The Milky Waif – cheating continuity – part 3

I've been experiencing trouble of all sorts, including with my internet connection, recently, so there might be some delay in publishing comments... But back to the subject:

Cheating proportions and perspectives

This is the first time Jerry tiptoes out of his mousehole into the kitchen. The perspective on the wall is rather forced but not obviously so. Jerry’s size appears to be pretty accurate compared to the mousehole and the green stool leg which is all that counts for the audience at this moment. From the overall picture we deduce that the square tiles are about as wide as Jerry is high.

So when we look at the second picture, it looks as if Jerry had been growing because not all of these tiles are square any more.

This is even more the case in this next frame where we don’t have the cupboard for comparison. Taking into account the size of the square tiles, Jerry is almost as high as the cupboard behind. So clearly the perspective isn’t forced on the floor, only on walls and furniture. The important proportion here is between Jerry and Nibbles.

You could measure Jerry and you would see that neither he nor the shot width change sizes during this pan. But easier than that, you could just look at the pan as a whole to see that it’s completely linear except for the forced perspective already mentioned:

 

The slight reflections give the floor a nice polished texture. Although the horizontal lines are absolutely straight and we are looking at the wall at a 90° angle, the floor perspective fools us into believing that the camera isn’t always straight on but first slightly to the left, then flat on in the middle and later slightly to the right. If the camera had to be straight on all the time, one had had to animate the tiled floor like in Ken Anderson’s famous Three Orphan Kittens scene.

What I’m getting at is this: during projection this shot looks all natural and consistent, yet it is competently crafted using many inconspicuous cheats.

Then two shots later, Jerry comes running from the left still on the same floor. All the horizontals are parallel, there are no verticals, only diagonals that are fairly parallel, which is all perfect for a medium fast pan. BUT: look how small Jerry suddenly is compared to the wall and to the tiles! Although he’s still running in exactly the same direction as in the first pan, he is far closer to the wall.

It all makes sense when we see him in correct proportions to Nibbles, Tom and the bowl of milk. As spectators, not only do we not care about the proportions of the background elements, we simply don’t notice it as long as the character proportions are correct. Probably, the tiles were drawn larger simply because they look good that way. This however has two advantages, whether planned or not: the tiles themselves don’t draw too much attention to themselves, they certainly wouldn’t strobe (this pan is faster than the first one) and they show the mice as really small vulnerable creatures compared to everything else.

In really fast pans, the tiles merge into one single strip of green to prevent strobing and perspective changes completely as can be seen in the following excerpt of a never-ending background loop.

It’s obviously the same floor as this pan connects Tom’s fridge area with Jerry’s mousehole. All the cupboards are gone, so the repetition is less obvious (the chair helps, too).

The same pan is used a second time later in the movie where Jerry suddenly brings Tom to a halt (like it is only possible in a chase cartoon). There we are reassured by the bowl reflection that it’s still the kitchen floor.

The Milky Waif – cheating continuity – part 2

Daniel Caylor of On Animation posted the following link in the comments: The Background Stylings of Don Driscoll. In September he wrote an interesting analysis of some original T&J shorts and their Cinemascope counterparts. Even if I don’t share his enthusiasm for Driscoll’s backgrounds at all, the comparisons are well worth studying.

Some more on cartoon colors:
As I have already stated in the last post, the most important trait of these backgrounds is their softness so that the characters read clearly. This is done by way of saturation and also by way of having low contrast on almost everything in the background. Basically it is high key lighting.

 

Even in a light/shadow composition, the contrast is kept rather low. 

The large form is accented by white rims.

In terms of storytelling, this even high key lighting is paramount because the characters have to read in front of every part of the picture, not just a preconceived pool of light. So no part of the background should attract attention to itself. Additionally, perceived spatial relations and perspectives have to look more or less normal in order to make the paintings work as backdrops for such fully dimensional cartoon characters.

