FRED SEIBERT CARICATURES

 

Craig Kellman, 1994

Carlos Ramos, 1999

Dave Wasson, 1998

Tim Biskup, 1998

Zac Moncrief, 1999

Dave Wasson, 1999

Rob Renzetti, 1998

Carlos Ramos, 1999

Alex Kirwan, 1999

BONUS: Get Well Soon Art, 2006

Dave Wasson

Doug TenNapel

Vincent Waller

Frank Rocco

EXTRA BONUS:

Signatures from What A Cartoon Creators

Craig McCracken Interview - Animation Magazine (1994)

 Interview by Rita Street.

Animation Magazine - Issue #31 October/November 1994

Click the image to enlarge. Text version included below.

Text Version:

I realized that little girls flying around as superheros beating up criminals is funnier than just some guy," says Director/Creator Craig McCracken, his large brown eyes hiding behind a mop of curly brown hair as he discusses his inspiration for The PowerPuff Girls.

    The PowerPuff Girls will make its debut on the Cartoon Network as one of 48 cartoons being produced by Hanna-Barbera and The Cartoon Network in an all out effort to bring back the great shorts of 40 years ago.

    With this landmark venture, the pressure is on to produce the best possible cartoons. But, can Hanna-Barbera really turn out the kind of quality shorts that were produced during the heyday of Warner

Bros. and Disney? 

    

    Executive Producer Buzz Potamkin certainly is determined to maintain quality. He likens the short production process to the production of commercials rather than the production of television shows.

    "When you're making commercials you never lose sight of the value of an individual frame. You only have 720 of them and you better be damn careful of them all — never lose sight of an individual frame. That's the sort of emphasis I'm trying to place on the shorts."

    

    As far as content, that's up to the artists. And the artists' mandate for the project? It's gotta be funny.

   

    The PowerPuff Girls appear to have a lot going for them in that department. Blossom, Buttercup and Bubbles are just your average kindergartners. They have to go to school and they like to draw

with crayons. They also just happen to be the superheroines of Townsville, the biggest celebs around, and the trio the mayor relies on to save the day.

    Blossom is the head PowerPuff and leads her gang with a pretty stern hand. As McCracken puts it, "She's the one who makes sure that the day is saved correctly." Buttercup is the tough one. "She doesn't want to go through all the formalities of being a superhero. She'd rather just beat up anyone who does anything wrong. She's got a real short fuse." And, Bubbles... ah Bubbles. More concerned

with crayons than flying, she secretly just wants to be a little girl.

    The crusaders' early name was the "Whoopass Girls" and Craig's first short by the same name toured the country with Spike and Mike's Festival of Animation.

    McCracken recently pitched the second episode to the powers that be at Hanna-Barbera and The

Cartoon Network. If all goes well you may see the Girls battle The Amoeba Boys sometime next year. "They're the simplest criminals in Townsville," says McCracken, "Because they're single-cell

organisms their criminal minds haven't evolved."

    Their one goal in life? To get in a fight with the best kids in town — The PowerPuff Girls!

-R. Street

"What a Cartoon" and Genndy Tartakovsky Interview by John Kricfalusi

This is the second part of an article about "What a Cartoon" by John K and features an interview with Genndy Tartakovsky.

To read part one, click here.

A caricature of Genndy by Craig Kellman in the What a Cartoon short "Lost Control"

 Animation Magazine - Issue #37 September 1995

Click each image to enlarge. Text version included below.

Text Version:

In the second part of this article inspired by Hanna-Barbera's shorts' program, John K. takes a closer look at Dexter's Laboratory and speaks with the cartoon's creator, Genndy Tartakovsky.

    When I looked at the individual elements that make up the film, I found various degrees of craft.

Craig McCracken's character designs are flat, like the current fashion, yet they seem fresher than what's around. He combines Jay Ward, the Cal Arts Character Animation school style, Japanese cartoons and then something original.

    The character Dee Dee is especially appealing. She's not just cute, but cute with character. Her look suggests her personality. This is rare in cartoons. In his own film, McCracken's Power Puff Girls are extremely cute and appealing but a little colder.

    Despite the name of the cartoon, Dee Dee is really the star. She is a typical big sister who drives her little brother insane. This fact is inherent in the story, but it comes across not simply because of the plot. Her design, her expressions and even the movement itself tells us about her character.

    Genndy explains: 'I made her a ballerina, so whenever she acts, she acts in a very exaggerated way. And she always tries to strike a pose, like she's pretending she's a ballerina. So that would simplify the

process, instead of trying to find out a way of acting that's broad.'

    Some of the animation of these ballet movements is very clever. I freeze-framed her pirouettes and leaps, and discovered drawings where Dee Dee grew extra legs to help the flow of the actions. There is a kind of sweet sarcasm to her movements and expressions which makes her a very real and convincing character. This is not anything that could be written into a script. Only an artist can do this.

    Genndy believes strongly in the law of contrasts. He juxtaposed Dee Dee's movement and look with her brother Dexter. She is tall and thin. He is short and squat. She is lively and graceful. He is subdued and mechanical.

    I didn't notice when I first saw the cartoon, but as I was home dissecting it, I was surprised to see the seemingly unsophisticated color styling. The backgrounds are completely painted in primary and secondary colors. There isn't a muted or neutral color in the whole picture. Everything is orange, purple, yellow, blue and pink. Colors right out of the paint tubes. This isn't unusual for modern cartoons. Most Saturday morning cartoons, and even Disney features, are painted in primitive garish colors. The idea I think is, 'Cartoons are juvenile; therefore paint them with blunt ignorance.'

    These modern cartoons remind me of Denny's menus. You've seen those blue-purple-orange sunsets, I'm sure. Well, normally this kind of coloring distracts me from any story or action in the cartoons, but somehow in this case, it wasn't so bad. At least the artists didn't put every color in every scene. They usually limited the palette to two or three colors and did manage to compose the colors around the actions, rather than compete with them.

