Exaggerate the Essentials

Al Hirschfeld in life and caricature

I teach animation to students in the second year of a four year program.  They are just getting beyond bouncing balls and flour sacks and beginning to engage with human movement.  This year, I'm noticing that more students are shooting live action reference for their assignments.  Live action has its uses, but it's critical that an animator knows what he or she is looking at.  Live action has to be analyzed to understand how the movement communicates to an audience.

The skill of caricature is to see past unnecessary detail to the underlying shapes of a face.  It is the process of analyzing and editing.  What is essential to a likeness and what is not?

This same process is at the core of life drawing.  Someone looking at a posed model is using knowledge of anatomy, perspective, composition and design to reduce a three dimensional figure to a two dimensional representation.  What detail is necessary to communicate the gesture and what can be ignored?  An untrained artist can trace a photograph of the same pose and while it may superficially resemble the figure, the lack of underlying knowledge will be obvious.  There is no analysis or editing, there is only imitation.

Human movement communicates.  From infancy, we develop the skill to read body language and facial expressions in order to understand what is happening in another human mind.  Because we do this intuitively, we are not aware of the analysis we are doing.  We don't consciously realize that some movements and expressions communicate more than others, the same way that some facial detail defines a person's appearance more in a caricature.

Using live reference without understanding how the body uses weight, balance, momentum and time is useless.  Using live reference before knowing what movements communicate and what movements can be ignored leads to a result no better than tracing a photograph and calling it a life drawing. 

Analysis and editing are essential.  Exaggerating what's left after you have eliminated the unnecessary makes the communication more vivid for an audience.  We see people moving every day.  Acting is a heightened version of daily movement; it's a way of communicating thoughts and emotions more directly than we see in normal life.

Live action reference can suggest things to a knowledgeable animator; it can help the animator analyze how a movement communicates.  But without the underlying knowledge, an animator cannot discriminate between what helps an audience understand and what distracts from understanding.

There is a difference between imitation and communication.  Until a student understands this, live action reference is simply a faster way to imitate human movement.  If the movement is no more insightful than what we see in life, animating it is unnecessary.  What we want is movement that communicates more precisely than real life.

Stripped Bare

The above animation is by Ron Zorman, who did it with TVPaint.

I'm including it here because it is a clear reminder of the expressive power of motion. These days, motion is either limited and cliched or buried under textures and effects. Animation also veers between stylization with no resemblance to human behaviour or a leaden attempt at realism that fails to achieve the complexity of live acting.

The above is stripped bare: no sound, no colour, no texture, no face, few details. Just line. Yet the way the four sack moves presents us with a character that is indisputably alive. We can read the character's mind. We can empathize with the character's experiences. All of that is accomplished purely through motion.

The principles of animation are all here. Anticipation, stretch and squash, overshoot and recoil, line of action, follow through, overlapping action, drag, staggers, slow ins and slow outs, contrast in timing, etc. While an animator can pick them out, they're invisible to the audience because all of them are based on motions we've experienced in life. The motion is, in terms used by Chuck Jones, believable as opposed to realistic.

This is the core of what animation is. Everything else is elaboration.

A Toast

Last Leaf

OK Go | Myspace Music Videos

Geoff Mcfetridge used a whole lotta toast (this is at 15 frames per second) and a laser cutter to make this music video for OK Go. This is a new twist on the concept of paperless animation.

Mindy Aloff Interview

Mindy Aloff, author of Hippo in a Tutu, is interviewed by Kent Worcester of The Comics Journal.

"Both animation and theatrical dancing are labor-intensive activities that benefit from a benevolent visionary at the helm. Animation today could learn much from what Walt Disney arranged for his staff to do: to visit the ballet and sketch the dancers. And dancing could benefit from Disney’s appreciation of melodic, song-based music with a clear pulse as a floor for dancing. Unfortunately, the simple pleasures of dancing that asks the performer to use a comprehensible vocabulary of steps and expressive gestures, which relate moment by moment to music, are exactly what most students of both animation and choreography want to evade now. Balanchine, in fact, once wrote about how dancing could learn about the elaboration of fantasy from cartoons. Artists globally, though, don’t want what these historical animated films are equipped to teach – joy as the text and complication as the subtext; instead, they want complication, edge, as the text and more complication as the subtext. I think the culture is going to have to change for either group to learn from one another, and I just don’t see that happening in my lifetime. Perhaps a few individuals will take this as a challenge and prove me wrong. I certainly hope so."

Patterns of Motion

I've always been fascinated by Disney's Woodland Cafe (1937) and this scene in particular. Like Mother Goose Goes Hollywood a year later, this cartoon looks both forward and backward in its animation style. There are some scenes that could have been done as early as 1933 or '34 and others, like the above, that point towards the 1940s. The cartoon concludes with an upbeat jazz number, "Everybody's Truckin,'" played by a band of grasshoppers who are drawn to resemble the black jazz bands of the time. The shot above is from the song.

This shot has always been the highlight of the film for me. While the surrounding animation is full of energy, this shot just explodes off the screen. This shot is animated by Ward Kimball and I thank David Nethery (see comment below) for confirming that.

I wanted to know why this shot stands out for me, so I took a closer look. You can click the images below to enlarge them.


The shot is 56 frames long, entirely on ones. That's three and a half feet of 35mm film, or two and a third seconds. Given how short the shot is, the animator could have gotten away with a cycle, but there are no repeat drawings in this shot.

After the first slap, which we pick up in progress, everything is animated on a 7 beat, meaning that every 7 frames, the bass gets slapped. The spacing between the sixth and seventh drawings in the pattern (for instance frames 5 and 6 or 12 and 13) is wide, resulting in an accent where the bass gets slapped hard. The right hand and arm are foreshortened and exaggerated in their slapping motion.

There are major and minor slaps alternating, mirroring the ONE two THREE four of the musical rhythm. The right arm, the tapping right foot and the bouncing body are all in synch, which is no surprise. What is a surprise is that the character's head and the bass, while still on a 7 beat, are actually delayed 2 frames. So the hand slaps the base on frame 20 but the head and the bass don't hit their extreme drawings until frame 22.

This is something that probably shouldn't work. It's out of synch! And yet, besides the fact that it does work, it actually adds energy and interest to the shot by breaking up the rhythm so that not everything is hitting the beat at the same time. How did the animator figure this out? Had the character been broken into levels (or if it was done today with cgi), it would be easy to experiment by shifting some elements forward or backward in time, but the character is done as a single drawing, so this delay had to be thought out in advance. This knowledge may have been commonplace at Disney at the time, as they had animated so much to music, but it's hardly common knowledge today.

There's still more movement, as the character tilts towards screen right until frame 27 and then starts tilting back towards screen left. It's this tilt that prevents the possibility of using any cycles in this shot, as the character is never in the same position twice. Nothing on the character ever stops moving and the background adds more optical excitement by changing colours.

In many ways, this shot is optical overload, but it is justified by the tempo of the music and the shot's placement at the climax of the cartoon. It points to possibilities that were later explored by animators like Rod Scribner.

Pencil Test Depot

Jamaal Bradley has set up a blog that collects pencil tests from all around the web. Right now there are pencil tests from Tarzan, Treasure Planet, Curious George, The Aristocats, The Jungle Book, Nocturna, Sinbad and Lady and the Tramp. Consider it your one stop shopping destination for pencil tests.

Princess and the Frog Pencil Tests

(Thanks to Behram Khoshroo for pointing this out to me.)

Abe Levitow Notes on Animating

Abe Levitow was one of the main animators in Chuck Jones unit in the 1950's. He later became a co-director with Jones at Warners and a director for Jones at MGM. In addition, he directed Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol for UPA.

I can't remember when I got these notes, though I'm guessing it was the late '70's. I also have no idea who Levitow wrote them for. Was it for a project he was directing? Was it for students somewhere? In any case, while the information in the notes has been covered elsewhere, it is presented in a clear, concise manner and you can never be reminded of fundamentals often enough.

(At the time I first posted this, the site devoted to Abe Levitow had been hacked. It has now been restored and is very much worth your time. You can find it here.)

