101 Dalmatians: Part 16A

In this section, the pups and their parents spend some quiet time together before Horace and Jasper arrive to resume the chase. The Colonel, Captain and Sgt. Tibbs delay the Baduns, but are not capable of stopping them.

As Peter Emslie points out in the comments to Part 16, the delaying action gives the Colonel his brief moment in the sun. He finally gets to take action. It's an important moment because it shows that Tibbs and the Captain respect the Colonel for valid reasons and they're not simply indulging him. The story forces limitations on how successful the three can be, though, so as not to distract from the main characters.

This is a sequence which is pretty much cast by animator. Frank Thomas has a major hand in animating the dogs, especially the adults. Blaine Gibson contributes some animation to Pongo and Perdita. Hal King takes care of the personality close-ups of the puppies while Ted Berman gets the their long shots. John Lounsbery animates the Colonel in addition to some scenes of the Baduns. Cliff Nordberg animates Tibbs. Julius Svendsen continues to animate the Captain.

The first part of the sequence is low key, bringing down the tension and the action in preparation for the long chase to come. Frank Thomas is the right choice to animate the dogs here as what's needed is a stong feeling of warmth between the parents and the pups. Once Horace and Jasper arrive, the chase is back on and with the exception of the upcoming sequence with the cows, the tension continuously rises from here until the climax of the film.

Pongo's snout is something that should have been better defined on the model sheets. Frank Thomas draws Pongo with a prominent bump on his snout. Other animators who handle the character treat the bump differently.

Frank Thomas

Eric Larson

Milt Kahl

Watching this sequence (and the entire film) closely, you run across all kinds of cheats. Here's a detail from shot 54 animated by Dan MacManus. Perhaps this was a stop motion model shot that was rotoscoped, but in any case, Horace and Jasper could use some more detail.
If you think it looks bad here, imagine how it looks on a theatre screen.

Shot 63, with pups sliding on the ice, has the animation and the pan done on two's and there's noticeable strobing as a result. There are also continuity issues. When the Captain is about to kick Jasper in shot 45, he has his left rear leg raised. But when he kicks Jasper in shot 46.1, he does it with his rear right leg. I wonder if this a mistake or if someone decided it made for clearer staging?

Ed Catmull and the Harvard Business Review

Ed Catmull, the president of Pixar and Walt Disney Animation, has written an article for the Harvard Business Review that can be read here. There is also a podcast you can find here.

Both focus on organizational structure and the steps that Pixar has taken to prevent the mistakes that are all too common in business. Here are some excerpts from the article:

"To act in this fashion, we as executives have to resist our natural tendency to avoid or minimize risks, which, of course, is much easier said than done. In the movie business and plenty of others, this instinct leads executives to choose to copy successes rather than try to create something brand-new. That’s why you see so many movies that are so much alike. It also explains why a lot of films aren’t very good. If you want to be original, you have to accept the uncertainty, even when it’s uncomfortable, and have the capability to recover when your organization takes a big risk and fails. What’s the key to being able to recover? Talented people!"

"Creative power in a film has to reside with the film’s creative leadership. As obvious as this might seem, it’s not true of many companies in the movie industry and, I suspect, a lot of others. We believe the creative vision propelling each movie comes from one or two people and not from either corporate executives or a development department. Our philosophy is: You get great creative people, you bet big on them, you give them enormous leeway and support, and you provide them with an environment in which they can get honest feedback from everyone."

"Everyone must have the freedom to communicate with anyone. This means recognizing that the decision-making hierarchy and communication structure in organizations are two different things. Members of any department should be able to approach anyone in another department to solve problems without having to go through “proper” channels. It also means that managers need to learn that they don’t always have to be the first to know about something going on in their realm, and it’s OK to walk into a meeting and be surprised. The impulse to tightly control the process is understandable given the complex nature of moviemaking, but problems are almost by definition unforeseen. The most efficient way to deal with numerous problems is to trust people to work out the difficulties directly with each other without having to check for permission. It must be safe for everyone to offer ideas."