    The timing in the cartoon is very slick and careful. If you look at each individual action alone, you might think, 'This is good, but not untypical of a Cal Arts' graduate.' More impressive than the timing is the pacing. Pacing is a bigger concept than timing. It is the wide view of all the actions and how they relate to each other. This is a concept of timing that was totally missing from every other cartoon in the 'What A Cartoon' program (at the Academy preview). It's a tool that just isn't used anymore in cartoons... period. Do you ever wonder why the old cartoons, just sort of 'feel good'? Why they seem to flow so well? Why they seem to have rhythm? It's because they have rhythm. Classic cartoons were timed to musical tempos. Modern cartoons are timed straight ahead, action by action. Where the accents fall in relation to each other is now accidental. That's why modern cartoons feel jerky.

    In music, tempos vary; slow then fast, the rhythms weave in and out of each other and build moods in the listener. When this is well done, it sweeps you away in emotional bliss. No words can describe the feelings that good music invokes, not the way the music itself does. Have you ever got a chill listening to a piece of music? Cartoons have this power, if the cartoonist is aware of the tools and skilled in the arranging of them. Because of this rhythmic quality of cartoons, I find the cartoon to be an art much closer to music than to literature. Sure, music can tell a story, but if the music isn't enjoyable for its own sake, who will care about the story? Music doesn't need story at all to be great art. It definitely needs melody and rhythm. Harmony, syncopation, structure, movements are all variations and arrangements of the melody and rhythm. These tools pace and refine the vital elements of music.

    Cartoons substitute pictures for melody and use rhythm to regulate the flow of the pictures. Without rhythm and pacing, a cartoon doesn't deliver its maximum potential. Try singing a song out of tempo. It's so hard to do, and so alien that it seems unquestionably, instinctively wrong. Many modern cartoons, even if the art and animation is wonderful are wrong and unsettling in this way.

    It took me a few years of trial and error and bad timing/pacing, and studying cartoons to discover this missing vital element in the modern stuff. I eventually interviewed some old animators who explained how they did it. They timed to beats and bars, rather than sums of individual frames. Bill Hanna physically showed me how he did it. It was so simple, so right, that I had to ask him, 'Why don't you teach your timing directors this?' He said, 'Oh, everybody knows this.' I guess he hasn't watched any Hanna-Barbera cartoons in a few decades.

    Genndy figured this out completely on his own. How? By being paid to do it the wrong way first and seeing the unsatisfactory results. 'When I was working at The Critic, they would go in and put extra feet — two feet, an extra second, in between the slugs. And I would ask, 'What's this for?' And they'd say, 'For the laughter.' And I'd say 'Oh, okay.'

    The Critic actually made me organize my timing... indirectly. It was a really great experience because their timing is very formulaic. Just a 4-frame head bob up, 4-frame head bob down. Totally even. You go to a pose, you overshoot... that's all it is. Twelve-frame walk cycle, 8-frame run. Just put in the arcs, plot it down. It's all dialogue driven. There's no hand gestures. They just stand there and talk. Blink blink blink. Accent, accent, accent. That's probably 60 percent of the timing. I made $300 more than I made at [Two Stupid] Dogs. That's a lot. I mean, I got sick of it after a couple of weeks.

    'I had a revelation on Two Stupid Dogs. I finally figured out that it's all beats. I retimed one of the scenes that I already timed with the Dogs, to beats [in a sketchbook]. And I go, 'Oh, now it makes sense to me.' I didn't shoot it, but it made sense. It felt good when you did it on paper. And then when I did the arcs [on an exposure sheet], I went 'Oh, this looks cool, this works.' You have a nice long arc, and then a real short one, and then a long one, or whatever. Even though some people say that's real stupid, if you look at a piece of paper and you look at the different sizes of the arcs, the action, if you can see the contrast on the sheets, that means there's good contrast in the timing. And most of the sheets that I saw for Dogs, or if you pick up any Hanna-Barbera old show, not like 'old-old', but recently, they don't have that [the contrasts].'

    In Dexter's Laboratory, Genndy used beats and contrasted actions and sequences, or pacing, to help put over the feelings he wanted the audience to experience. He alternated slow scenes with fast scenes, dialogue scenes with action scenes and gave each sequence its own tempo. On top of that, the rhythmic wave of the whole picture gradually rises to a climax. This is pretty sophisticated for someone's first film.

    I asked Genndy what he thought was more important, story or pacing. 'I think they're one and the same. The way the story flows along is the way the music flows along which is the pacing. When you have a chase, it's a fast thing, so you write it fast. I mean, you can't physically write it fast, but that's why you don't write it. You [story]board it fast, thinking in real time. You just do scribbles that work. Then I think the question is, Do you want to have one or two things that are really good, or do you want to have a really good overall feel to it?'

    Genndy uses his storyboards to work out the flow and pacing and to find rough spots in the story. 'When I first started doing storyboards on Dogs, I would do a sequence and I would act it out, play it out. When I came to an uncomfortable moment, an uncomfortable scene or sequence, I would feel there's something wrong, and I mentally made a note, that I knew there was something wrong with it, but I wouldn't fix it, I would just let it go, and I don't know why I did that. You're flowing along, you're acting it out, and then you have to do something unnatural, when you're acting you feel it. You really, really feel it. There's something not working there. So, now I've got to rework it.'

    I asked him if he could do this from a script. 'Not from a script. From a storyboard. I think it's got to be visually represented so you know where the cuts are, where the angles are, where the camera direction is, how it's flowing. From a script, you're reading a line, you're reading a set-up, and what you're thinking might be something different than what someone else thinks.'

    How does one keep track of these story glitches? 

    'Well, I put a post-it on the board, and I may pitch it to some friends, but sometimes they don't really understand what I'm saying. It works mechanically, it works as part of the story, but it just doesn't work no matter how good the gag is.

    'People say 'Oh, that will work in animation.' But it's got to work in the board, before anything goes to animation. You can pitch the whole thing and if you go through the whole thing without stopping, without feeling a problem, you've got a good cartoon.'