 

The Tom and Jerry palette is usually limited to a few main colors, different in every short, but always rather unobtrusive and as low contrast as a realistic setting allows for. In this example, cyan/green and magenta/red are rather dominant (in pastel versions of course) like in so many different works of illustration and art.

 

Note that in the green RR example, shades of red are merely absent, probably due to Roger wearing glaring red trousers. The red is not only complimentary but also much more saturated than the green making for a clearer hierarchy. He’s wearing only primary colors, by the way, a clear indication that he was conceived in the 80s, no matter how many 40s allusions…

So far I have only written about Tom’s realm (kitchen and living room). Almost the first two minutes play in Jerry’s “apartment” however:

In the establishing shot (and the later close-up with a different flagstone) you can see a clear pool of light. These backgrounds are variations of the basic blue-yellow cold-warm color relations, if rather subdued.

 The blue which is not really that dark is simulating relative darkness. Note that in areas to be perceived as dark there are no yellow parts worked into the carpet. This also comes in handy when they use the faintly yellow straws later on. Since these backgrounds never have to accommodate Tom, the blue-gray areas can be rather large and make Jerry standout easily. Walls in front of which Nibbles has to be seen are never plain gray. Everything is prepared for Nibbles to be have a good silhouette while hanging from the stick next to Jerry’s head later on. Here the props (blankets) are in soft pastel colors, not saturated primaries like the violent props in the kitchen. Apart from the obvious tactile element of softness, it enhances Jerry's (and certainly Nibbles') round baby appearance.

The Milky Waif – cheating continuity – part 1: introduction

Note: I suspect my posts are too long for most of you to read right away, so I try to divide them up whenever this is workable.

Recently I was studying some Tom and Jerry pan backgrounds which inspired me to put together some thoughts about screen directions and geography in these cartoons. It’s astonishing how little has to be correct in terms of background continuity as long as the few recognizable elements aren’t popping up in completely unexpected spots. In short, anything goes, as long as screen directions are consistent and eyelines match.

The Milky Waif (released May 1946 as the 24th Hanna-Barbera T&J-short) is one of those censored* shorts that originally included blackface gags and derogatory slang imitations. If you haven’t seen it in a while, I’m sure you’ll find it somewhere around the web. The basis of my analysis is the version released on DVD in Europe on the second disc of “Tom and Jerry Collection” where almost all of them appear in chronological order. Although it might hardly be the most original or well animated of the lot, I have chosen this short because of its clearly limited indoor setting. It has become fairly well-known for the first appearance of the gray baby mouse character “Nibbles” who became Jerry’s longest running sidekick and ally.

The censored version at hand contains 67 shots (not counting any title cards and logos) for which 38 backgrounds seem to have been used. As could be expected in a cat-chases-mouse cartoon there are some rather long pans among them.

  

  

  

 First I’d like to sort out the relevant parts of the set: there is the iconic mousehole, then we have an equally iconic tiled kitchen floor, there’s a fridge (that is never opened, it just prevents us from getting lost in the kitchen), there are green stools all around. In the nearby living room there’s a blue carpet on a beige floor.


These design elements are so iconic that mock 40s cartoons like Roger Rabbit are drawing on our unconscious knowledge of cartoons:

As movable props we have a clearly recognizable yellow bowl of milk, a few straws, a red hammer, a frying pan, a milk bottle, some books and a fly swatter. In the finale, Jerry uses a garbage can and a mallet.

As you might have noticed yourself, the colors are different in each available version of these shorts. I do not usually color correct them for analysis (at least not without indication) because it is important to me that the source of the images remains identifiable. In other words, I’m analyzing what is there and not what I believe should be or once was there.

Colors of the same backgrounds and characters vary considerably from shot to shot due to aperture and lighting. It’s important that in the case of these transfers we don’t read too much into such visible changes. They are the product of getting evenly lit shots (or faded prints) rather than subtly planned effects. So the following color swatches represent general color choices only.