I've never worked at Pixar or even visited the place. Catmull makes it sound somewhat utopian, but I've worked in enough companies to know that people within a company are always competing for plum assignments or for having their vision prevail. That's human nature and I doubt that Pixar has found a way to re-engineer it. However, Pixar has had a remarkable run at the box office and remains a leader in the field, so I can only assume that the company philosophy has helped them in their continued success. It certainly sounds different from most of the places I've worked, none of which have been as successful.

(link via Cinematech.)

Behind the Scenes of Walt's People

Didier Ghez, editor of the Walt's People series of books interviewing those who worked with and for Disney, goes into detail on the creation of each volume. It's a long and involved process, dedicated to bringing a wide variety of source material and a high degree of accuracy to the reader. Anyone interested in Disney or animation history should have these volumes on a nearby bookshelf.

Michael Maltese in 1960

Jaime Weinman has unearthed a 1960 interview with Michael Maltese from the New York Herald Tribune. Maltese, if you're unaware, was one of the writers of the classic Warner Bros. cartoons. At the time of this interview, he was writing Quick Draw McGraw for Hanna Barbera.

Rowley on Persepolis

I want to draw your attention to Stephen Rowley's review of Persepolis, which has only recently been released in Australia. It begins:

"Even those who love animation are prone to dark speculation about its shortcomings as a medium. The lack of live actors and the associated hindrance to truly subtle performances, in particular, is often cited as limiting the potential for serious dramatic work in animated films. The fear is that the relative paucity of full length, adult-oriented dramatic features might not only be due to a lack of courage and imagination on the part of directors and studio executives, but might also reflect actual limitations of animation itself. Thank goodness, then, for Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis."

Rowley goes on to enumerate the ways that animation is better suited to telling this story than live action would have been. Definitely worth reading.

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.

101 Dalmatians: Part 16

Otto Messmer's Parrot

Comicrazies has reprinted 22 examples of the comic strip Laura, drawn by Felix the Cat creator Otto Messmer, from 1932. Laura is the name of a pet parrot, though in this series of strips, she's one of 6 parrots.

In the old days, famous comic strips would get an entire newspaper page on Sundays. Often, the creator would add a second strip to the page. In this case, Laura was the strip on top of Felix. Another example would be E. C. Segar's Popeye having a topper called Sappo.

Messmer's design is heavily rooted in the 1920's. The poses are hardly naturalistic and the character construction is based on the "circles and hosepipe" animation approach of the time, though Messmer's characters are generally more angular. The style has definitely dated, but I always found it charming.

Looking at these strips, I wonder if Messmer was an influence on Herge and his ligne clair style.

101 Dalmatians: Part 15A

In this part of the film, Pongo and Perdita arrive at Hell Hall and attack Horace and Jasper, allowing Tibbs and the puppies to escape.

Pongo and Perdita's entrance is interesting for several reasons. The breaking glass in shot 72 is in rather large chunks. I hate to say it, but it looks like Blaine Gibson (or possibly an uncredited effects animator) took the easy way out by limiting the number of pieces.

Shot 75, with the dogs in front of the fire place, is one of the few expressionistic pieces in the film, where the backgrounds mirror the characters' inner emotions. That fire is an expression of the dogs' rage at anyone who would threaten their pups. This kind of thing was used extensively in Snow White: Snow White's flight through the forest where the trees are an expression of her terror, the storm as the dwarfs pursue the Queen expresses their anger and the candles "crying" when Snow White is in the coffin. Live action film continued with expressionsim during the post-war film noir period, but Disney seemed to abandon it after the war, one of the things that make the post-war features less interesting to me.

Shot 77 of Pongo, teeth bared, charging the camera is this film's equivalent of Monstro charging the camera in Pinocchio. Reitherman animated the Monstro shot and I'm sure that he recalled it when directing this sequence.