More on Silent Comedy Timing

Another great example of silent comedy slowed down to real time. Here's Ben Model working his magic on the opening factory sequence of Chaplin's Modern Times (1936). The bulk of this has been shot at 16 frames per second, so that watching it at 24 fps means that the action is 50% faster than life.

Note the pauses in the acting that Model points out that separate the movements and gestures. This is so the actions read clearly when they are sped up.

This sequence works in the finished film due to the inhuman speed that the workers must move on the assembly line. There's a sense of urgency that's not only funny but a story requirement: Chaplin's eventual nervous breakdown has to be believable.



As noted by Ben Model in the comments, here is the sequence where Chaplin has his breakdown, first at the speed at which it was shot and second as it plays in the film, 50% faster than it was shot.

It's All In The Timing

Ben Model is a musician who accompanies silent movies as well as a silent film historian. He's done some very interesting work taking silent comedies and demonstrating the difference between the speed at which they were originally projected and being projected at a realistic speed.

It was standard in the silent era for films, and comedies in particular, to be undercranked. What that means is that if the film was going to be projected at 16 frames per second, it would be shot at 12 frames per second so that when projected, the images would be faster than life. The term "undercranking" comes from the fact that cameras were literally cranked by hand.

There was no fixed projection speed during the silent era. Projection ranged anywhere from 16 to more than 24 frames per second. Initially, projectors were also hand cranked, but even when they were motorized, they were controlled by rheostats which could vary the speed within a single film.

What's interesting in Model's examples, is how the actors adjusted their speeds so that they would get the desired result on screen. Here is the boxing sequence from City Lights (1931). At this point in time, film projection had been standardized at 24 fps and cameras were motorized due to the need to synchronize with sound. Chaplin still preferred to shoot with an older camera so that he could continue to use silent comedy timing.


There are differences that Model points out. Characters seem to weigh less when in fast motion. This lends a sense of unreality to the physical knock-about that allows it to be funny. When Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd made sound films in the 1930s, their falls appeared painful because they were accompanied by sounds of impact but also because being timed realistically, they looked like real people hitting the ground and the audience viscerally felt the impact.

The speed itself adds comedy to this fight. In real time, it's leaden, but sped up it has a lot more energy.

One thing that the extra speed required was increased clarity. With gestures faster than normal, it was important to do only one thing at a time so that the audience could read the actions clearly and not get confused. In this Model version of a clip from The Adventurer (1917), pay attention to Chaplin and the empty glass in his hands. When the drink is finished, he licks his fingers, puts his fingers in the empty glass and them licks them again and drinks from the empty glass, hoping to find a final drop. There's the rule of threes in operation; Chaplin performs three actions to show that he wants more, but hasn't any. That's all an anticipation of the gag where he tips another man's glass and steal the liquid from it.




Model has other examples available here, including one from Sherlock Junior (1924), starring Keaton. In Chaplin's last silent, Modern Times (1936), he sang a nonsense song at the end, which forced him to shoot at 24 fps. However, before, during and after the song, he cut in undercranked footage shot with a silent camera. Note how different the speed of people's motions are in the two types of footage. While Chaplin's song is funny, it's like he's stepped into a different world where everything is sluggish by comparison. I should note that this clip contains the last verse of the song, one which Chaplin edited out for re-issues and is missing from the latest DVD release of the film.



The animators and directors of the 1930s and '40s grew up watching silent comedies and absorbed the feeling for fast action. Bobe Cannon's smears in The Dover Boys are 4 frames long. Tex Avery talked about bringing in an object 4 frames before it beaned a character. Rod Scribner's animation has the broad energy of silent comedy. The furious anticipations that animated characters go through before zipping off screen owe a debt to the sense of speed that silent comedy introduced. Animation caricatured it, pushing it even further. Fast is funny, especially when it's been combined with movements that read clearly.

The Vital Conception

With regards to animated acting, I've written that I don't believe the technique (meaning drawn, cgi or stop motion) is responsible for the quality of a performance. What I believe is that a character has to be conceived with an inner life and a certain measure of complexity before a good performance is possible.

I'm going to start with some live action examples, though they're not particularly current. In the 1930's, Humphrey Bogart was almost always cast as a gangster. These characters were one dimensional, usually nasty and violent. Occasionally, the character would reveal cowardice when he was about to die. To use Dorothy Parker's comment about Katharine Hepburn in another context, in these roles Bogart ran the gamut of emotions from A to B.

In 1940, Bogart was cast as a gangster in High Sierra. There are major differences in the way this character is conceived. Bogart is shown to be weary. He is disappointed several times in the film by the world treating him worse than he deserves. He sees his options disappear as the law closes in. The character's end is tragic; he's finally found the loyalty and emotional support he craves, but it's too late. Bogart's death in this film resonates emotionally in ways that his earlier deaths never did.

Bogart the actor did not suddenly get better; he merely got a better role. It was better because the character had a history, a point of view, and self awareness; in short, an inner life. Bogart's character in High Sierra is a complete person, not merely a few traits assigned to a role in order to advance the plot. After High Sierra, Bogart continued to get better written roles.

This process can also work in reverse. During the 1920's, Buster Keaton worked for producer Joseph Schenk. Schenk was a hands-off producer who left Keaton alone to create films the way he wanted to. The plots of all of Keaton's features in this period follow the same pattern: put-upon little guy makes good; gets girl. Keaton varied the settings and often built the films around large machine props like locomotives, ocean liners and steam boats, but stuck to the formula.

In 1928, Schenk sold Keaton's contract to MGM. The producer there, Irving Thalberg, was the opposite of Schenk in that he involved himself in every aspect of the studio's production. MGM and Thalberg considered Keaton a performer, not a film maker. At MGM, Keaton's scripts were created on an assembly line without his input. They didn't understand that Keaton's success depended as much on the construction of Keaton's world as it did on his performances.

In truth, while Keaton was a marvelous acrobat and had a fine mind for gags, he was somewhat limited as a performer. Keaton the performer depended on interacting with a universe that was a giant machine, indifferent to its inhabitants. Keaton's appeal came from his ability to overcome physical obstacles on the way to achieving his goals. Social situations were not the root of Keaton's comedy, and Keaton's sound films were all built around social misunderstandings and threats.

Like Bogart, Keaton did not change as a performer. In Keaton's case, the character's relationship to the universe was taken away, leaving his character with nowhere to go.

On the animation side, Bill Tytla is very much like Keaton in that his skills did not suddenly desert him, but the way his characters were conceived did. At Disney, Tytla animated several characters with a complex inner life. Grumpy starts off as a misogynist, but falls in love with Snow White. Dumbo goes from being a victim, persecuted for his appearance, before discovering his talents and finding the courage to exercise them. Stromboli is a supporting character and doesn't have much of a character arc, but he alternates between charm and threats, with explosive violence often rising to the surface.

Tytla left Disney to animate for Paul Terry. While Tytla did solidly crafted work in The Champion of Justice and Jeckyll and Hyde Cat, the conception of the characters is so limited that Tytla had nothing to work with. After leaving Disney, Tytla didn't do a single piece of animation that compares to his Disney work.

In live action, an actor gets to own a character. The actor can create a character's history in order to fill out whatever is in the script. As the actor will be the only person to portray the character, this allows the actor a major hand in conceiving who the character is and how the character should behave.

In animation, even when a studio casts animators by character, the animator is rarely the only one to inhabit the role. Usually, the animator will supervise a team in order to generate the necessary amount of footage. Even before the animator(s) get their hands on a character, there are many others who have a hand in shaping the performance. There may be a script. There will be a story team with different artists handling different segments of the film. There will be a voice actor who will interpret the script or boards in ways that will limit the animator's choices.

This level of fragmentation makes it more difficult to conceive a character as there are simply too many cooks. It is not easy to create a personality that an audience wants to spend time with. If it was, there would be more hit cartoon characters. Adding additional layers of history and inner life to a character is increasingly difficult when studio politics result in everyone wanting their point of view to dominate. Compromise, the inevitable result of politics, simply results in characters who fail to become individuals and instead are just a collection of traits.