Background colors in these 40s shorts are always softer than the characters because they are painted in water colors. The watercolor kitchen for example is made up of soft pastel colors:

As opposed to the strong and opaque cel paint of the characters (this overview is deceiving because the strong body color should take much more space than the other colors):

  

Jerry                                  Tom 

(slightly reddish probably due to fading print)

The prop colors (cel paint, of course, not water color) are even more saturated than the characters’ brown/orange and gray/blue.

  

* for those interested in the uncut version (which you’ll find on youtube), wikipedia’s plot synopsis is accurate: 

"Jerry and Nibbles hide in a closet, while Tom hammers on the door. Seeing a chance to use deception, Jerry uses a container of nail polish he discovers to disguise himself and Nibbles as a pair of black people. Emerging from the closet, Jerry, dressed in headscarf and in blackface, greets Tom: "How you doin', Mister Tom?" and beckons Nibbles, his "honey child," to hurry up. Out comes Nibbles, also in blackface and wearing a headscarf. However, the disguise is revealed when Nibbles' diaper falls down, exposing his tail and gray fur. The chase continues, eventually leading to Jerry grabbing a frying pan and hitting Tom full in the face with it, knocking him out.” 

The end cut happens right after the last frame of disguised Nibbles running through, thus only leaving in the frying pan banging in Tom's face.

Face Accent

When I watched Firefox (Clint Eastwood, 1982) - a truly awful Cold War movie - the other day, there was a moment (lasting barely a second) that made me wince unexpectedly, not because of some filmmaking trick but due to controlled acting. It was this one shot that still lingers on in my mind, so I decided to take some screengrabs and post it here as an acting study.

What I'm writing about here is fairly conventional stuff, but stuff I tend to forget about when falling back into animation acting clichés.

Like the hard-boiled crooks in film noir classics, Eastwood's Russian military antagonists move as little as possible when they talk.This, of course, helps establish the stiff military environment. If Eastwood as a director is capable of one thing, then it's most classic straight forward film making that never draws attention to itself. (Part of what makes this movie so unbearable is his heavy-handed earnestness applied to a preposterous story.)

What we have here is a lenghty suppressed power play between the sober Soviet general Vladimirov (Klaus Löwitsch, one of Fassbinder's stars, condemned to play communist bad guys in 80s Hollywood) and the First Secretary (Stefan Schnabel), who is outraged about Eastwood stealing a MIG31 ("the firefox"). The scene is intercut with two parallel outside actions and - just before the climax - with reaction shots of the rest of the crew, which I have all left out.

In the first part of the scene, Vladimirov's eyes are almost always in the shadow. He is left in the frame, while the First Secretary is halfway in light and backed by his subordinates.

Then Eastwood shows us the spatial relations because one of the two radio guys in the front is receiving new information. It's interesting that he doesn't cut to an immediate close-up of the radio guy but stays on the ensemble to have us see the reaction of all people involved.

Then we come back to the antagonists, only closer this time.

After a few shots of a parallel scene we are back in the control room where the two have changed positions.

   

Vladimirov is still surrounded by darkness but his face is lit from below.

 

By classically cutting closer to the opposing faces (with large shadow areas, one of Eastwood’s most obvious trademarks), the tension is heightened. So when the climactic upshot (another one of Eastwood’s trademarks) finally appears, we only see facial features lit from below.

The climax of this power play scene: the general accuses the First Secretary (the real big shot here) of being stupid in front of all his men. After a short silence, the general now reverses the chain of command and tells the first secretary: “you must act, first secretary!”.

Dialogue (mustact.wav)

If you listen to the dialogue snippet, the accent lies on the word “act”. In animation we tend to accent this word by a strong head move (with a big anticipation maybe). Now a big head accent would destroy the rigid composition and would also appear out of character for the general. Instead the actor goes for what I call a face accent:

 

In this video you see each individual frame (roughly a second of screen time) for half a second.