In shot 80 by Ted Berman, the pups are looking in the wrong direction. The shot is re-use from earlier in the film, but the puppies should have been flopped based on the character locations established in shot 68. This is known as crossing the 180 line and is frowned upon as bad film grammar.

The pan in shot 101 is on two's, which results in some strobing. Shot 100.1 has a pan on ones, but the animation is on two's. This kind of thing is indicative of the studio trying to hold down costs on this film.

The battle is an interesting mix of genuine action, with the dogs and the Baduns intent on damaging each other, and low comedy. Pongo knocks Jasper down and gets kicked towards a closed door, hitting with real impact. John Sibley, Cliff Nordberg and Frank Thomas handle the above. When Pongo recovers, he gets behind Jasper and manages to sink his teeth into Jasper's rear, courtesy of John Lounsbery on Jasper and Thomas on Pongo. I'm sure that there was a conscious calculation not to let the action become too intense for the children in the audience by making sure there was comedy at regular intervals.

Once Pongo bites Jasper, the rest of the sequence shades more to comedy, with additional assaults on characters' posteriors and dignity. Perdita upends Horace butt first in the fireplace and Pongo pulls Jasper's pants down. The sequence ends with the Baduns being bonked on the head by falling plaster. Knowing Reitherman, I was expecting a close-up of the two of them looking goofy from the impact, but they've got to stay conscious as the chase continues, moving from Hell Hall to the countryside.

Whatever acting is here is pretty broad. There's good action that's solidly drawn. The characters have weight and momentum. They occupy well defined spaces. However, there's little time for characters to think or register their emotions when the action is so furious.

The sequence is definitely exciting and moves the story forward. The characters are no longer searching, they're now escaping. This might be a good spot to consider as the end of the second act.

Happy Birthday Gene Deitch

Today is Gene Deitch's 84th birthday, so happy birthday, Gene! Gene worked for UPA and was the head of Terrytoons after Paul Terry sold it to CBS. Since the 1960's, Gene has worked in Europe where he did adaptations of many children's books for Weston Woods.

Gene and his cartoonist sons Kim, Simon and Seth are the subjects of a joint interview in The Comics Journal #292, pictured above. That issue was apparently available at Comicon but has yet to hit comics shops or bookstores. Look for it in the next few weeks.

Gene's online book about his life in animation can be found here.

(Birthday link via The Comics Reporter)

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.

101 Dalmatians: Part 15

Amid at Cartoon Brew has already pointed this out, but I wanted to also recommend Oswald Iten's blog Colorful Animation Expressions. Iten is analyzing the colour styling of 101 Dalmatians, something that is needed and that I am incapable of doing.

I'd also like to make a general comment about comments. I'm all for spirited debate and not interested in censoring anybody. However, I would ask that comments restrict themselves to the films or media in question and not get personal. The best comments, even ones you disagree with, provoke thought. They force you to examine your own point of view. Mud slinging is a critical dead end that dilutes the value of any discussion.

Babies and Bathwater

While I'm not surprised that Michael Barrier and Michael Sporn found this summer's animated features lacking, I am surprised by some of the comments about computer animation. For instance, Barrier says this:

What's clear from WALL•E and Kung Fu Panda , as never before, is that computer animation is a dead end, a form of puppetry even more limited than stop motion. There's no reason to believe that its 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.

And Sporn says this:

When I first saw Toy Story, I realized that the possibility of computer animation replacing traditional animation might actually exist. Nothing prior to that point led me to think that. What I didn’t expect was that I was watching the high point of the medium.

People concentrated on animating grass (A Bug’s Life), hair (Monsters Inc.), water (Finding Nemo) and, now, machines (Wall-E). Essentially, they were concerned with moving the technical capability of the medium forward and ignored the very real need of moving the characters with any REAL depth. Pixar and Dreamworks gerry-rigged stories around the capabilities of the new medium and animated around those problems. They’ve gotten to the point where they can successfully impersonate the things of real life.