Somebody with a deep understanding of character needs to drive the process. If it is a producer or director, that person has to be better than an actor in that he or she has to create the inner lives for all the characters, not just one. If it is left to the animators, they need more control so that the character isn't fatally compromised before it reaches them.

It can be done. In Toy Story, Buzz Lightyear sees a commercial that makes him realize that his view of himself is wholly false. That story point is powerful enough that the animators have something strong to work with. In The Incredibles, Bob is leaving for work and it appears to be a typical mundane morning departure. However, he is leaving on a mission that his wife doesn't know about (and wouldn't approve of) and he can't wait to get started. She believes that he is having an affair, so Bob's departure is more than leaving for work, it's the end of their marriage and their home. This is all conveyed through subtext. The dialogue says nothing of this.

The above are great scenes because of what's going on inside the characters' heads. A great performance can only come from scenes written consistently at this level. The acting starts with the writing.

In addition to the problems outlined above, there are others. Managements rarely admit ignorance, confusion or guilt. If things are going well, then management is obviously doing a good job. If things are going badly, then management "knows" what the problem is ("People must be tired of 2D animation. Yeah, that's it."). Artists often don't understand writing enough to supply what's needed for a performance at the story stage. Animators often get lost in the details ("it needs more eye darts") instead of dealing with larger character issues.

These problems exist regardless of what technique is used to animate a film. All of these issues contribute to the lack of great acting in recent animated features and in my opinion make it harder to create a great animated performance than a great one in live action. I don't know what the solution is, but I'd love to see people completely re-imagining the animation process with the goal of putting great acting at the center of it.

The Vital Connection

There's no reason to believe that [computer animated] characters will ever live on the screen as the characters do in the best hand-drawn films; given the way that computer-animated films must be made, the vital connection between artist and character simply can't be strong enough.

-Michael Barrier

Working off of the above quote, I'd like to talk a little about "the vital connection." Mainly, I want to talk about the technical side of how animators work in various media. There's no question that different forms of animation have different strengths and weaknesses, but, if anything, computer animators have a level of control over characters that easily rivals other forms and in some ways exceeds them.

In stop motion, the animator is limited by the puppet itself. If the puppet's movement is physically restricted by its construction, the animator must adapt to that. There are also limitations imposed by the recording technique. Ray Harryhausen's animation tends to be jittery due to his technology. Because his work was being photographed onto film, he was stuck waiting for it to be developed and wasn't able to relate his current frame to previous ones. On more recent stop motion projects, such as The Corpse Bride, the frames were digitally captured, allowing for playback of previous frames on the set. As a result, modern stop motion animation is generally smoother.

Even with digital recording, though, a stop motion shot still needs to be thoroughly visualized before animation begins. The animation is still being done straight ahead, so timing and paths of action must be worked out in advance and they're not easily changed without re-animating a character.

In drawn animation, an animators drawing ability is roughly equivalent to the limitations of a puppet. With drawings, it is definitely easier to revise shapes and the overall timing of a character than it is in stop motion. Visualization doesn't need to be as thorough as the animator can add or subtract drawings at any time. While it is easier to revise timing or the path of the overall motion, it remains difficult to revise timing on only a portion of a character. Assuming that all parts of a character are drawn on a single level, altering timing for an arm or a leg requires erasing and redrawing before a test can be shot.

In cgi, the limitations of the rig are equivalent to the limitations of a puppet. While I'm sure that cgi animators all have their pet peeves about the flexibility and controls of rigs, the rigging at studios doing high budget features is very impressive. There is quite a bit of flexibility of a character's shapes, though not as much as pencil animators whose work is heavily graphic, like Eric Goldberg or Fred Moore.

Timing in cgi is far more flexible than in stop motion or drawn animation. In cgi, it is trivial to alter the timing on the arms of a walking character. It literally takes seconds to select the relevant arm controls in the dope sheet and slide them forwards or backwards in time. Timing can also be globally or locally compressed or stretched in the dope sheet. This makes trying variations more practical than they are in other forms of animation. Paths of action for an entire character or just a part can also be altered with far less effort. If anything, from a technical standpoint, the level of animator control in cgi is equal to or greater than stop motion or drawn animation.

Yet Michael Barrier and others somehow feel that cgi character animation is lacking. Why? One possible answer is the need for pre-visualization of a character's actions before starting to animate. A stop motion animator must do this more than a pencil animator and a pencil animator must do it more than a cgi animator. If this was what was bothering people, then stop motion animation would be the gold standard and that doesn't seem to be the case.

Perhaps it is the animator's interface for creating motion. Stop motion animators put their hands on the puppet to manipulate it. That makes for an intimate relationship. Drawn animation is done with a pencil, something animators have used for 15 years before entering the industry, giving them a greater familiarity with that tool than with a computer mouse. A pencil certainly expresses individuality better than a mouse does. An artist's line is a form of a signature, though in drawn animation the animator's lines are often homogenized by assistants for the sake of consistency. A cgi character will automatically look consistent, though nothing stops cgi animators from having as individual a sense of posing and timing as any other type of animator.

Another possible answer is that the ease of revising cgi leads to over refinement. It's sort of the difference between whole wheat and white bread or molasses and white sugar. In both cases, the refinement leads to blandness. While cgi animators can revise more quickly, the footage quota on cgi features is not higher than in drawn features of a similar budget. The time saved goes towards refining the surface. There are few imperfections in the movement, which may lead to a kind of sterility.

While cgi lends itself to this level of refinement, it is not a necessity. As I've said, artists make decisions and some of them are bad ones. This is why I think that blaming a form of animation for the weaknesses in a film is wrong. The bigger problem is not the technique, but how the characters are conceived. I'll take up this issue in a future entry.

Animation and Theatre

I'm visiting family in New York and last night I had the pleasure of seeing The Bully Pulpit, a play based on the life of Theodore Roosevelt, written and performed by Michael O. Smith. In animation, as our work appears on screens, it seems natural to look to movies for inspiration. However, there's a lot to be said for learning from performers on a stage. Let's not forget that the first animated hit, Gertie the Dinosaur, was based on vaudeville animal acts.

Smith's play has a single set and he is the only performer in it. Roosevelt, on the occasion of his 60th birthday, relates the story of his life to the audience. Along the way, he evokes his parents, wives, children, friends and political contemporaries.

The play has a 10 minute intermission, but for roughly 45 minutes in each act, Smith has to hold the audience's attention for the play to succeed. The vast majority of animated shots are less than 15 seconds long. Imagine the challenge of maintaining a character for 45 minutes without the benefit of camera placement, cutting or editing. How can this possibly work?

It works because of shared experiences. We don't live in Roosevelt's time and the specifics of the bric-a-brac that surrounds him are increasingly alien to us. However, we all have family, we all fall in love, we all have ambition, successes, failures, friends and enemies. By concentrating on Roosevelt's emotional responses to these things, we are able to understand him. We might not respond as Roosevelt does, but his responses are believable based on our own experience of the world.

This emotional arc is what we respond to. It's the difference between drama and a dull recitation of facts (and one reason why students often find history boring). A performance, live or animated, needs to arise from a character's emotional responses. Character consistency comes from the responses expressing a particular point of view, which adds up to what we call "personality."

A one-performer, one-set play is about as stripped down as you can get, forcing the performer to rely on the foundation of what storytelling is all about: people. We have a fundamental need to share our thoughts and experiences and are curious to compare them to the thoughts and experiences of others. It's why we're social animals. An isolated person (a prisoner, a shut-in) is doubly isolated because whatever the person experiences can't be shared.

Movies often confuse genre with subject. Movies think they're about adventure or suspense or romance. Within animation, we're bombarded with the mantra "story, story, story." Yet all genres and stories are about one thing - people - and we often allow ourselves as creators and audience members to be distracted from the only thing that really matters.

A camera and editing are tools to dress things up, but the one-performer play proves that they're not necessary. An actor on a stage is all that's needed to hold an audience's attention. If you can, see a one-performer play live and marvel at what an actor is capable of in the most austere circumstances. Then ask yourself how many animated performances live up to what you've just witnessed.

