"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.