If you overlay frame 1 with frame 17 (the extreme position), you see how little the head moves, yet how strongly the face is distorted:

The beautiful thing: In animation we could go much further with the distortion.

This shot also shows how the expression change is not happening all at once. Just study the timing on the various features like eyelids, eyebrows, cheeks and mouth. There are so many details here. Note how before the accent (frame 11-14) he doesn’t look his opponent into the eye but slightly dow. Here are the 25 frames used in the slow-motion video (the last one is next to the First Secretary's reaction shot):

 

  

  

  

Pierre Lambert's Lavish "Le Livre De La Jungle"

French author Pierre Lambert once again publishes a ridiculously expensive art book that is worth every cent. Although in numbers there may be less artwork on display here compared to the usual “Art of” book, but with so many production backgrounds reproduced in the most astonishing print quality, Lambert’s large format volume about Walt’s last feature The Jungle Book is nothing less than marvelous.

The Art Of Animated Features
Nowadays, “Art of” books accompany the release of almost every American animated feature. More often than not, those books simply seem to remind us how much individual style had to be suppressed to come up with widely acceptable mainstream aesthetics. The historical information these books provide seldom goes beyond self-congratulatory making-of stories common in DVD special features, which looks less embarrassing printed on glossy paper.

One gets the impression that, according to these books, the “art” of animated films is based on “unique” superficial styles (later considerably toned down for the finished film), focussing on design rather than on animation. Without wanting to sound too conservative, in the case of the features made during Walt Disney’s lifetime, most often I actually like what ends up on the screen and not just the preliminary artwork. Already back then, the mantra that you couldn’t get too graphic in a feature without losing character believability was repeated over and over, but even the blandest character designs came to life through animation.

Before the 1990s, “behind-the-scenes” material was only available in a few Disney endorsed books, especially the luxuriously illustrated but heavily biased ones by Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston. Meanwhile there are lots of wonderful Disney endorsed books by historians like John Canemaker and Brian Sibley that are full of preliminary art and lavish color plates. On the other hand, such indispensable independent books as Didier Ghez’s self-published interview collections or Michael Barrier’s thoroughly researched works cannot rely on the same wealth of artwork.


The Art Of Making Art Books
There is a third way, though: French author Pierre Lambert’s way. What makes Lambert’s independently published books so unique is their dignified presentation and the amazing print quality of his handpicked reproductions (backgrounds with cel overlays are even printed on gleaming paper to simulate real cel overlays). Currently, there is nothing comparable on the market.

I first heard of Pierre Lambert in 1997 when his lavish "Pinocchio" book was released in English and reviewed on German television. I wasn’t too familiar with the internet back then and without a credit card I wasn't able to order the book through amazon.com. Later on, when I finally figured out how to get it, it was already out of print.

So when I heard about Lambert’s new release "Le Livre De La Jungle" (The Jungle Book), I knew I had to get it immediately at all costs, since The Jungle Book has always been my favorite Disney movie and I’ve been waiting for such a book for what seemed like centuries.

Most books that deal with Disney studio history in general do not devote more than a few paragraphs to Walt’s last feature, most often dismissing it as below average but extremely popular with audiences.

On a side note: the most interesting background information so far can be found in the special features DVD of the platinum edition that presents many previously unpublished storyboards and other preliminary sketches. The highlight for me was the collection of abandoned Terry Gilkyson demo recordings and a more Beatles-inspired demo of “That’s what friends are for”.

Kipling, Peet, Disney – Three Opposing Forces
But back to the book. Pierre Lambert’s French text is a little gem all by itself (sometimes it comes in handy that in Switzerland you’re forced to learn French in school). Even though there is no newly acquired information (all the interviews have already been published elsewhere), this is the first time all these sources have been put together so neatly. Lambert starts with Bill Peet's recollections of the project’s origins and then compares Kipling’s, Peet’s and Disney’s version of the story. For every crew member he introduces he seamlessly incorporates a short but very insightful biographical overview, largely focussing on the people whose contributions finally made it to the screen.