Emery Hawkins

Thad K. has posted John Canemaker's complete interview with animator Emery Hawkins and created a compilation of Hawkins' animation from Columbia, Warner, Lantz, MGM and Disney cartoons (there's even a Hubley commercial in there).

The Hawkins interview was done for John Canemaker's 1977 book The Animated Raggedy Ann and Andy, as Hawkins animated much of the character of The Greedy in the feature directed by Richard Williams. While portions of the interview appear in the book, this is the first time I'm aware of that the entire interview has seen print.

In the 1940's, Hawkins was doing brilliant work at Lantz and Warner Bros. His Woody Woodpecker is probably the most attractively drawn version of the character, yet he doesn't skimp on Woody's hard, manic edge. Hawkins' animation for the Art Davis unit at Warners is a highlight of cartoons that deserve to be better known and appreciated. His work in this period was built on rounded forms with lots of follow-through. There's so much drag on the characters that sometimes it appears as if they're moving underwater (though they're still timed normally).

Starting in the '50s, Hawkins worked for John Sutherland doing industrials and many studios that did commercials. That work is generally obscure, which is a shame. Hawkins was too good for his work to be anonymous. Undoubtedly there are hidden gems waiting to be discovered, but Hawkins wanderlust took him to so many studios in his career that compiling any kind of filmography is a daunting proposition. His work on theatrical shorts is reasonably well documented, and Thad's excellent compilation will give you a good idea of Hawkins' gifts.

Which Way Do We Go, George? Which Way Do We Go?

Keith Lango comments on the conclusion to my MRP and Peter Hon adds some very good thoughts about the time and effort it takes to do an independent film.

I know exactly what he's talking about. I've been debating whether to start a graphic novel, where I could tell a lengthy story, or do a short animated film. I'm guessing that they'd take me the same amount of time, but one would allow for a more complex story. However, I wonder if I'm not thinking boldly enough.

I think that trying to make a short film that's as polished as professional work is a mistake. Adding up the man hours (more like man years) that are spent on any studio production (TV or film), it's almost impossible for an individual to invest the same amount of time. To make a Pixar quality short as an individual, you might have to start immediately after the doctor slaps your behind in the delivery room and you might not finish before landing in your death bed.

So the thing to do is focus on content. That's where so much of studio animation falls short anyway. Studio content is aimed at the widest possible audience and the audience goes for it because it's similar to what's been done before.

Say something new (or say something familiar in a new way) and forget about slickness. If what you're saying isn't worth paying attention to, slickness won't change that. Furthermore, how many ideas are worth spending years of your life on? If you've got one, I sincerely congratulate you. However, an awful lot of animated films aren't worth the time spent to watch them, let alone to make them. Rather than worrying about refining our work, maybe we should worry about saying something interesting.

I'm not attacking the idea of craft, but I've never felt that craft was enough. Just as many animation artists publish sketchbooks, maybe we need an animated equivalent. Whether drawn, stop motion or cgi, maybe we need to work for more spontaneity and less for refinement. Elevate content over form. Forget about sanding off the rough edges. Make your statement quickly and move on.

Six Authors in Search of a Character: Part 14, Conclusion

Animators had more control of their characters’ behaviour and fewer collaborators in the silent era than at any time since, but they didn’t know what to do with that control. Their backgrounds as cartoonists did not provide them with direct contact with an audience, so their understanding of an audience’s expectations was limited. They also had no experience fashioning characters in narratives longer than a comic strip. The struggle to develop animation technology at the same time they were turning out large amounts of animation overshadowed any thought about one animator controlling a single character. Animators’ physical isolation in New York from the mainstream film business in California and their lack of affiliation with live action studios during the silent era insulated them in a ghetto-like situation where they developed at their own provincial pace.

Disney altered the landscape significantly but didn’t change it in fundamental ways. The assembly line that had been developed in the silent era was not thrown away, only modified. The result was a double-edged sword for animators. The newer system freed animators from the concerns of doing finished-quality drawings and provided them with enough assistance so they could concentrate on communicating a character’s thoughts and emotions to the audience. However, their control of timing was taken by directors, their control of style was taken by character designers, and their control of emotion was taken by voice actors. Control of a great deal of a character’s physical behaviour migrated upstream to the story artists.

In the TV era, the same structure remained in place though the need to output animation grew exponentially. These conditions defeated the best aspects of the Disney system but allowed the worst aspects to survive. Animators had no more control than they had on theatrical shorts or features while the need for productivity prevented them from the level of refinement the system formerly allowed.

With motion capture becoming increasingly common as an effect in live action films and with the creation of films that appear to be animated but are motion-captured imitations, the importance of the animator is further reduced. Live action directors don’t understand the animation process and are not shy about praising actors at the expense of animators. Here’s Gore Verbinski, director of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest reflecting on Bill Nighy’s motion-captured performance of Davy Jones.

"There's a point in the process where things have to be singular, they have to be from one person's point of view. I think you get that from an actor's performance, and not with a committee of animators and animation directors and even from myself. It's just too much to go through to say, 'Let's create nuance from scratch.' You need somebody to start it. We're always going to need great acting" (Cohen 1).

In these films, directors see animators purely as technicians; they are considered special effects artists not people capable of defining a character’s behaviour. In animation terms, the animator is used more like an assistant animator. Someone else has created the movement and the assistant animator’s job is to refine it into a satisfactory shape.

Actor Andy Serkis has experienced how it feels to create a motion-captured performance and interact with animator collaborators.

“Animators are actors in the sense that they draw from their own life experience and emotions and bring that to a character. They even use their own facial expressions to convey a feeling by acting into a mirror. However, if there are 40 animators working on individual segments of Gollum, the string that holds the pearls on the necklace, so to speak, could be missing, and given that the character has such a complex psychological and emotional journey, he could take on 40 different personalities! But here there was a very different agenda. Instead of looking into mirrors, the animators would be using the performance of a single actor, and sticking closely to the footage we had shot on location and in motion capture, and that would be the emotional string that would hold it together” (95).

Serkis can be forgiven for not knowing that even in completely animated films, there must be that string. It’s usually supplied by the director, using the voice track, the timing, the storyboard and the character layouts. It may be supplied by a lead animator on a character. Glen Keane was the lead on the titular Aladdin character in the Disney feature.

“Animation is such a team effort no one man can take credit for a character. In the Aladdin unit, I have a great team of animators working with me doing vital acting moments in the film. The challenge is for all of us to think as one. The lead animator sets the pace for the character in the film. That’s why each of the animators in my unit checks with me. Besides [directors] Ron [Clements] and John [Musker], the lead animator is the only one who sees everybody’s work and knows if somebody’s heading off in this direction or that direction.

“He becomes the conscience of that character throughout the film. If one of Aladdin’s personality traits are violated, I have to speak up in Aladdin’s behalf in the film, and raise my hand and say, ‘Hey, that’s not me, that’s not me – I wouldn’t do that’” (John Culhane 71-72).

Serkis and Keane hold roughly equivalent positions, though they use different techniques. Each of them collaborates with others in creating a character’s behaviour, setting the tone and editing the contributions of their collaborators. Serkis, by supplying his character’s voice, has an advantage over Keane.

Animators, due to the assembly line nature of production, are always forced to rely on somebody else’s string while they supply the pearls. This is my crux of disagreement with Michael Barrier. He feels that casting animators by character allows for more unified behaviour; animators supplying their own string as it were.

“Animation of the kind that Walt Disney had begun cultivating in the middle thirties – and that had flowered in Tytla’s scenes of the dwarfs – was powerful because its cartoon exaggeration could reveal so fully the emotional life of its characters. When an animator immersed himself in that emotional life, the bond between character and animator could be as strong as any bond between character and actor on the stage” (Hollywood 313).