    The experience of Dexter's Laboratory taught Genndy to use simple methodical tools to structure his stories before going to the storyboard stage. 'On the first one, there's really no explanation how it [the story] came. But on the second one, I had all these vignettes that I wanted to do, that the characters fit really well into. I had to connect them with a story, so I figured out a way of connecting them, and then I just started doing thumbnails. When you're doing the thumbnails, things just start happening, it just starts working. It's like a machine, you know? It's like, okay, this works, this is cool.

    'But before I even start the storyboard, I have, not an objective list, but it's more of a motivation list for the overall picture, and I go: 'Set-up, Motivation, Reaction, Conflict, Conclusion... 

    'What's the set-up?' And I write: Set-up: Dexter makes chocolate chip cookies that Dee wants. Conflict: Dee Dee grabs cookie, Dexter doesn't want her to eat it. Result: Dee Dee eats the cookie, she grows to be 100 feet tall. Conflict: Dee Dee goes to city and messes with it. Resolution: Dexter is happy that Dee Dee left the house so he can be alone. That's the first two minutes of the cartoon. That was an outline. And when I'm doing the storyboard, then I add all the gags, the acting, the lines of dialogue, and it works.'

    I could go on about each other creative element in Dexter's Laboratory, Paul Rudish's dramatic layouts, the little animation touches that only an artist who has creative control over his story could do, the music and sound effects, but I would be delaying the point I want to make.

    The great thing about this cartoon is not that each individual element is clever, pretty, well-written, it's that each creative element is used to tell the story. Nothing is arbitrary. We've all seen cartoons where we can say, 'Aren't these cute characters,' or 'That was a funny gag,' or 'Isn't the color nice?' or 'Look at the cool backgrounds.' This cartoon has a story that inherently invites the artists to create fun things to look at. But all the visuals, all the cinematic touches are placed in a firm framework and completely organized and controlled by a methodically-thinking mind.

    Genndy is not only an artist. He is a scientist. He isolates and defines problems, then systematically finds solutions and composes or choreographs his creative elements to achieve their maximum effect. He doesn't just take a bunch of ideas and throw them in the air, and where they fall, that's where they stay. Now all this may sound like high-falutin' double-talk, but to my mind, this combination of creativity and mechanical problem-solving ability is neither completely new nor too much to expect. It's what directors do. Tex Avery did it. Chuck Jones. Clampett. Hanna and Barbera. All these guys were more than just artists with wacky ideas. They had the ability to get their ideas across. Good live-action directors are problem solvers. Choreographers, symphony orchestra conductors. Different mediums. Similar minds.

    Betty Cohen states The Cartoon Network's and Hanna Barbera's basic philosophical and business goal, 'Using the short form as a means of creative exploration, an amazing array of both veteran and new directors will bring to life their very personal, very original vision. Real characters will be creating real, memorable characters.'

    Genndy Tartakovsky is evidence that this is possible when someone who has a vision is given the opportunity to try. Unfortunately, not all artists do have this potential. While some of the other cartoonists in the program show much promise, notably Pat Ventura, Dave Feiss and Eddie Fitzgerald, it seems that there may be some problem with the program's selection process.

    Some of the artists who premiered their shorts at the Academy didn't seem to take advantage of the once in a lifetime opportunity they've been awarded. In a program that declares itself a 'return to the Golden Age of Cartoons,' I was amazed to see many cartoons that looked like they were right out of the worst period of animation history: 1970s' Saturday Morning Cartoons.

    It was bizarre to see Ruby Spears' style characters doing Tex Avery takes. And these weren't just from the older directors. Guys in their twenties and thirties are making Saturday Morning cartoon-style shorts at higher budgets. It doesn't look like one mind is choosing the directors who will make the roster, which is too bad for the program.

    I hope the actual, promising directors get the chance to do a few shorts each. I hope they are allowed the luxury to make their mistakes and learn from them as Tex Avery and Walt Disney did. I hope that the directors are able to find artists to support them and not compete with them. Every artist in the animation business needs this program to succeed. If it works, there will be more cartoonist created cartoons. If it fails, we could all find ourselves back in the dark ages of animation, slaves to ignorant lords who have no love for the art, no respect for the talent they need so desperately to feed off of.

    In a day when huge corporations are in a gluttonous manner, battling over who gets to own the top artists; who gets to monopolize the control over our industry by anesthetizing our brains and creative drive with big bucks so we'll neglect to notice that we have no say in the content and future of our art; under the massive approaching black storm cloud of self-destruction, Fred and Betty's program is a small ray of hope. Is it possible to regain some pride and self respect in who we are and what we can do for the audience?

John K. is the president of Spumco. He is currently developing The Goddam George Liquor Program (working title).

The viewpoints expressed herein are those of the author and not necessarily the opinion of the editor, staff or owner of Animation Magazine.

   

John Kricfalusi on Hanna-Barbera's "What a Cartoon"

Animation Magazine - Issue #36 August 1995

Click each image to enlarge. Text version included below.

Text Version:

    Fred Seibert's and Betty Cohen's cartoon shorts program is the only hope I see that cartoons have at the moment. And before I saw the premiere of these shorts at the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, I suspected it was a slim hope.

    Fred is the big shot at Hanna-Barbera these days and, single handedly, he is revolutionizing not only the studio but the way cartoons themselves are being produced. His program is designed to give cartoonists back control of the medium they invented and to find the modern day star cartoonists. Fred

realizes that the star cartoonists are even more valuable than star characters.

    Hanna-Barbera's promotional department promises a return to the Golden Age of Cartoons. As most of today's brow-beaten cartoonists would agree, this is a noble promise. It's also a tall promise and Fred has more obstacles in his path than he might realize.

