Animation Magazine - Issue #36 August 1995
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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.
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