May 2010

Animators and their Art

1 Comment / Animation /

I just realized that I have a lovely sketch by Lauren Faust hanging on my wall.  It’s not perfect and it’s in pencil, with plenty of rubbed-out corrections, yet I love it.

Right next to said sketch is a model sheet of Klaus from American Dad! signed by Dee Bradley Barker. Fair enough, he isn’t an animator, he’s a really funny voice-actor, but the drawing has the signature of Seth McFarlane.

The difference between these two pieces might as well be a canyon. On the one side, we have a unique, original sketch. On the other, we have a plain, manufactured sheet of paper with a fish on it.

Of course I like my Klaus picture. I received it as a present, but I still like it for what it is and for who signed it. Although in my mind, the sketch is by far the superior artistic product.

Unfortunately, animation art can get seriously expensive (like I could’ve bought a car for that type of money). Yet ordinary animators often have literally hundreds of sketches lying around. Some end up being coloured, others get tossed in the bin. Many of the bloggers I follow will post their recent sketches for all to see. Some are quite spectacular and make you wonder why they ended up on the floor.

I’ve noticed that lots of animators attend comic-cons around the country and sometimes they even sell stuff too! I’ve found this an excellent way to acquire stuff from artists I like, especially if you’re tight with the pursestrings. Many of the same artists also sell art via online stores, so you have no excuse if they aren’t coming to a comic-con near you.

Do yourself a favour and look into it, I promise you won’t be disappointed.

Here’s some of my favourites to get you started:

EDIT: I now also have a model of Linguini from Ratatouille signed by his voice-actor  one of my favourite artists, Lou Romano!

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Live-Action Movies Based on Animation

Animation, Opinion /

I very nearly went with Scooby Doo for the picture, but this one has Robert DeNiro in it!

Although the trend has died down somewhat, the genre just doesn’t seem to die. The Smurfs is the latest to get the treatment and although we will be treated to Hank Azaria as Gargamel, I still can’t quite look forward to it,

Although it has been common to mix animated and live-action characters (most notably in several Disney films and a scene where Jerry Mouse dances with Gene Kelly in Anchors Aweigh), the latest craze has been to use CGI characters.

There have been numerous releases over the last number of years and I can’t honestly remember a good one among them. People are familiar with the characters so that’s not a problem, but of all of them, the main problem seems to be the downright atrocious quality of the script or the actors hired (seriously, Daphne as a blonde???).

All of them have skewed towards the young market. Fair enough if that’s what you’re going for, great! But seriously, with the likes of Pixar churning out movies with complex, believable characters and smart, clever jokes, there really is no excuse for toilet humour.

Sure some of these movies are based on cartoons that were never great to begin with (thank you ACT) but at least they never tried to make us believe they were clever.

Of course, by aiming at kids, the adults who actually remember the cartoons when they were broadcast on TV, they are making a fortune. That’s why we got a sequel and prequel to Scooby Doo and why we’ll continue to see ever more annoying Alvin movies for years to come.

I realize that Hollywood turns out the same crap all the time, but as an animation connoisseur, I find it deplorable what has happened to some characters as they’ve been hauled out and flogged like a dead horse.

There are plenty of examples of studios being able to create interesting movies with original characters, why can’t we see the same with established characters, or do studios assume that the movies will coast on the remnants of the characters embedded in the millions of us who are familiar with them?

Sadly, it doesn’t look like the practice will die anytime soon. My advice? Spend your hard-earned money on an original movie with some depth to it.

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A Few Words on Adobe Flash

Animation /

There has been a fair amount of chatter over the last few days in response to a letter from Steve Jobs,  the head of Apple Computer, where he basically says that Adobe Flash is unsuitable for use in the Web 2.0 world.

Animators have been quick to jump into the debate, which isn’t surprising seeing as numerous TV shows have been made over the years including Cartoon Saloon’s very own Skunk Fu! as pictured above.

With a post over on Cartoon Brew, the debate is pretty much divided with plenty of people supporting the format and plenty of people against it. Having never used it, I can’t pick a side even if I wanted to. Sure there is some truly awful animation produced in flash, but there always has been truly awful animation produced at some point. it’s a poor workman that blames his tools.

Is flash perfect? No of course it isn’t. It was never designed for use in TV shows. It was meant for quick animations on the web. It’s great that someone figured out that it could be used to animate a TV show, but that’s kinda like me using MS Word to make a flip book. It can be done, but it’s not perfect.

Back to Steve Jobs. He’s within his rights to ban flash from Apple devices if he wants, that’s his way of doing things. However, I know myself how many places it pops up on the web because I use NoScript, and I have to approve a lot of flash stuff.

The only problem I have is that he’s trying to force people to move on to the next format (HTML5) when that’s not quite ready yet. This is similar to when he launched the iMac without a floppy drive. A brave choice but floppys stayed around for at least another 5 years.

The problem is that there is no immediate replacement, at least for animators. Sure they have some choice in regards to producing animation, but flash is by far the cheapest, most popular solution right now, and it will take time for a similar product to emerge.

I could get on my soapbox at this point and argue that we need some sort of open standards but that’s never going to happen, at least not for an industry such as animation.

Right now the whole thing is a bit of a moot point. We’ll all just have to sit tight until a solution comes around, which it will. There’s money to be made in one, and if that’s the case, somebody is bound to figure it out.

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