    First of all, the program is not the same system as the 'Golden Age' System. Fred is producing 48, 6-minute cartoons. That's a good start. If he gave out one short each to 48 artists, that probably would completely defeat the purpose of the program. You would be hard pressed to find 48 exceptionally talented artists in the whole business, and even if you nabbed each one and gave him or her a short, who would be left to draw the cartoons? A good director needs good artists to work with. Leon Schlesinger

and Fred Quimby did not give out each short they produced to a different artist.

    Just being a good cartoonist is not enough to make one a director. A star cartoon director is an extremely rare talent, so rare that our whole 70 or 80 year history has only produced about six people who were continually able to create popular characters and move the artform forward. These six

basically carried everyone else along with them. And they didn't all pop up at the same time under the same program.

    Fred likes the classic Warner Bros. approach to handling talent. Find the talent, leave them alone, go to the race track and let your cartoonists create the Bugs Bunnies and Daffy Ducks for you, while you

rake in the money. If your directors don't get laughs, fire them and find ones who do. Leon Schlesinger discovered Tex Avery, Bob Clampett and Chuck Jones this way. That's half of our history right there. But he didn't do it overnight. It took him five years of pretty terrible cartoons, created by mediocre directors until he finally found Tex Avery. And even then, Avery didn't instantly create hits. If he had only been allowed one cartoon to prove himself, or even 10, we probably would never have heard of him.

    The conditions that existed at the old cartoon studios were far more conducive to success than they are today. The Hanna-Barbera program seems to hope that cartoon directors can come from nowhere and instantly blossom into geniuses. The applications for the program are being offered even to people with no previous animation experience. At least one of their finished shorts looks like it was drawn by a store-window artist. That's more than a $100,000 for window art.

    The Clampetts and Disneys very definitely did not produce hits first time out. It took them years of practice. They made many mistakes — and were able to — there was no one to second guess whether what they were doing was right or wrong.

    All the classic cartoon directors started at the bottom. Bill Hanna started as a cel washer. Clampett started inbetweening. The rise up the ladder was something like this: wash cels, ink cels, inbetween, animate; if you are funny then you might get a job as a story man; if you are extremely talented and

ambitious, you become a director. Clampett started at 16. By the time he became a director, he was 23 years old. That sounds young, but he had 7 years of solid experience. He knew what a single frame of film meant. He knew what a tempo was. Accents. While still an animator, he contributed story and character ideas. He worked under experienced people who taught him what they learned the hard way

and when he finally earned his own chance to direct, he rebelled against his teachers. With all this knowledge and skill behind him, he spent a few years trying really hard to make hit cartoons, and after some practice went on to completely revolutionize cartoons. By the time he was 28, he was able to create hit after hit on a continual basis. Along the way he created and helped create a few new characters. Under the best conditions cartoonists have had in our history, the best cartoonist took about 13 years to become a star. Chuck Jones under these excellent conditions took a little longer.

    These conditions don't exist today. We don't have the luxury of learning animation from the ground floor up. The apprentice jobs, animation clean-up and inbetweening are not done in the country anymore. The core of what we do — animation — the very name of our art form is not even done here. How can we possibly direct if we don't even know what an inbetween is? Most artists today start near the top, as layout artists or storyboard artists. Right out of Cal Arts and into a job that the artist can't even fathom, in a system that knows the job categories by name only. A few cartoonists today are lucky enough to have worked at commercial studios and learned how to animate there. Mark Kausler is an excellent cartoon animator who learned much of his art this way. I look forward to seeing shorts from him.

    Even being able to animate doesn't completely qualify one to be a director. A director needs to have a wide and eclectic assortment of talents and skills, not all of the following, but most of them. To be a director, you have to be a good, expressive artist. Many animators are not. A designer. An actor. You should be able to tell a story clearly and emotionally. You need a sense of rhythm. Actual musical ability is even better. You need an organized mind. Leadership ability. Not only a point of view, but a point of view that other people care about. You need actual skills that come from practicing many varied jobs in the business. 

    To get these skills in today's cartoon business is almost impossible. Today, people have to teach themselves by studying the old films and practicing on their own time. Bob Jaques of Carbunkle Cartoons spent years single-framing old Warner Bros. and MGM cartoons, drawing and analyzing what he saw. Studying is good, but not as good as practice, and when Bob finally got the chance to prove himself, he created a whole new style of animation for The Ren and Stimpy Show. The lip-synch in particular was revolutionary, but I doubt if he could have created a revolution if he didn't already understand the standard way things were done.

    The point I'm trying to make is that it would be wiser to find a few potential star directors and give them each a few cartoons to practice on rather than give everyone off the street a short and see what happens.

    My own view is that H-B is too easily giving away these golden opportunities to anybody who shows a passing interest. And who wouldn't be interested? We all want to be stars. The trick is to find the talent that has the determination and drive to fight for the chance. And then that talent needs time and practice to develop his or her abilities.

    Even with its flaws of execution, the shorts program is a necessary step in the right direction. At least people who draw are making cartoons start to finish.

    For the night of the L.A. premiere/preview of the shorts, Fred Seibert did an amazing thing. He invited the artists from all over the industry to the event and spent a crapload of Ted Turner's money on us. He introduced the program by telling us that we were the backbone of the business; that we were what it was all about. Well that's the first time I've ever heard anybody in power say anything so radical and then to actually mean it on top of it. That's like telling musicians that music would be nothing without them! Sounds like communist propaganda to me. He went on to admit that he didn't know a lot about animation before he came to Hanna-Barbera and just wanted to know the secret of why the old cartoons were so much better than the new ones. Betty Cohen, the president of The Cartoon Network also wanted to know, and actually got a bunch of cartoonists in a room and asked them. Friz Freleng, Bill Hanna, Joe Barbera and I all said the same thing. The best cartoons were made by leaving the cartoonists alone. Fred and Betty wanted the best cartoons so Fred decided to leave his cartoonists alone.

    I was packed in this huge auditorium, surrounded by artists of every style and philosophy as Fred told this story. When he gave me a bit of credit for partially inspiring this cartoonist call to arms, I felt a huge relief that things were changing and a sinful wave of pride. I also felt a little fear. The lights lowered and the cartoons were about to come on. What if the cartoons were lousy? What if the much needed revolution failed?