My point is that truly animator-centric characters cannot exist in the current production structure. Even if one animator contributes all of a character’s scenes, the pre-production decisions that are handed to the animator, most especially the voice track, make the character’s behaviour collaborative. Tytla may have been sympathetic to Grumpy’s voice track, performed by Pinto Colvig, but because the audience would hear Colvig’s reading, where it would be ignorant of storyboard and layout drawings supplied to Tytla, Tytla had no choice but to take Colvig’s reading into account in his animation.

Here is animator Tony White on the centrality of the voice track to animated behaviour.

“It is impossible to produce good and convincing dialogue [animation] without first listening intently to what has been recorded and getting under the skin of its meaning and impetus. On one level, it is just words. On another level, it is a succession of accents and pauses and breaths, and even emotion, that makes up every single line of dialogue. Only by listening intently and frequently will you begin to feel what is really being said in a delivery (not just the sound of the words), and then begin to get a sense of how the character looks, how the character needs to stand, how the character needs to emphasize the words they are saying. Only then, when you are actually under the skin of the dialogue, should you pick up a pencil and draw.” (249)

The voice-body split that became the norm in animation at the start of the sound era was something new. It did not exist in theatre. Dubbing in live action film was certainly not the norm. It did not even exist in puppetry. It only existed in animation due to something close to an original sin: the decision in the silent era to divide a film by sequence instead of by character. Once the gulf between animator and character was opened, it continued to get wider. Disney attempted to close it by casting by character, but at the same time he did that he was pulling more control of the characters away from animators into pre-production for the sake of efficiency. To his credit, he didn’t do it for financial reasons; he did it to gain greater artistic control over the films he was producing.

While some animators under certain conditions may approach the kind of actor-character identification that is possible with live acting, those cases are rare due to the realities of the animation industry. Barrier feels that this identification is what animation should aspire to. I agree with him, but I don’t think that casting by character is sufficient to achieve it. There are too many other variables.

Story artist Bill Peet felt that he was the prime contributor to One Hundred and One Dalmatians and that others simply enhanced his contributions.

“The public probably thinks the animator sits down and starts doing it from scratch. I did storyboards, thousands of them, and character design; I would direct the voice recordings.

“Then guys like Marc Davis, Ken Anderson, and Woolie Reitherman would take credit for my Cruella De Vil and all of the personalities. Those personalities were delineated in drawings, and believe me; I can draw them as well or better than any of them” (Province 163).

The above not only exposes the tension over credit, it also shows that the artists themselves can’t agree on where control of a character lies. Peet wrote the script and did the storyboard for One Hundred and One Dalmatians, based on the book by Dodie Smith. Marc Davis, cast by character as Barrier would prefer, animated Cruella De Vil. Live action reference footage of actress Mary Wickes was shot for the role of Cruella (Frank Thomas 320). Betty Lou Gerson recorded Cruella’s voice track. Does this character represent any one contributor’s point of view? Can any of the above people claim the same level of control that an actor routinely has over a character?

Helene Stanley (left) and Mary Wickes act out a scene as reference for Disney animators for One Hundred and One Dalmatians. From Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston.

In researching and writing this MRP, I am left with the question of whether casting by character makes a significant difference, given how collaborative the creation of an animated character’s behaviour is. In the case of a single animator per character, the pre-production work gets passed through that animator’s sensibility; in that sense the animator may function more as a synthesizer than as a creator, though the animator unquestionably makes a contribution. While within the industry animators are routinely compared to actors, perhaps a better analogy is to musicians in a symphony orchestra. Such musicians are responsible for playing the notes on the page while filtering them through the interpretation of the conductor. Within the ensemble, how much room is there for musicians to assert themselves?

While casting animators by scene or sequence might dilute a character’s behaviour due to too many authors, it might also salvage a character’s behaviour by averaging out the ability of the contributing animators. Casting an animator with a talent for comedy on certain scenes and for pathos on others might allow those scenes to work where a single animator might not be versatile enough to meet the challenges required of a character.

Casting by character has been used in the recent past at Disney, resulting in films that have proven popular and received critical approval. The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King were all cast by character. By contrast, Pixar has always cast by scene. Toy Story, Finding Nemo and The Incredibles have earned the same box office success and critical kudos as the aforementioned Disney films.

Is one form of casting inherently superior? The industry has clearly not settled on one approach. Audiences and mainstream critics seem unaware of the difference. The existence of supervising animators may render the debate moot, as there has never been a feature where each character was animated by a single artist.

In live action terms, we can point to films that are dominated by producers, by directors, by writers and by performers. There is nothing inherently superior about one more than another; the quality of a film doesn’t rest on who dominates but on whether the film’s elements cohere into a satisfying whole. The elements that make up an animated film differ from live action, but they must also cohere if a film is to be successful.

If the creation of animated behaviour is characterized more by synthesizing than by creating, does it matter if the synthesizer is the director, the voice actor or the animator? Each of them will be forced to incorporate contributions by people working on other parts of the process. Should the animator inherently be more privileged than other contributors?

If you believe that the animator should dominate -- that the animator should have the opportunity to bring a unique sensibility to a character -- then my conclusion is that the current production structure needs to be reworked, as its current incarnation intentionally removes control from animators for the sake of efficiency. The current approach attempts to create coherence in pre-production before the animators begin and then impose the coherence on them.

I don’t know what an animator-centric production would look like. At the very least, it would require the voice cast be assembled to rehearse together, with the director and animators present to shape their performances. Then the director and animators would work on staging, eliminating the storyboard artists and layout artists. Following this, the animators would bring their characters to life.

This is still more collaborative than live acting; each role would still be split between voice actor and animator. Unless a production was willing to use the animators’ voices, I can’t see a way of making animated characters less collaborative than this. It’s possible that this approach would be impractical from the standpoint of budget and schedule. It’s such a radical break with current procedures that it might take several films for the animators to adjust and before the results were worth watching.

The one animator in mainstream films who managed to maintain control of his characters and avoid the use of a voice track was Ray Harryhausen. In features, Harryhausen added stop-motion puppets to live action films, always working on fantastic creatures that live action couldn’t manage. He rose to the position of associate producer or producer on his films after 1963’s Jason and the Argonauts, certainly a rarity for an animator still doing frame by frame work on a film. Harryhausen’s only attempt at lip synch was a test for an unrealized project based on Baron Munchausen. “It was the first time that I experimented with animation and dialogue, and because of the time and effort, it was the last” (Harryhausen 286). Harryhausen’s characters may emit sounds, but never dialogue.

Harryhausen was inspired by the 1933 version of King Kong and later worked with Kong’s effects supervisor and animator Willis O’Brien on the film Mighty Joe Young. As Gary Giddins points out,

“Harryhausen shunned sentimentality after that – no easy feat as he was forced to tailor most of his work to children. Indeed, for all his devotion to Kong, he never animated creatures that were quite as sympathetic or anthropomorphic (beyond his penchant for manly musculature) as Kong” (125-26).

This raises an issue that so far has been ignored. While I admire Harryhausen’s imagination and craft, I prefer the behaviour of O’Brien’s creatures. If a film is structured so that it is cast by character, we are left with the ability of a specific animator when judging what’s on screen. Bad casting and acting are common in live action films and in theatre. There’s no reason why animation should escape similar problems.

Harryhausen is one of a kind. He built a production structure to suit himself and it hasn’t been imitated by anyone for major productions. The only other area that approaches Harryhausen’s level of control is independent animation. It’s only on short projects that animators have the freedom to control a character without having to collaborate, but just as silent animators were limited by their backgrounds as cartoonists, many independent animators are limited by their backgrounds in fine arts. They prize the image over believable characters. Norman McLaren is an example of an independent animator who controlled his films but was more interested in design and the formal aspects of the animation process than he was in creating characters.

Those independent animators who are concerned with characters, such as Borge Ring (Anna and Bella), work alone or in small teams. As a result, their films are short and are produced infrequently. Prior to the creation of internet sites like iFilm and YouTube, the market for short films was small, so these film makers did not get much exposure outside of festivals. This limited their influence on the animation industry.

I don’t know if animator-centered films are possible from large studios. There is no incentive to destroy the production structure that’s proven profitable and functioned for nearly a century. When new technologies are introduced, it’s easier to adjust the production structure rather than replace it.

