Animation Magazine - Issue #29 May/June 1994
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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.
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