    When the curtains opened, my fears grew into a filthy horror. A monstrous thing from Hell violated the screen. I felt the shock of hundreds of cartoonists as an embarrassing and badly matted Spirotot-swirl spun over a cheesy space background. The title of the graphic monster was 'What A Cartoon,' whatever that means. The thing looked like some bargain basement local television station manager hired his nephew to create a station I.D. 'Make it really obnoxious! And make sure it doesn't have anything whatsoever to do with cartoons!' Maybe some executive, cheated out of the chance to put his stamp on the cartoons themselves spurted his creative juices on this thing. I felt like crawling out of the room.

    I'm glad I didn't, because a cartoon came on a real cartoon. An excellent cartoon. A professional cartoon. It was called 'Dexter's Laboratory.' Directed by Genndy Tartakovsky.

    It was instantly appealing, the colors were light and tasty, the lead character was beautifully designed and it was working. My first reaction was jealousy. It was someone's first cartoon, some dirty punk's

and it was working on every level.

    The damn thing was original too. Not that it didn't borrow elements from all kinds of sources, many of them obvious; but it put them together in a brand new way with confidence and seamless dexterity. My jealousy quickly gave way to fandom. I was watching the first cartoon in years that I was completely enjoying on a fan level. I felt just like when I was a kid and I discovered a new cartoon. A new magical world. 'Dexter's Laboratory' is not at all the kind of cartoon I would make, but I would watch it religiously every week. I haven't been able to just enjoy a new cartoon for so long, that I had forgotten what it was like. It's like ice cream. I don't know any other way to describe it. A real cartoon is like ice cream. Ice cream has been banned from the world for 25 years and now prohibition is over.

    When 'Dexter's Laboratory' finished, I was inspired. I saw something that I couldn't do. I felt the magic of the mysterious and that's what art and entertainment should be. It should be out of your

reach. It should make you feel like it is really magic. Too much entertainment today is mundane, within our conscious grasp. Who hasn't looked at newspaper comics and said, 'Gee, I can do that.' Who couldn't write on the level of a Saturday morning cartoon? I wondered how Tartakovsky did it. A few days later, I called Genndy and asked him for a copy of his cartoon so I could take it home, analyze it and learn something new.

In the next issue, John Kricfalusi takes a closer look at 'Dexter's Laboratory' and speaks with the cartoon creator.

Disclaimer: the viewpoints expressed herein are those of the author and not necessarily the opinion of the editor, staff, or owner of Animation Magazine.

"John Kricfalusi on... Bad Cartoon Writing"

 

Animation Magazine - Issue #29 May/June 1994

Click each image to enlarge. Text version included below.

Text Version:

We're tiny, we're toony. We're all a little looney,

And in this- cartoorty, we're invading your TV.

We're comic dispensers, We crack up all the censors

On Tiny Toon Adventures it's a dose of come-dee..

They're furry, They're funny. They're Babs and Buster Bunny...

...There's Hampton, and Plucky, Dizzy Devils yucky...

Since this series of articles is intended to promote the idea that funny drawings are the most important elements of cartoon entertainment, you might wonder why I spend so much time talking about writing.

Only because it has become the source of our medium's biggest problems.

    Today, when animation or cartoons are discussed at all seriously, too many people talk about how the most important aspect in a cartoon is the story. Almost inevitably the very people who champion story and good writing are the people who practice it the least — modern cartoon writers.

    Of all the media that have ever used any kind of written material, surely Saturday morning cartoons (and their offspring, modern cartoons in general) have the poorest standards of writing skill in the history of human creative endeavor. This is moderately understandable, because animated cartoons don't naturally attract good writers, they attract good cartoonists. Novels, journalism and movies are more likely to attract serious skilled writers. However, cartoons need to get their ideas from somewhere.

    Because modern studio heads are not cartoonists, they tend to think they need writer-writers, no matter how poor the quality, or low the intelligence of this human lor. These executives in charge of animation never think to look for writers among the actual practitioners of the medium — the cartoonists. They would rather settle for someone who admittedly can't draw, but is willing to take a low-level writing job, even if it is only on a cartoon.

    What is a writer? A person who has ideas and the skills to communicate them in words. The medium of writing is the medium of words. It is only a medium, not an end in itself.

    There are other ways to communicate ideas — with paint, with film, with architecture and on and on. Do painters use writers or do they create their own ideas and execute them? Who "wrote" "The Execution of the Rebels on 3rd May, 1808"? Francisco de Goya like other artists, communicated his ideas in the medium he was expert in, in this case the medium of painting. Modern cartoons get their ideas from people who are not able to actually use the medium.

    It's as if you needed a sculpture but instead of hiring a sculptor and asking him to come up with an idea to sculpt, you hire a "sculpt writer" whose job it is to describe a sculpture on paper, then you hire someone with actual talent and skill to try to make some kind of artistic sense out of it. What kind of self-respecting "writer" would take money (more money than the sculptor) for writing sculptures? Certainly not anyone who actually had something to say of his own and the writing dexterity to say it with. This kind of job could only attract charlatans, con-men, door-to-door radio salesmen and once in a while, the honestly ignorant.

    This is exactly the situation we have in animated cartoons today; people unskilled in the medium of animated cartoons (yet well versed in the arts of chicanery) supply the ideas.

    Interestingly, cartoon writing has developed a pattern of incredible predictability. I'd like to point out some cherished techniques of Bad Cartoon Writing that have devolved down to us over the last few decades.

    If you would like to pursue a career in legal swindling, memorize these simple mistakes and you can make between $3,000 to $5,000 a week or almost triple what the cartoonists make, and you can help further destroy our art form in the process.

    1. Too Much Plot

    As I've pointed out in previous issues, the more plot you have in a cartoon, the less time you have for entertainment. Remember, cartoons have finite lengths, whereas novels do not. The Novel is the perfect medium for plot. Cartoons aren't.

