bold inventiveness.

ONE SHOTS as well as Star Vehicles

AIM HIGH RATHER THAN LOW

Besides trying to discover appealing star characters, part of a shorts program should be devoted to progress: to developing new techniques to make your cartoons obviously better than your competition's.

The faster you advance, the more primitive you can make your competitor's work seem.

Our business frowns upon this and builds in safeguards against progress. It values "consistency" over experimentation and advancement. Model sheets, story bibles, pages of catch phrases for each character and on and on...

The result of the philosophy of "never change" is to actually degrade consistently year by year, because it is physically impossible to stay the same. You have to move in one way or the other - forwards or backwards.

Many TV cartoons today look like still images of stick figures. Childlike frozen stick figures that only move in the sense that they are being pushed and pulled around in flash like paper puppets. But no one knows it or cares because no studio is trying to outdo anybody else. It's like each studio looks at the others to see how low it's safe to aim this year. (The same applies to stories, but I won't get into that here)

THERE USED TO BE HIGH STANDARDS EVERYONE AIMED FOR

What happened to the idea that entertainment had to be amazing? That entertainers had to have obviously rare and astonishing abilities? When my parents see a modern cartoon, I've heard them say, "I don't get it, I can draw as well as that." That whole generation expected to be amazed by anything that was called entertainment. Athletes have to be strong, fast and coordinated. Singers used to have to be able to carry a tune and have beautiful rare voices. Cartoons and illustrations used to attract and impress the average person by their rare visual skills, humor and inventiveness. The average viewer didn't think "Well, hey I can do that." Today, big studios aim down to compete with "user-generated" content. Is there a point of spending a lot of money doing what just about anybody else can do cheap?




If there was a studio devoted to progress, within a couple years no one else could compete with it because the other cartoons would look so primitive by comparison. Today unfortunately, amateurism is the trend. I don't even think the people in charge know it. I think they actually believe that the more primitive a cartoon is the more advanced and hip it is, but maybe I'm missing some work of genius out there. I remember when "good-for-you" cartoons like Caillou and Arthur looked primitive to me. Now they look like standard professional network cartoon fare - or even better in some cases.

Big House Blues - Carbunkle Animation 1

The best animation studio I ever worked with was Carbunkle in Vancouver Canada. BHB was the first thing we did together. At the time the studio consisted basically of Bob Jaques and Kelly Armstrong. (They can correct me if I'm wrong)

BOB JAQUES

I think I probably gave Bob just 2 layouts for this scene. It looks like it was drawn partly by Jim Smith and partly by me. Each character that moved - basically just did the same thing left and right in the layouts, and Bob added overlap and smooth timing and something else that made the scene really come to life.

I liked it so much in fact, that when I saw it I added cuts of close ups of the animation so that the audience could really appreciate it.
I won't presume to try to explain just what he did to smooth it all out and give it such a swingin' feel, because I really don't know. I'm just a big fan of it. He's obviously using classic animation principles, but he's placing the details in beautiful designy motions. They don't just "work". They move gracefully. He combines design principles and motion principles in a unique way. Maybe this comes from Bob's stylish caricatures.
Stimpy has toes!
Somewhere in there I added this shot from a later David Feiss scene just to add a musical accent.

It was all just supposed to be one scene happening on the long shot, but when I saw how well Bob animated the dancing to "Der Screamin' Lederhosen's" "Dog Pound Hop", I dragged the sequence out to enjoy more of the music and animation. When those 2 elements work together, I feel you should milk it. If the animation was crappy and had no punch, I would have cut away as fast as possible to the story.


For hi-rez clip:

http://www.cartoonthrills.org/JKE/01MoreBlog/Spumco/BigHouseBlues/BobDanceRSCycle.mov

KELLY ARMSTRONG

Here's a couple layouts I did for a scene that Kelly animated. She has a style all her own, as if she just reinvented the wheel to suit her own purposes.

Yes, I stole Jasper the Pup from Milt Gross back when I was trying to promote him to all my animators and cartoonists - many of whom hated him! I also wanted to animate his mouths all crazy, sort of like Jim Tyer, so I drew a couple mouth positions off to the side of his head, making no sense. Here's one.

Kelly took this idea much further and really exaggerated the heck out it, even adding a "shrink take" - also inspired by Jim Tyer.

My layout for Ren stretching to yawn looked something like this, and again...
...Kelly kept going, taking it further. This was something I just never expected from anybody. I was so used to everyone toning down the drawings that they got from the previous department, that it was really a shock to see someone take my poses and go way further.
She did another amazing thing that you would never expect from a studio that is animating from your layouts. She listened really carefully to the voice track and added her own custom-made poses to match exactly all the subtleties in the track. Usually you would get fired for that. "If it isn't written on the ex-sheets, don't do it."
I probably drew one yawn pose, but when I recorded the yawn, I broke it up into 3 or 4 pieces, without thinking about the animation. "Ahh...ah...ah...ah...
So Kelly made up different faces in sequence that really added a lot of realism to the scene.
Even though a lot of the cartoon is theoretically "limited animation", Carbunkle's additions and nuances made the characters really come to life in a way that people just weren't used to seeing in cartoons from the 1980s.





Ren and Stimpy would not have looked or felt anything like it did had I not completely overturned the whole TV animation system for it to happen. Had I just sent these layouts to Asia - like I was advised to do, they would have come back basically evenly inbetweened and traced horribly. The effect of this is to make the characters just float through the scenes. You never focus on anything important, because all the poses have equal time on the screen. There are no accents. I've had this happen to my cartoons many times, and end up begging for retakes and explaining what "animation" is as opposed to "inbetweening".

What Bob and Kelly did on the Ren and Stimpy pilot (and the later cartoons) was to treat each scene as if it were unique and happening right now, caused by various factors - the story, the personalities, the emotion, etc. There was no obvious formula timing. Everything was accented hierarchically and added drama and punctuation to the cartoon. They added their own poses to punch it up even further.

I'm gonna put up a bunch of scenes from Big House Blues, relatively in order. Another thing that happens naturally among talented artists (if you let it happen) is - they evolve. They get better with each scene and with each cartoon. In Big House Blues, all the animators got better by the end of this very short cartoon, just because there was no one standing in their way feeding them arbitrary rules to hold their development back. No Ranger Smiths!

Carbunkle animated part of this cartoon and we did the other part at Spumco. It was a healthy way to work and we spurred each other on to see who could do the wildest stuff. - but there is a lot of subtlety too; it just gets lost among the wackiness.

http://www.cartoonthrills.org/JKE/01MoreBlog/Spumco/BigHouseBlues/KellyYawn.mov



See lots of Carbunkle animation on these two box sets.