Advent Calender 2010 - Dec 1 [Updated]

It's this time of the year again and luckily I'm less busy than the past few months. So I try to do an Advent calender again. Most of it will be color guessing again (not all of it, though).

How the color guessing works: I post an image with one area completely desaturated or modified otherwise. Underneath there are several color propositions for the desaturated area. If you think you know the correct color, write a comment with the letter corresponding to the picture you think is correct. Of course you could always guess, it’s multiple choice after all. I will withhold comments for at least the day after, so that you don’t see what other people already have guessed. As long as you don't see any comments on a post you can still answer, even if the next one is already up.

Later I will also post the original image. There might also be additional questions like trivia or one or two "normal" posts inbetween.

If I get three answers I will continue, else I will stop posting those images.

I'm putting together a list of participants just for fun to see who got the most answers right. 

December 1: what color do you think Baloo is in this beautiful preliminary color sketch?

modified image (Baloo desaturated)

A

B

C

D

 The solution is B
I've taken this sketch from Pierre Lambert's gorgeous book Le Livre De La Jungle. 
Unfortunately, there is no artist credited.

Alice Mosaic and Fantasia Draft

It might have gone below your radar but Steven Hartley is in the middle of doing a Mark Mayerson-style mosaic for Alice in Wonderland based on the draft supplied by Hans Perk.
I have been toying with the idea of doing it myself but am glad to see that someone else has already done it. Hartley who has shown his passion for animation history already as a commenter on Hans Perk's blog also provides insightful commentary to each sequence. Look and see how much he has to offer about golden age animators.

The mosaics are found here and here.

Coinciding with the 70th birthday Bluray edition of Fantasia (reportedly still missing the Deems Taylor narration) Hans Perk has meanwhile started to post copies of the draft for this movie.

Smears

Recently I've spent more time studying cartoon animation than color design. At work we talked about scenes that were worth showing frame-by-frame to animation newcomers/students. Naturally I thought of "smears" because they go unnoticed to most untrained viewers.

Then the other day I accidentally stumbled upon this Bugs Bunny scene from Hare Trigger (1945,  noteworthy mainly because it features Yosemite Sam's first appearance) that inspired my blogging about the subject of "smears":

Drawings 4 and 8 are the "smears", versions of elongated inbetweens that are usually only shown for one frame even if the rest of the animation is on 2s. 

Basically they compensate for the lack of motion blur in hand drawn animation.

Frankly, I was surprised to see such outrageous drawings in a Freleng cartoon, but to be honest, I've never looked too close at the animation in his films anyway. [UPDATE 2013: I should have given credit long ago: this shot was animated by the great Virgil Ross who - as Thad explains in the comments - was never given the recognition he deserved, neither by Clampett nor be Freleng.]

When I think of smears, Bob Clampett and Rod Scribner come to mind as well as Chuck Jones' famous Dover Boys (1942).

 

The character slides from pose 1 to pose 2 with the leading body parts consecutively being elongated which makes for overlapping drawings and prevents strobing (first left leg, then head, then right leg).

 Smears often go unnoticed because they are immediately followed 

by normally timed or even slow animation like reaching inside the coat (above).

Here's an extreme smear. The key element is that 

volumes are not kept consistent.

As a sidenote: in case you thought this rather odd combination of complimentary colors was only used for bad guys, look at these frames from Clampett's Book Revue (1946):

The following framegrabs from To Duck Or Not To Duck (1943) demonstrate how Jones and his animators used this technique in a Daffy Duck cartoon as well. It's early Jones, so Daffy is still loony and playful.

The concept here is basically horizontal elongation.

The Dover Boys style pose-to-pose-inbetweening following an imaginary arc is visible in the frames below:

The following scene contains three different concepts: 

1. Elongation: we see not only elongation but also multiplication (eyes), which has become a staple of Jones cartoons:

The hand (the visual focus) is already "normal" while the face 
is still smeared. The ears provide nice overlap.

2. But not all fast movements are done in smears. Some motion blur is simulated with good old dry brush strokes following the arc of the movement in the character's colors:

 There's some nice anticipation on Daffy and 
counteraction on the legs in frames 5 and 6.

3. Finally there's elongation of a different kind: the dogs' materiality changes for a split second into a rubbery carpet without any strength.

For comparison: Bob Clampett didn't hide these "off-model" drawings only during fast motions, he made a style of using them for the acting as can be seen in Book Revue (1946):

NTSC-pull-down issues prevented me from capturing all frames, but the remaining ones surely show Clampett's attempt of exaggerating almost every motion. Just look at Daffy's arms and hands.

Chuck Jones on the other hand took his pose-to-pose style even further and got more or less rid of real smears as his style evolved. The poses are held longer while the transitional inbetweens are practically non-existent any more (The Scarlet Pumpernickel, 1950):

There's only a bit of dry brushing left.

A motion that would have been smeared earlier is now not even really inbetweened (Drip-Along Daffy, 1951)

The arms just go down from frame 6 to 7 with only the overlapping secondary motion 

on the pants giving a sense of movement.

Daffy is not seen zipping off to the left. It's just the secondary action 

and a bit of dry brushing that implies his sudden exit.