However, between the budget and schedule demands of TV, the geographical and cultural separation of animators from TV pre-production, and the rising use of motion capture in features, animators are being increasingly marginalized. Perhaps fashions will change as media and technology evolve or perhaps animation needs a manifesto similar to Dogme, challenging artists to work in different ways.

In any case, the structure of production has unquestionably forced animators into sharing control, with repercussions for both animated characters and criticism. I hope that this MRP has clarified the nature of the collaboration’s historical roots and how it functions in an industrial setting.

Six Authors in Search of a Character: Part 13, Rotoscoping and Motion Capture

Rotoscoping was invented by Max Fleischer in 1915 (Cabarga 19). The process involved taking live action film and projecting it onto glass from underneath. The images would be traced on paper placed over the glass. Fleischer’s invention was created specifically to turn live action into animation and it was first used to trace images of Max’s brother Dave wearing a clown suit (Cabarga 21). The appeal of the process was more lifelike motion for cartoon characters. The film led to the Fleischers being hired by J.R. Bray, for whom they did a series of films using the clown, later named Ko-Ko, as their main character (Cabarga 23).

A drawing from Max Fleischer’s patent application for the rotoscope taken from The Fleischer Story by Leslie Cabarga.

In the 1930’s, the Fleischers used the rotoscope in several Betty Boop cartoons featuring the performer Cab Calloway. Calloway and his band provided the soundtrack for the cartoons, appearing in brief live action clips during the titles. Within the cartoons (Minnie the Moocher, Snow White, The Old Man of the Mountain), Calloway was photographed dancing and the animators rotoscoped the footage turning Calloway into a walrus, an old man, and other characters (Cabarga 63-69).

Later in the 1930’s, Disney used rotoscoping during the production of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The studio was not experienced drawing and moving realistic human characters, so Marge Belcher (later known as Marge Champion after her marriage to Gower Champion) was photographed as Snow White under the direction of Ham Luske, the animator assigned to supervise the character (Barrier, Hollywood 194-95).

“It was only by using live action as a guide, or so Disney must have thought, that he could give to Snow White the consistency – what Marc Davis called the “unity of acting” – that was possible in a short cartoon when a single animator handled a character all the way through. Ham Luske, by directing the live action for Snow White, thus assumed control over the character greater than any he might have enjoyed if he had been only the lead animator” (Barrier, Hollywood 195).

Another reason for the use of live footage was as a communication tool in production. David Hand, the supervising director of Snow White, said, “The value of live action is the working agreement between the animator and the director” (Barrier, Hollywood 215)

How much the animators used this footage seems to have varied. Grim Natwick, one of the animators assigned to the Snow White character, would often discard some number of rotoscoped drawings in a sequence before starting his own work. He remarked, “you always had to carry [the rotoscoping] further, and you always had to be very careful that you didn’t depend on the rotoscope” (Barrier, Hollywood 196). Some animators made it a point in later years to say that they used it as reference, but did not use it as the basis for their motion. Rotoscoping had the aroma of a cheat and animators wished to distance themselves from it. Art Babbitt was adamant about his work on the Queen in Snow White not being rotoscoped.

“You may have read that a lot of rotoscoping was done, but I have proof that I didn’t rotoscope my Queen. Live action was taken of an actress who acted out the parts. I studied the live action on a Moviola, got it firmly in my brain, then put it away and never touched it again” (Strzyz 83).

The issue came down to who originated the character’s behaviour. Had the animators simply traced the live action, the behaviour would belong to the actor. The animator would be functioning as an assistant animator, altering the appearance of the original to make it resemble the character, but not altering the behaviour. While animators were willing to admit to the use of reference, they understood that rotoscoping usurped their control.

The Fleischers didn’t have any reservations about rotoscoping in their first feature Gulliver’s Travels. The character of Gulliver was blatantly rotoscoped. A comparison of the drawings with a photo of the actor, Sam Parker, shows a strong resemblance between the two (Cabarga 158).

Rotoscoping and filmed reference continued to be used for animated features. The scenes containing human characters in Disney’s Cinderella were shot completely in live action on a bare soundstage before the animation stage started. Cinderella was Disney’s first all-animated feature since Bambi in 1942 and the studio could not afford to exceed the budget or produce a flop. Live action reference was a way to try out visual storytelling and acting possibilities on the cheap before the expensive animation stage (Frank Thomas 330). Frank Thomas recalled,

“When all of the live film was spliced together, this was undeniably a strong base for proving the workability of the scenes before they were animated, but the inventiveness and special touches in the acting that had made our animation so popular were lacking” (330).

Rotoscoping has even been used in stop-motion. For the clay-animated film Closed Mondays, directed by Bob Gardiner and Will Vinton, live action reference was shot of the main character, a drunk who stumbles into a museum (Furniss 175). It’s obvious when the character is in close-up that the facial expressions have been copied from live action.

Motion capture is the computer animation equivalent of rotoscoping. In the beginning, some systems hooked potentiometers to a body suit, so that when the actor moved, the potentiometers would measure the angles of the body’s joints. Newer systems rely on using multiple cameras shooting reference points on a performer’s clothing. Software takes the views from the cameras and is able to calculate the location of the reference point in space. This information is then used to drive the equivalent parts of a computer character (Serkis 36).

Recent examples of motion capture include the character of Gollum in The Lord of the Rings trilogy of films by Peter Jackson, the titular character of Jackson’s version of King Kong, and the character of Davy Jones in Pirates of the Caribbean II: Dead Man’s Chest. In these films, motion capture is used to place computer-generated characters in live action environments and interact with live actors.

Andy Serkis (left) wears a suit covered in markers. Cameras and software take the marker information and use it to drive the computer puppet of Gollum in The Two Towers. From http://www.xsens.com/images/paper/Gollum2.gif

Other recent films have taken a different approach. Robert Zemeckis’ The Polar Express and Monster House (the first as a director and the second as producer) have used motion capture to imitate the look of computer-animated features. Actors are motion captured and their performances drive caricatures of humans placed inside computer-generated environments. In Happy Feet, dancer Savion Glover was motion captured and his dancing was used for the penguin character Mumble (Sarah Kaufman 1).

Motion capture is a way for live action directors to make films that look like animation without utilizing the process. These directors are used to working in real time with actors.

“[Savion Glover] was fitted with a skintight suit covered with small reflectors. Cameras then captured the motion of the reflectors as Glover danced, and technicians applied the data to the image of Mumble. The result could be seen instantly -- instead of looking at his reflection in a mirror, the way a dancer might practice in a studio, Glover faced a computer screen as he danced, which showed what he looked like as Mumble. [Director George] Miller, also peering into a monitor, could speak to Glover through a headset to keep his performance in line with a penguin's range of motion” (Sarah Kaufman 1).

As both rotoscoping and motion capture record motion that exists in real time, they are not animation, though they may be processed to look like animation. Both these systems utilize artists to take the results of the live action and alter it. In the case of rotoscoping, artists will trace the live action and turn it into drawings, whether they resemble the original live action or are transformed into a cartoon character. In the case of motion capture, the process of capturing the motion data is not perfect. Animators routinely have to clean up the data (Solomon, Penguins 1). In the case of Gollum, animators were also responsible for key-framing the facial animation, though only because the producers didn’t feel confident that they could solve technical problems in time to do facial capture before the film’s delivery date (Serkis 91). However, by the time that Serkis played King Kong for Jackson, the technology had advanced to the point where Serkis face was captured along with the larger body movements, though there are claims that only 25% of the facial animation is by Serkis and the rest is by animators (Rowley 1).

As the motion does not originate with animators, when animators work on rotoscope or motion capture results, they are, in effect, doing the jobs of assistant animators. They are cleaning up someone else’s motion. They may be using the expertise they gained as animators to finesse the live action source, but they are not responsible for doing more than polishing the performance.