    All cartoon script writers write stories that are just too long. The only way to get every story point a writers writes into a cartoon is to chop out all the entertainment value. And even then, it's still too long. There is no time left in the cartoon to use acting or even just plain funny drawings. Here is a tip to

scriptwriters: Scripts take about one minute per script page to perform. And that is tight. If a cartoon is 20 minutes long, don't write more than 20 pages of material. Usually scriptwriters turn in about twice as many pages as the screen time actually allows. This is an absolutely unbelievable waste. Not only for the writer who eventually is going to have much of his material cut out of the picture, long after he

has forgotten what he wrote anyway, but even more criminal is the extra work the artists have to produce for no reason!

    The storyboard will be twice as long as it needs to be. Twice as many layouts will have to be drawn, if someone doesn't catch the problem in the timing stage. Now if an artist is going to spend the same amount of time producing twice as much work, the obvious conclusion is that the quality of the art will go way down, to say nothing of the loss of the artist contributing creative material to the cartoon.

    There is no point in a writer arguing this. He has no direct experience with performance time, whereas animators do. Of course, ideally we shouldn't be writing scripts at all. We should have cartoonists writing storyboards.

    2. Too Many Plots

    Even if we could solve the problem of too much plot we'd still have the problem of too many plots.

    Some writers tend to pride themselves on how many plots and sub-plots they can squeeze into a story. Again, if you have unlimited space in which to tell your story, then that's fine if the writer truly has the skill to weave complex plot elements. (If the writer did have this kind of skill, do you think he'd be writing Tiny toons?) In a finite time-space, the number of plots has to be balanced with the actual

entertaining elements of the story. The more time you spend setting up new plot threads, the less time you have to develop each situation into an entertaining memorable event.

    I see this problem, not only in amateurishly written children's crap, but even in The Simpsons. This cartoon certainly has its moments, and there are usually a few funny lines in each cartoon, but I feel there is much lost opportunity because scenes have to be cut short to make room for sub-plots or sometimes not even sub-plots, but storylines that have nothing to do with each other! I watched one

story that set out to be about Bart's uncle's funeral and halfway through it. Homer came down ill from eating some Polish Sausage or something. This extra story just came out of the blue and interrupted the other story. It was extremely disjointed and both storylines suffered from not having enough time to comfortably tell either story.

    This kind of story plays as if it was written by a committee or staff of writers. Everybody wants to get their ideas into every story. It's a natural tendency. We all do it. It is very hard for a writer to throw out his particular idea. But if the performance is going to suffer because it has to be rushed through, then we need to be tougher editors. A simple solution to this is to spread this wealth of story ideas

over more stories rather than trying to cram them all into one.

    Instead of telling three stories poorly over 22 minutes, tell three stories comfortably over 66 minutes. Crammed stories play crammed. They play like Cliff's Notes — all skeleton and no meat. You will recognize cramming when you see an over reliance on flashbacks. This makes for very awkward transitions and abrupt shifts in narrative. Usually a reliance on flashbacks reveals that the writers just realized they have to fill in a gap to explain where the new storyline came from.

    Remember that the Honeymooners usually had one plot line per half-hour episode, and this is one of the funniest shows in television history.

    Contrary to popular belief, The Simpsons succeeds in spite of the writing, not because of

it. Its appeal lies in its core elements, its fundamental premises, the personalities of the characters, their relationships to each other, the attitude and the graphic look of the cartoon all the elements that its creator, Matt Groening instilled into it. It could profit from more careful traditional writing skills, more of Matt's singular vision and less writing by committee.

    3. Explaining Jokes

    Have you ever heard a cartoon character say, "I'm a cartoon character so I don't have to fall off this cliff until I notice that I'm standing in thin air!" This is the worst kind of amateurish writing. It is an example of a modern "writer" explaining a joke that he doesn't get himself, that someone else wrote long ago, that has been perfectly understandable by the audience for the last 50 years. This shows a lack of confidence in the writer's own ability to tell a joke.

    Another cartoon writers' crime is having the character tell the audience what it's supposed to feel, as in dialogue like, "Aren't I 'wacky'?" Being afraid to let the material stand by itself is something you would expect from a beginning writer, not a highly paid professional. The audience should decide for itself whether material is "wacky" or "funny" or "cool" or however the writer wishes his material to be regarded.

    4. Lack of Professional Confidence

    Amateur writers are understandably afraid that their work won't "work," so they over explain the jokes. They would rather have the characters tell you how zany they are than show you by having the characters actually do something funny. These writers are terrified that their jokes might fail. A confident professional writer or director is willing to take the chance that not everything he does is going to work. I remember legendary cartoonist Eddie Fitzgerald asking Bob Clampett one day about

some of his unorthodox film cuts. "Weren't you afraid that cut might not work?" Clampett looked at Fitzgerald in honest incredulity. "What's going to happen if a cut in a Cartoon doesn't work! Is the world going to end?

    Today, everyone is afraid of every creative idea in a cartoon; that it might "fail." This kind of "safe" thinking has caused the whole art form to fail completely and miserably. A true professional has confidence in his work, confidence that comes from actual hands-on experience with the tools of the medium, in the case of cartoons, experience with entertaining through drawing as well as writing. A pro will be confident enough to try a joke that might fail. If it does, so what? There are plenty more where that one came from.

    5. Unnatural Dialogue

    While I've already mentioned the problem of dialogue spoken with the writer's voice rather than the character's voice, I would like to further mention a related and particularly annoying habit of modern cartoon writers. Writers love to use the characters' mouths to show off the writers' knowledge of obscure trivia, things that only other amateur writers could possibly care about: secrets about the

cast from Gilligan's Island, big pretentious words, names of literary devices like "onomatopoeia" which they don't know how to use and so forth... All this blusteration is just meant to disguise the fact that they don't understand who their characters are and what dialogue is for.

