Cartoon Modern

REN & STIMPY creator (and my former boss) John Kricfalusi has been writing a lot on his blog recently about animation design. As with everything else he writes, John has some very definite ideas about what makes for good animation design and whether you agree or not, his thoughts are well worth reading.

The design posts include this one about a John Hubley-produced E-Z POP TV commercial, a piece about the backgrounds in Chuck Jones’s INKI AND THE MYNAH BIRD (1943), which were designed by John McGrew, and a new post about Art Lozzi’s backgrounds in the Yogi Bear TV cartoon SCOOTER LOOTER. I’ve been critical of the H-B backgrounds earlier, but the Lozzi backgrounds in this particular cartoon are gorgeous and perfectly designed for animation. When the work is good, it’s good, and there’s no argument against that.

Yesterday I mentioned that I wasn’t a big fan of the early Hanna-Barbera backgrounds and I wanted to be a bit more clear about why I think those paintings are weak. I recognize that they were created under strict production schedules which limited the artists’ ability to create quality work. Even though they were created in a rushed manner, they’re still stronger than a lot of the backgrounds being painted for today’s shows. But when I discuss them, I’m looking at them in context of the period that they were created—the 1950s—and compared to the rest of that era’s modern backgrounds, they are among the most generic and boring of the bunch.

Below is an example of a late-1950s H-B TV series background. I could have chosen any other one to illustrate this piece, but this one seems like an above-average example from the period. There is nothing inherently wrong with the painting. It has the typical sponge/roller/airbrush techniques common to background painters of the time, and there’s nice bold outlines on the objects. But after one glance, you’ve seen it all. There’s nothing to it; everything is spelled out bluntly in the painting: trees are green, rocks are brown, road is mud-colored. Color and design are used in a pedestrian literal manner that removes all visual interest from the scene. Jules Engel used to say, “Good paintings make you tingle.” There’s not a tingle to be found in this painting.

Now compare it to this painting of trees by Walt Peregoy from Disney’s PAUL BUNYAN. Here is a background that’s exciting! Peregoy is working with even less than the H-B layout. He doesn’t have rocks to create contrast, just a bunch of random trees in a forest. But Peregoy attacks the concept and make it his own. I doubt he was even working from a layout here. They probably just needed a generic tree background and Peregoy was enough of a designer to run with that. Who else would have thought that sharp cutting triangular shapes, colored blue, with a crazy paint-splatter technique would create a dense, woodsy forest effect?

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Or how about this painting by Peregoy. His sense of color is exciting as hell, and his smart use of values frames the scene and draws our eye to the center. Note how Peregoy doesn’t succumb to painting formulas. His approach to painting this tree scene is completely different from the prior painting. A background painter has to be as much of a designer as the layout artist that he’s following.

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In PAUL BUNYAN, it’s easy to tell which backgrounds were painted by Peregoy and which were painted by Eyvind Earle. Despite the different approaches, their backgrounds work well together. Today’s filmmakers make a fetish out of consistency in production design but this film is a great example of how contrasting styles in a film can actually generate greater visual excitement.

Below is an example of an Eyvind Earle background (which I found on Michael Sporn’s blog). The composition of the village is amazing; Earle manages to create the impression of a bustling village scene with a minimalist, nearly abstract approach.

Sure, there’s plenty of Fifties animation design on this here blog, but I’m not the only person writing about this amazing period in animation history. Many other artist-bloggers are also discussing various aspects of Fifties animation design on their blogs. Here’s a few recent posts from other bloggers that are worth checking out:

Michael Sporn has posted some frame grabs from THE INVISIBLE MOUSTACHE OF RAOUL DUFY, a 1955 short directed by Aurelius Battaglia at UPA. The film was written by experimental filmmaker Sidney Peterson. While the short aired on THE BOING BOING SHOW in 1956, I believe it was produced earlier for another purpose. In an interview with Peterson, he said that he’d been working with MoMA to create projects which would enhance the public’s understanding of modern art. Peterson said, “I hit upon the idea for children’s films about artists, films maybe for television, which would be cast in the form of fables. I wrote three such scripts for which UPA did the animation: THE MOUSTACHE OF RAOUL DUFY, MERRY-GO-ROUND IN THE JUNGLE (about Henri Rousseau), and DAY OF THE FOX: THE LEGEND OF SHARAKU.” I’ve never been able to find any record of MoMA being involved in these productions, but it sounds like the films may have been completed before production had even begun on the BOING BOING SHOW.

The modern technique of the 1950s was so pervasive that it was even applied to the cheapest TV productions of the time. Kevin Langley has made a couple posts of background paintings from early Hanna-Barbera television cartoons. The backgrounds were painted by Fernando Montealegre and Art Lozzi and Bob Gentle. While the bgs have some good ideas in them, on the whole, they feel rushed and cheap. I can imagine the painters at H-B had to paint dozens of these a week to keep up with the breakneck production schedules, and the hastiness shows from the generic color palettes to the uninspired technical execution of the paintings.

Dan Goodsell has posted four model drawings from a 1950s Ray Patin commercial. I scanned a few of these in for the book but ended up not using them because there was far stronger work available from the Patin studio. At the time, we didn’t know which artist had drawn them or what they were for. Dan recently discovered that they were made for a Campbell Kids Clubhouse commercial, which can be viewed HERE. As you can tell from the finished commercial, the type of rendering that the artist used in these drawings was utterly useless for the purpose of animation. That time would have been far better spent had they focused on the design and construction of the characters. Nevertheless, the animator(s) of the commercial do a terrific job of creating beaver characters with strong designy shapes and appealing animation.