However, if a well rigged commercial can feature computer animation that equals or betters something in Pixar’s best, or a live-action/computer-effx feature (such as Spiderman 2, which has a story almost identical in parts to The Incredibles, or The Dark Knight, which has superior performances to anything in Pixar) works better than the best feature animation scene, what’s the point?

My disagreement isn't with their views on particular films, but I think that their generalizations are far too broad. Barrier not only writes off cgi, but stop-motion as well. Sporn says that because commercials or effects for live action are capable of matching the technical sophistication of a Pixar film, somehow that makes Pixar superfluous.

Barrier believes that in computer animation, the "vital connection between artist and character simply can't be strong enough." I disagree. For one thing, I've written extensively on how tenuous the link between animator and character is in drawn animation. The process of animating cgi characters is different in the details, but the system is an extension of what was used in drawn animation. If the connection between artist and character is possible in drawn animation, it is every bit as possible in cgi.

I resolutely believe that no animator can be held accountable for what's on screen, and that's true of classic Disney films as much as it is for recent cgi efforts. This industry is and always has been filled with talent, but that talent requires the right type of producers, directors and writers to let the talent shine. Take Bill Tytla out of Disney and Tytla becomes average. I would bet that there are animators capable of great things currently working, but who are not given material with depth or that plays to their strengths. Condemn the industry and the production system if you like, but they are not the medium or the technology.

Barrier's mention of stop motion makes me wonder if drawings are a prerequisite, in his view, for good character animation. I hope not. There are performances in stop motion that touch me deeply, whether dramatic or comic. Jiri Trnka's The Hand is a great film, one where the main character's face never changes expression, yet his feelings are crystal clear. It's a great performance, one that contributes to a film with a strong political point of view. Tim Burton's The Corpse Bride contains moments of achingly beautiful character animation, though the film as a whole has problems. Nick Park's The Wrong Trousers is a small masterpiece, one that I would hold up as comparable to shorts by Keaton or Laurel and Hardy.

I have enormous respect for Sporn's historical knowledge, but I would point out that the sins he accuses Pixar and DreamWorks of can also be aimed at the Disney studio in the 1930s. Disney was fixated on effects and technology. Disney "gerry-rigged" stories around animation's capabilities, avoiding human characters for years as well as sticking to low comedy. Barrier, in Hollywood Cartoons, talks about how Disney seemed to abandon his advances in character animation after Snow White in order to pursue other goals.

Artists, regardless of their medium, tend to be seduced by surfaces. It was true of Disney in Fantasia and Sleeping Beauty and it's certainly true of recent cgi films. The problem with Hollywood animation across the board is that it aspires to be slicker, not deeper. Another problem is that animated feature directors seem to do their best work early in their careers: Walt Disney, Don Bluth, Ralph Bakshi, Musker and Clements, Trousdale and Wise, and now, unfortunately, John Lasseter. With only two features he's directed, I don't know if the same is true of Andrew Stanton, but it's possible.

Barrier points to Brad Bird and Stanton gravitating to live action and it's because animated features are exhausting. Combine that with having a limited number of things to say, the seduction of slicker surfaces, the excitement of new technology, and the pressures of the marketplace, and you're left with animation directors who either don't think deeply enough about their stories and characters or who are prevented from doing so by commercial considerations. The people making animated films are either not smart enough or are being constrained. Both are likely true, as much as artists prefer to place the blame elsewhere.

The problems and failures of industry animation are far bigger than whatever technique is chosen. Just as we believe that animation is capable of expressing the entire range of human experience, I believe that every technology is equally capable. Artists and business people make choices and some of them are bad ones. To paraphrase Shakespeare, the fault, dear Michaels, lies not in our technologies, but in ourselves.