    6. Stealing Movie Plots

    Under the guise of "parody" cartoon writers mask the fact that they have no ideas of their own by "parodying" popular movies over and over again. What's amazing is that they all parody the same movies and just shove their particular characters into somebody else's plot and story. How many Cartoons have we seen that have a title like. "Raiders of the Lost...Duck"? Replace "Duck" with "Bunny" or "Devil" or "Smurf" or "Bart." Replace "Raiders of the Lost..." with "Demolition..." "...Wars" and you have an infinite amount of "free" story premises. Watch next year's crop

of crap for titles like "Jurassic Duck," "Jurassic Bunny," "Schindler's Goofs" and "Jurassic Vacant Cartoon Writer Brains."

    I think that the urge to parody movies is partially an attempt to suck up to movie directors who will hopefully be so flattered that they will give a script deal on something "legitimate" to the writer, enabling her to get out of the miserable cartoon business.

    7. Writing Action That Can't be Staged

    Scriptwriters should not attempt to write physical action. This is something that has to worked out mechanically with drawings. It can't be done in your head, especially if you can't draw. Writers are always writing convoluted action that physically doesn't work. The artists are stuck with trying to make sense of action gibberish, and then the writers complain that the artists ruined their "work." I've heard

more than one writer say, "I'm such a visual thinker. I can imagine all these wild things in my head. If only I could draw, I'd just show you what I mean." There's only one answer for this

kind of talk. "Get off the planet."

    8. Writing Action That Is Too Complicated

    Not having to draw the cartoons themselves, writers have no concern for the immense toil the Artists have to perform in order to put unworkable written ideas on the screen. Writers love to write unbelievably detailed action. Something that sounds impressive on a printed page can amount to

disaster for the artists and the film. I've read countless scripts with idiotic scenes like: "Four hundred mounted Arabs come out of the forest, brushing against the trees. Down shot." One drawing of this would take a good artist weeks to complete. Imagine animating 12 drawings for every second of screen time that the scene is on. This is a practical impossibility. It would take a hundred years to animate such a scene, and for what? To stroke a writer's ego by showing a spectacular scene that took him about half a minute to "write"?

To purposely write stuff that is over ambitious and obviously hard to draw is the absolute height of irresponsibility. The writer is sloughing off the hard work on the artist just because it impresses some network executive who reads the script and imagines The Ten Commandments and gives the writer another fat raise as a reward. Meanwhile the cartoon comes back looking like Hell because the writer didn't do some hard work himself in composing an actual workable cartoon story that utilizes the medium's advantages.

    9. Too Many Characters

    The "too-much," "too-many" syndrome of bad cartoon writing carries over into the characters as well. 

    Modern cartoons usually have too many characters per cartoon. They have "gangs" of

characters in them, all of whom have to be addressed in each cartoon Story. 

    Simple arithmetic will reveal the obvious problem; the more characters you have, the less time you have to spend on each one. This in turn equals less character or personality per character.

    Not only that, but the more characters an artist has to draw in each scene, the less time he will have to draw each character well. Therefore the quality of animation severely drops.

    Cartoon writers need to be taught the "less-is-more" theory. This is more true in animation (which is such a labor intensive art) than even in other artistic mediums. The best way for a writer to realize this is to have to draw his material himself. If every writer in the business had to draw his own scripts for a year or two, they would quickly be cured of many of their irresponsible bad habits.

    Every beginning cartoon writer should be forced to in-between a "crowd scene," so they can see just what is involved. Then they should be forced to design a 'Rube-Goldberg contraption' and lay it out for animation.

    Part of the reason that so much actual drawing in cartoons is done overseas is because too much time and money is wasted on too-long and over-complicated scripts (not to mention, ridiculously overpaid "writers"). Any network or studio executive who might be reading this should realize that when you read these kinds of scripts, your writers are directly cheating you out of quality and production value in your cartoons. You could have more and better artists actually doing work here in the country if your writers would waste less of your studios' time and money.

    10. Celebrities

    Many cartoons today rely on celebrity guest spots.

    There was an episode of The Simpsons that guest starred Aerosmith. The band had nothing to do with the plot of the particular story, they were just there. A lot of screen time was spent on the scene, yet no entertainment value was derived from it. They didn't make fun of the band. The drawings didn't even look like the actual musicians. What were they doing there?

    This too typical instance represents a lack of confidence in original material. The writers feel that their cartoon (the story, the characters, whatever inherent entertainment substance) can't stand by itself. Most cartoon writers are ashamed of having to work on cartoons and so they try to lure in celebrities to lend credibility to the show. The writers are appealing for legitimacy. "You see? It's not just a cartoon! Real people, famous people are in it!"

    11. Defeating the Dramatic Purpose

    

    The term "comedy relief" is a misnomer. It should actually be called "dramatic relief" because that is its function. Comedy relief characters tone down dramatic scenes. 

    Comedy relief characters are not comedic, they are "wacky." They don't make you laugh, they run around with their tongues flopping out and they have crossed eyes. When non-funny people try to be funny, they create "wacky" instead. So what we end up with in cartoons with "comedy relief" characters are stories that are neither dramatic nor comedic. The two elements cancel each other out.

    Disney, after Snow White, began to introduce sidekick characters into his stories. In Sleeping Beauty, Disney created a wonderful villain, Maleficent, the "Fairy of Darkness." She was drawn great. She sounded very menacing. She moved terrifyingly. Sleeping Beauty was potentially a great dramatic story. Disney and his storymen must have thought their villain was "too scary" because they did everything they could to get in the way of her scenes. They surrounded her with "wacky" troll-like bumbling guards. These characters seemed to be out of a whole other cartoon universe, the "Toot Whistle, Plunk and Boom" Disney land. Every time these characters enter the scene, they completely kill the menacing aspect of Maleficent.