While Lambert obviously writes from an admirer’s point of view, he never feels the urge to gloss over ruptures and studio mythology incompatibilities. He adresses re-use and questions the “time-saving” part of this strategy by quoting John Ewing about having to redraw a chase sequence from Mr. Toad. As The Jungle Book is much more character than story driven, Lambert structures his text around the development of the characters.

The Selected Artwork
One can only dream about what film this would have been had Peet, Peregoy and Gilkyson got their way. But while not suppressing any evidence of different versions Pierre Lambert focuses on the artwork of the film that finally got made. Mostly production artwork - animation art, that is.

After about twenty pages of text the artwork is presented in the order of the events in the film. While sketches by Ken Anderson and Al Dempster as well as a lot of uncredited works are present, most of the book is filled with gorgeous background paintings (sometimes with cels and overlays) and animation drawings. The only non directing animators featured are Eric Larson (vultures) and Eric Cleworth (elephants).

I don’t know how much of Walt Peregoy’s original concept art is still buried somewhere in the ARL or if he has taken it with him when he left the studio in 1965, but at least there is one painting of the man village credited to him in the book (page 217).

Compared to the strange Jungle Book selection in (John Lasseter’s ?) “Archive Series: Animation” the selected animation drawings here - from the loosest Ollie Johnston drawing of Mowgli hugging Baloo to Frank Thomas’ solid King Louie - really do justice to their creators.

The same cannot be said of many of the reproduced cels, though. Hardly any of the selected (available?) original production cels are key frames. While it is desirable to have setups that differ from the familiar ones, not every inbetween is a great drawing (which is ok in motion).

The Trouble With Cels
That’s also where the process of reproduction reveals its only flaw: cels and overlays look like they have been photographed/scanned in front of a white background, then digitally rotoscoped/cut-out and overlaid over the production backgrounds. Sometimes the white edges show, sometimes the pencil outlines are cut fuzzily. Also some of the multiplane overlays and imitated special effects don’t work very well, as is the case in some Shere Kahn cels with grass overlays (page 197) that originally looked slightly translucent (like in the screenshot on the left).

In order not to gray down the backgrounds that are the main attractions, this process is understandable and thus acceptable. What is not, in my opinion, is that some of the cels are wrongly adjusted or even in front of the wrong backgrounds, like the one on the cover. Why would anyone want to do that? These layouts may not have been planned to be seen in their entirety but they certainly have been planned with character positions in mind.

cover setup (2009) vs. story book setup (1982) 
vs. screenshot (Platinum Edition, cropped at 1:1.75)

I have another minor quibble though: I was a little disappointed that apart from one or two preliminary backgrounds attributed to Al Dempster, there are no background or layout credits at all. I guess there’s no way to find them out as there seem to be no background drafts, but if someone knows, I’d be glad to put a reference list together.

Already A Personal Favorite
One of my personal discoveries was how much of the character designs is still present in Bill Peet story sketches, although he left the studio before Walt commissioned the re-write by Clemmons, Wright and Gerry and remains completely uncredited. There are sketches of Kaa and Shere Kahn that really put Ken Anderson’s and Milt Kahl’s contribution in context. While Bill Peet was vengeful about Tytla getting credits for Dumbo animation Peet thought was already present in “his” storyboards, Kahl has made the two characters so much stronger by just a few alterations (Peet’s version of Kaa resembles the one in the beginning at night and not the later daytime design).

All points of criticism aside, this is already one of my most beloved Disney books ever. Get it while you can, even if you don’t speak French, because it’s the reproduced artwork that makes this book special. There are already rumors that there may be an English version sometime soon.

All screenshots from The Jungle Book Platinum 2-Disc Edition DVD.