Aardman and Dreamworks

Courtesy of Harvey Deneroff's blog, here's a link to an interview with Nick Park from The Guardian. In the article, there are some interesting comments about the relationship between Aardman and DreamWorks, including the following:

Aardman fought hard to retain the rights to [Wallace and Gromit], which left DreamWorks feeling uncomfortable about losing control of an area almost as important to the bottom line as the box office take. "They found it difficult working with characters they didn't own," says Park. "They were trying to respect that at the same time as trying to completely dictate to us. There was a sense of tension."

The Long Tail Revisited

Two years ago, I wrote about Chris Anderson and his book, The Long Tail. A quick summary is that in a brick and mortar world, retailers want their shelves filled with their most popular items in order to maximize profit from the physical limitations of their stores. However, in a digital world, shelf space is essentially infinite and free, so offering maximum choice is a better strategy. An item may only sell once a year, but if you have enough of those items, they can generate enough profit to rival the income you make from more popular items.

There are several well-known online companies that are built on this business model: Amazon, iTunes and Ebay. They each offer a wider selection than physical stores are capable of and have enlarged the market for their products as a result. These companies are often referred to as aggregators, as they pull together lots of products under their virtual roofs.

The long tail has been criticized as a theory. Anita Elberse is a marketing professor who's written something of a rebuttal. There's also a blog called Whiskey's Place that predicts an end to niche markets in the shrinking economy.

While the aggregators have a successful business model, creators who live in the long tail have yet to find one. As a retailer, if you have 100,000 items that each sell one unit a year, you're making money. A creator may only have 1 item, and selling one unit a year isn't going to provide much income. While creators eventually develop a backlist, even somebody prolific is going to be limited to 20 or 30 items.

So is the long tail just a pipe dream as a viable business model for creators? Seth Godin has written an interesting analysis about the nature of the curve, breaking it into three profit centers. His piece is interesting from a big business standpoint. Kevin Kelly looks at Godin's three profit centers and talks about how they relate to creators.

I've been wrestling with this for a while and I think the only advantage to the creator that I can see in the long tail is that aggregators can invent or produce a long tail domain that was not present before. Like Seth's Squidoo does. Before Squidoo or Amazon or Netflix came along there was no market at all for many of the creations they now distribute. The proposition that long tail aggregators can offer to creators is profound, but simple: you have a choice between a itsy bitsy niche audience (with nano profits) or no audience at all. Before the LT was expanded your masterpiece on breeding salt water aquarium fishes from the Red Sea would have no paying fans. Now you have maybe 100.

One hundred readers/watchers/listeners is not economical. There is no business equation that can sustain profits for continual creation from so few buyers. (It can of course support the business of aggregation above the level of creation.) But the long tail niche creation operates perfectly well in the realm of passion, enthusiasm, obsession, curiosity, peerage, love, and the gift economy. In the exchange of psychic energy, encouragement, meaning of life, and reasons to live, the long now is a boon.

That is not true about profits. Economically, the more the long tail expands, the more stuff there is to compete with our limited attention as an audience, the more difficult it is for a creator to sell profitably. Or, the longer the tail, the worse for sales. But if we view the long tail as a market of a different type, as a market of enthusiasm and connection, then as the long tail expands, this increases the chance of two enthusiasts meeting, and so the longer the tail, the better. The first two pockets of the curve are trying to maximize profits; the last pocket of the long tail is trying to maximize passion and connectivity.

There is one further indirect advantage to the long tail. Since your creation now exists in a market (where it would not have existed at all before) it can, if you are lucky, start to migrate uptail. With creativity you may be able to move your creation out of the economic doldrums of the long tail up into section #2, where 1,000 true fans and other mid-level success lies. As I argue in 1,000 True Fans, this is where you want to be as a creator. Seth calls it the pocket of " the profitable, successful niche product" and I agree with him that this pocket #2 rather than pocket #1 is where you want to aim for.