    The evil Queen's opponents are the sickeningly sweet and zany three good fairies, Blueie, Pinkie and Mauvie. They further tone down Maleficent's potential menace. The time all these useless extra characters waste could have been better spent developing Sleeping Beauty and the Prince's personalities so that we might care about them when they are truly in danger. The message of all this zaniness is to tell us that the protagonists are never in danger of being in danger. This is purposely self-defeating storytelling. But Walt Disney did it so it must be the right thing to do. For all the great and wise things Walt Disney actually did do for animation, everybody copies his faults instead. Wacky sidekicks are staples of cartoons to this day, while beautiful, well drawn animation is not.

    These faults have magnified to the point of absurdity in modern cartoons. In Alladin, there

are more wacky sidekicks than there are characters whom the story is actually about. The lead character has three wacky sidekicks, a monkey, a Genie and a rug! Jasmine has two sidekicks, her fat father (fat is always wacky) and a boring sidekick (they must have used up their zany budget by the time they got to this character), the Esso Tiger. Worse, Jafar the villain has just about the most irritating "comedy relief character in history, a screaming parrot. The parrot has no purpose in the story's narrative, except to interrupt the atmosphere of the Arabian Nights, the potential dread of the evil Villain and to remind us that the story is not really happening that it's just a cartoon.

    This kind of writing shows a lack of commitment to a firm statement. Is it scary? Or is it funny? The writer who uses "comedy relief" is admitting that he doesn't know what his story is about.

    12. Bastardization

    This is when you take the original premise of something and betray it. For example, what is the premise of Yogi Bear? He's a lazy good for nothing, irresponsible, scheming, pilfering bear. He is basically a fugitive from society, living precariously on the edge of the law. This formula accounts for the initial success of this character and series. Now what is the premise of Yogi's Gang?

    Yogi Bear is a leader of men. He and every other Hanna Barbera character from completely unrelated series have an Ark. You know, like the one from the Hebrew religion? The one that represented Yaweh's murderous vengeful wrath upon all his creations? But this Ark doesn't navigate through water. Of course not. It's a boat. It flies. And what is Yogi's mission? To clean up the environment of course. What else would a lazy, no good pilferer do if he had his way?

    Who could possibly come up with such an unbelievably wrong, preposterous backwards concept? Only an idiot, or more likely a team of idiots — cartoon writers and development executives.

    Another form of bastardization is parasitism. This is when a writer takes someone else's idea and alters it enough to cripple it and call it his own. The current favorite trend of parasitism is exemplified by the "babies" phenomenon: The Muppet Babies, The Tom and Jerry Kids, The Flintstone Kids and so on.

    13. Superbastardization

    Superbastardization is when you mix and match different premise betrayals with parasitism and other bad writing tricks until the premise becomes so twisted that it is beyond any coherent statement.

    The Flintstones movie is a fine example of Superbastardization. It's a big-budget movie stolen from a low budget TV cartoon that itself was stolen and bastardized from a low-budget live-action TV sitcom.

    The current reigning monarch of Superbastardization is Tiny Toons. This goes so far beyond imaginable idiocy that I can barely believe its elements as I describe them. The premise of this series is based upon the classic Warner Bros.' irreverent characters only now they are "cutesy" (as against "cute" or appealing to look at) babies. Every character is a "comedy relief" character, even the ones who were originally straight-man characters. Elmer Fudd is not only zany, he has a vagina now. Let's go further. Glue an exceptionally unirreverent live-action director's name to it, then plug these stolen bastardization personalities into situations not suited for them. For example — into stolen movie plots. Then commit every single other bad writing crime known to man.

    I take my hat off to Tiny Toons. This is a supreme parody of all that's bad about modern cartoons.

    Some of these writing problems are not specific to animation, they've been around for as long as series entertainment of any kind. However, they are usually associated with the decline of a series, when the original team who developed or created a series is replaced by new writers who don't understand the characters, or when the writers run out of ideas that fit the original premise. Or the writers just get tired of writing for the same characters over the years.

    This happens to almost all sitcoms. Get Smart. Max started out as an idiot then became a responsible family man and had to be replaced by Larabee, a new idiot. All in the Family. Archie Bunker became a nice guy. He was visited by Sammy Davis Jr.

    Lucy has to be the worst offender. I can hear her tired old writers after eight years of I Love Lucy. "What do we do with her now?" "I don't know, let's send her to Hollywood. She can meet some celebrities, maybe that will beef up the ratings." Or, "Let's have the characters put on a show! That way they can pretend to be someone else and we won't have to write a new story!"

    What is unique to modern cartoons is that they begin their lives already out of ideas — already at the bottom of a decline. The decadent age of a modern cartoon series starts at its inception in the Story Bible. Today's cartoons are purposely designed to be embarrassing. To get back to the prospect of good cartoon writing, we've seen that "story" or "plot" is obviously a disadvantage to short cartoons (under 20 minutes), however it may not be to longer-form cartoons. This remains to be seen.

    The animation medium (the best of it) and all its clichés and storytelling habits have basically evolved out of shorts. To this day feature-length cartoons have never really gone beyond the short-form cartoon mentality in terms of story, but this is not to say that story can't play a more important role in longer-form cartoons if story-oriented cartoons are ever made. In Disney movies the "story" is quite blatantly less important to the entertainment experience than the fantasy elements, the songs and the ever proliferating sidekicks. 

    All these elements are throwbacks to the cartoons and Silly Symphonies of the 1930s. These vestigial properties take up so much of the time in a typical cartoon feature that there is virtually no time left for "story" in the sense of "plot" and "character development." It's really too bad the Warner Bros.' writers and directors didn't try features. They understood character, and good story really begins with good character. However and if ever it happens, it will take cartoonist-writers with ideas and the skill to communicate them to evolve the medium and develop stories that are suited to the animated feature length cartoon.

In the next issue, John Kricfalusi discusses Bob Clampett's influence on cartoons, the Art of Chuck Jones and the end of Animation's Golden Age. Kricfalusi is the president of Spumco.

The viewpoints expressed herein are those of the author and not necessarily the opinion of the publisher, staff or owner of Animation Magazine.