Six Authors in Search of a Character: Part 12, Animation for Television

Just as animation came late to movie theatres, having to adjust production schedules to fit an already established exhibition model, animation also came late to television. Large scale animation for TV did not start until the late 1950’s, a decade after regular TV production had been established in the U.S. Instead of having to turn out a one reel short every week or two, a cartoon studio had to produce a half hour show every week, a significant increase in volume. As a studio became successful, the incentive was to produce additional series, ratcheting up the output to unheard of amounts of animation.

Chuck Jones, bemoaning the state of animation on television in 1974, wrote this about Hanna-Barbera.

“One team in Hollywood which once turned out eight to ten seven-minute short a year now turns out four half-hours a week during the production year, an increase from one hour a year to at least 130 hours, or a 13,000 per cent increase” (27-28).

In theatrical animation, the move into sound production meant that many aspects of animated behaviour migrated upstream from the animators. The move to television did nothing to reverse this trend, but the need for greater volume combined with lower budgets per minute meant that animators were not able to maintain the quality of their work. If animated characters’ behaviour is a partnership between pre-production and production, in the television era production was reduced to a junior partner whose creative contribution was secondary to simply getting the footage out.

Several factors contributed to the shift from theatres to television. In the late 1940’s, the Paramount consent decree forced the studios to sell their theaters and eliminated block booking. Studios no longer had guaranteed bookings for their short subjects, so revenue for cartoons went down (Solomon, Enchanted 171).

In addition, the animation union negotiated a 25 percent pay increase in 1946 that drove up costs (Gray 43). With the consent decree in effect and bookings down, studios were not about to raise cartoon budgets. What happened was that the length and complexity of short cartoons were gradually reduced over time to compensate for rising costs. The Tom and Jerry cartoons often ran 8 minutes in the 1940’s. By the ‘50’s, they were down to a maximum of 7 minutes and sometimes less (Solomon, Enchanted 170).

The last nail in the coffin was the increasing popularity of television and its effect on movie attendance. With fewer people attending movies, there was pressure on theater owners to reduce their own costs, and short subjects were seen as unnecessary frills that theatres could do without.

Disney made the last Mickey Mouse cartoon in 1953 and reduced the production of animated shorts. That year, Disney released 15 short cartoons; by 1955, the studio released only 4. Several studios got out of the short cartoon business all together. UPA produced their last theatrical cartoons in 1959. MGM closed their cartoon department in 1957 and that indirectly caused the birth of mass-produced animation for television (Maltin 306).

There were cartoons made specifically for TV as early as Crusader Rabbit in 1950 (Scott 17), but there was no large-scale animation production. When Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera were let go by MGM in 1957, they were faced with the problem of earning a living. They adapted their story reel approach, adding just a few more drawings, and started making cartoons for TV. Their first endeavor was a series of shorts starring the characters Ruff and Reddy. After the success of that show, they gained Kellogg’s as a sponsor and created The Huckleberry Hound Show and spun off The Yogi Bear Show from it. In 1960, they broke into prime time with The Flintstones (Beck 180-81).

TV budgets were considerably smaller than theatrical budgets. Hanna and Barbera spent $35,000 on each Tom and Jerry cartoon. When they produced Ruff and Reddy cartoons that were approximately the same length, the budgets were $3,000 (Hanna 82). The Crusader Rabbit episodes had cost a similar $2500 (Scott 16). Where animators were responsible for producing 10-15 seconds a week of animation on the Tom and Jerry series, for television animators had to produce anywhere from 50-120 seconds per week.

The only way for animators to increase their output was to get more screen time from the same number of drawings. Each drawing was photographed for more frames. Another technique was to break the character into separate pieces, so the head could be held and separate mouths could be placed on top of it to make the character speak.

The effect of this was to reduce the importance of animation as a contribution to the final film. Animators contributed fewer drawings per second of screen time than they had in the past. Where many aspects of character behavour were controlled in pre-production in theatrical short cartoons, the one thing that animators undeniably contributed was motion. The contribution of animators was reduced proportionately with the reduction in motion. The result was something at director Chuck Jones referred to as “illustrated radio” (Barrier, Jones 17).

There was also financial pressure on animators, as TV production was seasonal work, starting in April and ending by November or December. Because animators knew that they faced months of unemployment every year, they often took staff jobs at one studio and then freelanced for another studio at night. The long hours were not conducive to doing creative work; the artists were focused on producing as much work as possible.

Just as rising costs and fixed budgets in theatrical cartoons led to a cheapening of the product, the same pattern held true in television. Animation and ink and paint remained the largest part of the production budget. Producers worked hard to reduce costs in these areas.

In the late 1950’s, the Disney studio adapted Xerox machines to photocopy drawings onto the celluloids used in animation production. The technique was first used on a test scene in Sleeping Beauty and then in the short cartoon Goliath II. One Hundred and One Dalmatians was the first animated feature that used this technique from start to finish (Maltin 74). Prior to the adoption of Xerography, animator drawings were traced by hand onto celluloid. Xerography allowed for the elimination of an entire department, saving a significant amount of money. By the mid-1960’s, the use of Xerography had spread to TV animation production for the same cost saving reasons that made it attractive to Disney.

Another trend to cut costs in TV animation had to do with outsourcing work. Rocky and His Friends, produced by Jay Ward, was perhaps the first TV series sent outside the U.S. for its production. The work was subcontracted to a studio in Mexico (Scott 66).

Other TV studios continued to do work in the U.S. but the idea of outsourcing gained in popularity. By the late 1970’s, the Motion Picture Screen Cartoonists Local 839, which represented the majority of animation workers in Los Angeles, struck the producers with runaway production being a major issue. The resulting contract prevented studios from outsourcing animation until there was full employment for local 839 members. However, in a second strike in 1982, the union lost that protection and producers no longer had to worry about local employment levels before sending work overseas (Solomon, Enchanted 245).

In 1989, TV animation production company Filmation closed its doors. It was the last of the TV animation studios to do all its animation in the U.S. From that point onward, it was considered a standard business practice to send the animation, photocopying, and cel painting overseas to lower wage suppliers.

Even prime time series with healthy budgets, such as The Simpsons, routinely send their animation and colour work overseas. Rough Draft Studios in South Korea has supplied the animation for The Simpsons for many years.

While there was a possibility in the early years of TV animation for animators to make a contribution to a character’s behaviour, that potential was gone once the work was outsourced. Overseas artists did not necessarily speak English and did not share a cultural background with North American viewers. Studios in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines and today in India and China are chosen purely on their ability to meet the price and delivery schedule. North American supervisors are sometimes sent to foreign studios to oversee the work, but their job is to prevent deviations from the pre-production planning. Where animators were once asked to enhance what they were given, that possibility is now gone as enhancements are difficult due to language and cultural barriers. Animation is now considered mechanical. Overseas artists merely follow instructions and assemble what they’ve been given into a film.

Where Chuck Jones and the other Warner directors timed their short cartoons to the frame, TV shows are routinely timed to run long so that editors can tighten the shows to suit a producer’s taste. If there is any sort of a problem, the work is sent back for retakes. It’s possible that 10% of a TV show may be redone to fix errors. This lack of efficiency is acceptable due to the low cost of the work.

With the development of computer animation, some TV work returned to North America. However, the urge for greater efficiency combined with computer animation has allowed for an even greater division of labour. At Nelvana, lip synch has been separated from the rest of a character’s animation. There is a department that does nothing but match character mouths to dialogue tracks. When the animators get the scene, the mouth action is already complete. Their job is to move the character’s body. In this way, even the behaviour of a single character in a single shot has been fragmented between artists. Where assistant animators formerly took care of details and follow-through elements, the behaviour was still completely in the control of the animator. This is no longer the case. It should be pointed out that Nelvana is using this approach even for in-house production, where the lip synch department and the animators are under the same roof in Toronto and everyone speaks English.

Because animation is now considered mechanical, there’s a greater emphasis on behaviour decisions made in pre-production. We’ve reached the point where animation is taken for granted, like dry cleaning. You drop off the work and pick it up, giving little thought to what happens to it when it is out of your sight.