So the long tail is no magic bullet. However, as this comment on Chris Anderson's site shows, opportunities come out of the tail that wouldn't exist without it. The big question for creators is how big an investment to make relative to the expected (or unexpected) return. With animation being so labour intensive, maybe it's the wrong medium for niche markets. I hope somebody proves me wrong on that. The link in the above quote for 1,000 True Fans is very worth reading, and might be the only strategy that's going to prove viable for long tail creators.

101 Dalmatians: Part 14A

In this section, Horace and Jasper notice that the puppies have fled the room and start to track them down within the house. Pongo and Perdita meet the Colonel and head towards Hell Hall.

Shots 4 and 7 are fairly simple from a narrative standpoint, but difficult for animators. In each shot, Horace and Jasper move in depth, changing size as they move. The benefit of shots like these is to provide a sense of the characters existing in a real space that they have to move through. The challenge for the animators (Bill Keil, Amby Paliwoda and Ted Berman) and their assistants (unknown, unfortunately) is to maintain the proportions of the characters as they shrink or grow.

Even at the time, there were tools available to help the artists. The camera lucida (often referred to as the "lazy lucy"), an opaque projector with the ability to enlarge or reduce drawings, was often used. The artist would be forced to trace off the projection. As this film introduced the use of Xerox on a large scale, it's possible that the drawings were photocopied up or down. Most likely, several drawings were resized for reference and the artists brute-forced the animation to work.

This is the kind of thing totally taken for granted in the age of computer software. 3D packages provide accurate perspective by default and even 2D packages allow for resizing without requiring redrawing.

Shot 7 also includes some nice effects animation on the flashlights. They're double exposed for all the scenes they are in, but in shot 7 they occasionally are aimed directly at the camera and the double exposure is replaced by an airbrush glow.

I'm guessing that Hal King is responsible for Tibbs' take in shot 20. It's beautifully done. There's great shape changing on the fur and the arms and legs are pumping away on ones, leading to a fast vibration. Tibbs' landing on Jasper's face contains some great drawings by King and either Sibley or Nordberg handling Jasper.

There's a lot of puppy re-use within the crowd shots of puppies running. Shot 23, a low angle shot with the pups coming over the horizon to run down the stairs (probably animated by Berman) is a flagrant example. A limited number of puppies have been animated and then photocopied and repositioned in order to make up the crowd. If you look at the mass of pups in many of these shots, you can easily see the cheats.

In shot 30, (example below) take a look at how rough they left the drawings for the puppies. As they were all moving non-stop, somebody made the decision to just paint the roughs and hoped that the audience wouldn't notice. The puppy animation is probably by Ted Berman and in this case, we're looking at the animator's original drawings, not at the work of an assistant.

(Click to enlarge.)

The Colonel continues to be played for laughs, demanding an explanation from Tibbs in mid-chase and then skidding on the ice once he meets up with Pongo and Perdita. While I think that the shots with Tibbs work, as the Colonel is trying to get a handle on the situation, I think that his slipping once he meets the parents is badly placed. At that point, the pups are in danger and the parents are desperate to rescue them. Watching the Colonel run in place on the ice in shot 65 dissipates the urgency of the situation. Pongo and Perdita need to race ahead for the hero shot they get in the next sequence, but Reitherman (as sequence director) could simply have had the Dalmatians outrun the Colonel rather than have the camera linger on one more slapstick fall. It's not the last time in his career that Reitherman would undercut strong emotions with low comedy. It was an unfortunate habit of his.

One Percent Redux

I want to call everyone's attention to a comment made by Andrew Osmond on the entry One Percent. He provides more details about the state of children's animation in the U.K. and it was Andrew who pointed to the above video, showcasing the culture issues that result from the lack of local production. If you're curious to see what the Wombles are actually like, go here (once again courtesy of Andrew.)