This is practically the same exit action like the famous one by the witch Hazel. Only that her hair pins are replaced by bullets here. It's noteworthy that all the animation in these later Jones cartoons indeed seems to be on 2s, like Ken Harris told Richard Williams. Noteworthy, because this is clearly not the case in earlier Looney Tunes. Here the effects (the vanishing smoke) are on 1s, by the way.

Finally, the multiplication smear is used for strong expression changes rather than transitions of far away poses:

Daffy in My Little Duckaroo (1954).

Shedding light on Mowgli

After what feels like an eternity of blogging hibernation I'd like to warm up with a short Jungle Book scene I'm sure everybody remembers. Note: I haven't forgotten the promised follow-up to my last post but, frankly, I bit off a bit more than I could chew when I started comparing some 40 full-scale movie reviews...

While reading the dialogue chapter of Nancy Beiman's new book "Animated Performance" I felt the urge to click through some favorite Baloo scenes frame by frame which reminded me of the following change in lighting:

After I saw the film in a theater as a child I was wondering how they achieved the change from blue night colors to the warm colors of the rising sun without the audience noticing it any sooner than Baloo does during the conversation.


From what I've seen in stills I then figured that the background lighting changed from shot to shot but wasn't really sure if what I've seen was really there or just in my imagination.

In 1994 I was lucky enough to project a 16mm print of the whole movie twice on the same day and was able to have a closer look at the scenes I was always thinking about. Turned out that I was right and it was no big deal of special effects, "just" careful background planning (I had secretly hoped that it was achieved by some magical lighting change effect during the shots, though).

This is a good example for the relatively inexpensive devices in the late nine-old-men features (especially post-Sleeping Beauty) that suggest rich special effects. Of course, "inexpensive" may not be the right word if you look closely at the backgrounds: there are a lot more different background paintings than would have been absolutely necessary, just look at the differences in the left hand tree in 7 of the following screengrabs:

For many shots the night lingers on without change, then after we start to feel the length of the conversation, dawn seems to break faintly giving Baloo a deadline to confront Mowgli (these are not all the shots of the sequence, just a subjective selection).

Despite the intuitive feeling that the change happens gradually from shot to shot, the advent of light comes in stages with always a few BGs kept in roughly the same amount of yellow light.

Note: I happened to see a Technicolor print from the 1992 re-release version a few days before I first saw the latest DVD presentation. And while the print featured the warm and dark brown Baloo, Hans Bacher is talking about here, I can also say that the colors overall were a bit darker and richer in this version but probably "remastered" from the original as well (as the sound obviously was).

A man of one single film?

I know that most people come here because of my posts on color but I also believe that most readers are interested in animation and film making in general. So when I come back to films like Dumbo (1941) over and over again, this is not because I only like simple escapist fare. I do like Dumbo, of course, which caused me to look closer at it despite having seen so many more interesting films throughout the years. However, there are several reasons for writing about Disney’s early features here:

First of all, these are the films I believe every reader of this blog has seen at least once (do you read many analyses of films you haven’t seen yet?) and they are available to almost anybody around the world so you don’t have to take my analysis for granted but can reassess it yourself.

There is much more to them than just brilliant character animation. Every storytelling device is used so carefully that it rewards analysis. Furthermore, it’s always interesting to see what a mainstream film as a mirror of mainstream social conventions tells us about a certain period and what makes it still work for today’s audiences.

On the other hand the stories themselves are as basic and simple yet effective that analyzing them can tell us a lot about more complicated or complex movies and essentially about film making in general. It’s important to stop looking at animation isolated from live-action films.

I believe that this blinder perspective is one reason why there still is an “animation ghetto”. The most obvious proof of its existence are overwhelmingly enthusiastic reactions from top critics to every new Pixar production even though most of these movies are only better than other studios’ animated features but hardly as interesting as any live-action film that gets comparable reviews.

Or in other words: excellence within established formulaic conventions is praised so loud that – maybe unintentionally – these conventions are cemented as natural limits to animation. This, among other things, is how a whole medium gets to be widely mistaken for a genre.

I strongly believe that in-depth analysis of just one single film can uncover much more about the nuts and bolts of film making than just superficially comparing many films. Of course, in order to put these discoveries into context, we have to see a lot of movies for comparison. Once you’ve recognized a certain pattern in the film you study, you become aware of it in other films without really looking for it. This certainly enriched my movie viewing experience and still does, every time I stumble upon a new concept.

So, most importantly, writing about a nearly 70 year old film like Dumbo is only interesting in a broader context that tells us something about film making or even human behavior in general.

Last but not least, looking at one film over and over again in different contexts may ultimately help us decide where we want to go with our own works and hopefully may encourage us to shake off the limitations that mainstream feature animation (perceived as a genre) is currently suffering from.

By the way, I do think Ponyo is a remarkable film not because it is old fashioned or even hand drawn, but because it explores its themes from a personal rather than a formulaic point of view. Accordingly, even though I consider Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) to be one of the best animated features I do not want to see another Snow White unless someone truly makes it his own story again. I’d rather see Mary and Max or any other character-based film that does not revert to animation as an excuse for being predictable and formulaic but as the medium of choice to present a certain story.