Six Authors In Search of a Character: Part 11, Assistant Animators and Technical Directors

Once the animator has taken the script, storyboard, voice track, layout drawings and exposure sheets and synthesized them into motion, the motion is still not complete. In both drawn and computer animation, other hands will touch the characters before they are in their final state.

In drawn animation, the creation of the assistant animator’s job was purely an economic decision. In the 1920’s at the Fleischer studio, management wanted to get more drawings from animator Dick Huemer. They convinced him to leave out his inbetweens so that Art Davis could do them. Because this increased animator productivity, it was adopted industry-wide by the 1930’s.

“The production methods of Fleischer and Iwerks were similar in that they both used a pool of assistants. Animated scenes were sent to the department, and the first available man completed the work” (Shamus Culhane 75).

Where most producers saw the use of assistants in purely economic terms, Walt Disney saw artistic possibilities. One of his animators, Norm Ferguson, drew in an extremely rough fashion. However, Ferguson was perhaps the best actor in the studio in the early 1930’s, and his work on the character of Pluto pointed in the direction that Walt Disney wanted to go.

A Norm Ferguson rough of Pluto from Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston.

Looking at Ferguson’s work, Walt Disney realized that drawing and acting were separate skills and he asked his animators to concentrate on the behaviour more than the quality of their drawings. “As [director Wilfred] Jackson said, Ferguson’s job had become, in a first for a Disney animator, to draw ‘the action without really drawing the character.’” (Barrier, Hollywood 79).

Assistant animators would then take the animators’ drawings, place a clean sheet of paper on top of them, and draw the character correctly based on the model sheets. As Disney animator Eric Larson stated,

“The cleanup man has the responsibility to diminish all the unavoidable differences [between animators] in his work, which is a very difficult job. The cleanup man makes clean sketches over the rough sketches from the animators” (Rasmussen 267-268).

Because drawings in animation exist in time, the assistant’s job was not simply to make the drawing clean enough to trace onto a cel. The assistant had to understand the principles of animation. “They knew how to keep a design in the free-flowing changing shapes of animation rather than make a rigid copy. They always extended the arcs of the movement, squashed the character more, stretched him more – refining while emphasizing both the action and the drawings” (Frank Thomas 229).

The assistant had to be extremely careful to maintain the character’s proportions and volumes in each succeeding drawing. If the assistant failed to do this, the reality of the character was compromised. Instead of the audience concentrating on the behaviour, it would be distracted by the character growing, shrinking, or otherwise changing in an unbelievable fashion. The challenge for the assistant was to keep the animator’s intent while making changes necessary for consistency.

Here is a rough from The Practical Pig (1939) drawn by Fred Moore. The line work is fairly clean, but a close comparison with the frame from the finished film reveals all sorts of alterations to the details of the drawing. The pig’s jaw, the hat, the tail, and the rolled paper have all been adjusted by the assistant animator. These types of changes were a routine part of the assistant’s job.

Image at top courtesy of Jenny Lerew; image at bottom is a frame enlargement.

Animators would often leave off details for their assistants to add later; this allowed the animators to work faster by drawing less. Here’s an example of Prince John from Disney’s Robin Hood (1973) drawn by Ollie Johnston. By this time, the drawings were being photocopied onto cels and no longer traced by hand. This forced the animators to work more cleanly than they previously did. However, note that details in the crown such as the jewels and the scalloping, the pattern on the robe’s trimming and the fingernails are initially missing and added by the assistant.

From The Art of Walt Disney by Christopher Finch.

There were cases where design changes were made after the animation was done. Here is a rough thought to be by animator Ken Muse from Mickey’s Birthday Party (1941) and an image from the final cartoon. Mickey’s costume has been substantially changed and the assistant animator would be the one responsible for redrawing Mickey so that his costume was correct.

Images courtesy of Galen Fott.

The assistant would sometimes add motion as well. As the animator was primarily concerned with behaviour, bits of animation referred to as “follow through” elements, such as hair, coat tails, skirts, etc, would sometimes be animated by the assistant. These elements don’t have a life of their own. They are somewhat mechanical in that their motion is dictated by the character’s motion. Dale Oliver acknowledged animating these elements when assisting on animation done by Frank Thomas (Sullivan 226).

If done properly, the assistant animator’s work goes unnoticed by the audience. However, there have been cases where poor assistant work has compromised the animator’s motion and the character’s believability. Grim Natwick, one of the animators of Disney’s Snow White character, was full of praise for his assistant animators on that project (Maltin 56). However, Natwick never said anything, good or bad, about the assistants who worked with him on Gulliver’s Travels (1939), produced by Max Fleischer. Following up his Snow White work, he was assigned to Princess Glory in that film. Unfortunately, the assistant work was not up to Disney standards. Shamus Culhane, who also worked on the film recalled,

“The one thing I found dismaying was the fact that Grim Natwick’s animation of Princess Glory had been butchered by crude cleanups. The final result bore no resemblance to his exquisite drawings of Snow White” (211).

In one close-up, the assistant was not able to maintain the relationship of the Princess’s hair to her skull. As she moved her head, it appeared she was wearing a loose fitting wig that was constantly shifting.

Some studios, like Fleischer and Iwerks in the 1930’s did not team animators with specific assistants. Those studios used a pool of assistants so that an animator could not know in advance who might work on his scene (Shamus Culhane 75). At Disney, the assistant position was used as a way of training future animators and assistants were assigned to work specific animators. The animators would give them small bits or corrections to animate (Korkis, Kimball 78).

Animators were able to take major liberties with their drawing if they knew they could count on their assistants to pull a scene into shape. Animator Bill Tytla said, “If you have faith in your first assistant and you know he will draw in the rest for you, and will give it the roundness and solidity and everything else it needs, you feel free to concentrate on trying to convey a certain sensation” (Barrier, Hollywood 211). Burny Mattinson spent 12 years as an assistant to Eric Larson at Disney.

“I went to work with Eric on the [Ludwig] Von Drakes [for the Disney TV series]. Eric wasn’t fond of doing, I don’t think, that kind of animation ‘cause he would do it in circles and stick figures and so forth, but thank God that’s where I really learned how to animate a lot more and how to draw better” (Kaytis).

By the 1950’s and ‘60’s, when the field was shrinking, the lines between job categories hardened and assistants were promoted less frequently. Animators then jockeyed to get the best assistants they could and established long term relationships with them.

Even in commercials, where studios would hire freelance animators for single jobs, career assistants were highly valued. At Zander’s Animation Parlour in New York in the 1970’s, the assistant animators worked continuously, rarely suffering layoffs, due to their ability to create polished, consistent drawings from an animator’s work. They were the ones who supplied the quality artwork that advertising agencies and their clients expected.

Inbetweeners are the lowest rung in the animation department. Even at Disney, where assistants were assigned to animators, there was a pool of inbetweeners under the direction of George Drake (Barrier, Hollywood 139). Like assistants, inbetweeners work was invisible to audiences but contained the potential for creating problems. In the words of Shamus Culhane, “A good inbetweener was, in his own area, almost as valuable as an experienced animator, because a poor draftsman and could bring down the quality of the animator’s work” (78).

In computer animation, animators generally don’t concern themselves with a character’s hair or clothing. These things are left to technical directors who take care of them after the animator has finished work.

Generally, these types of “follow-through” elements are done differently than animating characters in computer animation. A computer-animated character’s motion is done in a similar way to drawn animation, where the animator specifies key body and face poses for the character. Those images that would be created in between the keys are created on the computer mathematically by interpolating translations and rotations.

“Follow-through” elements such as hair and clothing are done procedurally. They are simulations that need to be started from an initial frame and must be calculated as forward motion with the help of parameters defining things like weight, drag, etc. These things are highly technical and if done well are not noticed by the audience. Like poor assistant work in drawn animation, they have a potential to do more harm than good with regard to an animated character.



At top, the animator works with a low resolution version of a Sully from Pixar’s Monsters Inc. because it provides faster interaction with the computer. Technical directors apply the fur to the version of Sully after the animator is done with the scene. Images from Monsters, Inc. Collector’s Edition 2-Disc DVD.