Canada has many co-production treaties, which allow companies from different countries to collaborate with a Canadian company on a show and still have it count as Canadian content. It works economically as it makes it easier to get a show financed and provide local employment. Culturally, however, the show has to satisfy multiple masters and the result is almost always a watered down compromise. The show can't be too specific to one partner's culture or it ends up being incomprehensible to the other partner's.

The result of all this is either imported children's TV (cheaper to buy than to produce original content) or co-productions (half a loaf being better than none). In neither case are children seeing the world they know reflected back to them.

Space Chimps

I haven't seen the film, so I have no opinion of it one way or the other. But I have to question the wisdom of opening any film the same weekend as the latest Batman film and the release of Mamma Mia. Batman: The Dark Knight will easily gross more than $100 million and there are predictions that it might go as high as $170 million. Mamma Mia is based on a huge Broadway hit with many successful road companies. There can't be a lot of money left in the pool after those two films suck up their share. The same article predicting the Batman gross is predicting Space Chimps to gross $6-8 million.

While I have no idea when the Space Chimps DVD will be released, it's likely to be for Christmas, where it will be up against Wall-E, Kung Fu Panda and the latest Looney Tunes compilation. A strong theatrical marketing campaign and good box office gross would have helped the Space Chimps DVD release, but it doesn't look like that's in the cards.

My sympathies go out to the crew of this film. A lot of hard work is going to go unnoticed.

Joel Chandler Harris

The above dummies were a gift from Walt Disney to the Harris family at the time of the 1946 premiere of Song of the South.

Here is a very interesting article on the life of Joel Chandler Harris, creator of Uncle Remus, and his continuing presence in the Atlanta area. His home, The Wren's Nest, is a museum dedicated to his work and to storytelling. The museum also has a blog, which covers material about Harris and preservation issues in Atlanta.

While Song of the South has been controversial for years due to its racial content, Harris himself was targeted during the Civil Rights era for appropriating Black creations and commercializing them. The museum prefers to view Harris as a preservationist, someone who put the oral folklore of Black slaves in a permanent form and saved it for future generations.

While the museum is trying to rehabilitate Harris himself, there's seemingly no interest in rehabilitating the Disney film. Click on the poster below for the museum's view of Song of the South.

One Percent

TV channels are suffering from declining audiences. That puts financial pressure on them to increase their viewership, which means that niche programs are often abandoned in favour of others promising larger audiences.

Like it or not, the children's audience is considered a niche that broadcasters have been abandoning for years. Some, like NBC, have abandoned it completely while others (Fox, CBS) have just leased out their children's timeslots rather than bother to originate programming themselves.

I recently spoke to a Canadian studio owner who said to me that while there are quotas for how much Canadian content a channel must broadcast, there's no requirement that the Canadian content be new. As overall audiences shrink (and the world heads into a recession), there's lots of incentive to avoid commissioning new children's programming. Here's an article from the Telegraph in the U.K. about the British situation.

There are 26 channels available to satellite and cable viewers that specifically cater for children. They include Cartoon Network, which shows the popular US-made cartoon Ben 10. However, the number of original and native programmes has plummeted. One per cent of the 113,000 hours of children's programmes broadcast last year were new commissions made in Britain.

The situation in Britain is complicated by a ban on junk food advertising during children's programming. That's undoubtedly good for children's health, but not so good for animation artists' bank accounts.

These pressures have also affected budgets. I heard from the same studio owner that producers are attempting to get half hour shows produced in China for $25,000. That price is only for the visuals, not scripts, boards, audio tracks and post-production, but I commented that in the 1970's in New York, Zander's Animation Parlour would get $30,000 for the visuals of a 30 second commercial. Commercials always had higher budgets per minute than the shows they interrupted, but it's hard to imagine how any studio could produce 22 minutes for $25,000.

Disney's recent live action successes have also reduced the amount of new TV animation being produced. The big question is whether this situation is temporary and will improve or if we're seeing the a permanent change in children's TV.

This might be a good time to be pitching puppet shows.