Boo Boo

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Stylish Flintstones Comics

Chris Lopez has done us another great turn. I don't know where he gets these old comic strips, but it's generous of him to share them with the world.
I loved these comics when I was a kid. I'm more critical of them now, but still enjoy looking at them. I wish I had them all.
Most of the drawings are probably Gene Hazelton (according to Chris they might be Dick Bickenbach) but both had very pleasing, sedate but somewhat modern styles.
Someone drew a good dead Fred.
This looks like an Ed Benedict character. He told me he ghosted for awhile in the 60s.
I love the great lettering in the comics. The title lettering was always a thrill. Unfortunately these are from truncated versions of the strips that leave out the title panels and possibly other panels. What a crime!
I have been spoiled by widened tastes and discovering many more great cartoonists over the years. Harvey Eisenberg's careful compositions and perfectly balanced poses make me think of these comics as being kind of clumsy by comparison. Milt Gross' wild layouts and funny posing makes this stuff seem really tame to me now.
I think the big difference between strips that catch on and strips that may be great, but not so popular is character. I'm of the opinion that a wide audience reacts best to cartoons about characters, rather than mere genius of execution - or even humor. They'll take mild humor with strong characters over hilarity with weak characters.

Milt Gross, Harvey Kurtzman, Geo. Herriman all did brilliant work, but never created strong characters that the public could latch on to. Segar, a lesser draftsman than all mentioned created Popeye, Olive Oyl, Wimpy, Bluto and a host of interesting characters who could carry long stories and many stories. That's the key. He has drawing skill for sure, but is not as adventurous visually as the other guys.


The Flintstones were such strong and distinct characters on TV, that they didn't need to be executed brilliantly in order to last 3 decades. A mere 6 seasons were played over and over again forever because the public got the characters. They seemed like real folks and people like to hang around with characters more than with geniuses. Same thing can probably be said about Peanuts. Or the Simpsons. I've never thought much of the meandering stories and weak gags in the Simpsons, but I sort of understand how the public got used to the characters through sheer exposure. It's on 12 times a day. It eventually became like visiting your neighbors and befriending them. Even if your neighbors are boring, they are easily accessible and recognizable, so you enjoy their company through familiarity and habit.

Tex Avery on the other hand is an obvious genius, an innovator and very funny, but he never achieved the popularity of the Warner Bros. characters or even Tom and Jerry, who are barely characters at all - but at least they never go away. People got used to T&J because it's all Bill and Joe made for almost 20 years. Tex never settled on any strong characters and it robbed him of the acclaim and riches his greater talent deserved.

The Flintstones comics weren't funny and didn't match the show concept exactly, but were stylish enough to look at and our already strong familiarity of the likeable TV characters made us enjoy the strip version - at least until it got too influenced by late 60s comic strip styles and no longer had any resemblance to the Flintstones. I love silhouette panels in comics and the odd time they do it in animated cartoons. It really tests an artists' skills to make something read clearly in silhouette.
Familiar characters done reasonably well give us comfort. Genius makes us feel and think - or run away if we are kind of stupid. Some folks just want to relax and forget about the day's troubles.

I like Clampett because he gives us everything - fantastic characters and funny stories with great execution.

Hey do me a favor, willya? Type in "Clampett" in that Ligit search slot at the upper right of the blog and see what happens. I'm doing a test.

http://comicrazys.com/2009/10/23/the-flintstones-sundays-1965-1966-dick-bickenbach/

Review Of Meatballs

I went to see this movie as a fluke. Kali and I were bored yesterday afternoon, and I said "Is there a movie out that won't make us sick?" We remembered seeing ads for the Meatball movie and I thought, "well the characters look awful bland, but at least they aren't outright nasty" so we went to see it. Now I wish we had seen it in 3d.

Whoever chose the promotional stills can't be very bright, because he chose the most sedentary looking stuff imaginable. There actually is some stuff in it that is pretty interesting to look at, but let's start with how you would usually review a movie:

Characters: The first thing that attracts me to a cartoon is the characters.

That means 2 basic elements:

1) The characters' specific designs.
2) The characters' unique personalities.


This movie has neither. The character designs are stolen from Davy and Goliath - which is as bland as Christian animation can be. The personalities are non-existent. They have the same exact characteristics as every modern animated feature.
The boy is a wimp who has no self esteem.
The girl is mildly sassy but has no individual quirks.

If the characters are bland, why are they good? They aren't, but merely bland is better than completely repulsive:I'm so used to seeing animated characters who look about as appealing as your dad naked, that to see characters who are merely inoffensive is a positive change for the better.

This character is a little too stylized to be believable, but at least it's an attempt to be a design at all.The black characters are stock Cal Arts "Bebe's Kids" that are in a million movies.
The monkey is in every Cartoon Network cartoon, but he looks good in 3d.

The voices as usual are completely uninteresting:Who are these people and why are they in the publicity photos? I've never understood the feature animation theory of using live action actors who have no distinguishable voices to do the acting. What kid cares? Seems like a complete waste of money to me.



Story:

The story doesn't work on any level, even according to its own rules. There is about 10 minutes worth of plot, dragged out to a feature length. It's not funny or anything. Well maybe once or twice.

I won't give away the resolution. I couldn't anyway, because there isn't one. The kid does something he thinks is good, everyone thinks it's good for awhile, then it turns bad, then by vague unexplained magic the bad is stopped, leaving a ton of damage - and then everyone forgives him, even though he's ruined his whole town.

No animated features have stories that work, so this is not a fault by comparison with the norm.

Lessons that no one wants in movies:

We learn the same lessons that we learn in every animated movie
It's OK to be yourself - especially if you are bland and wimpy.
We learn that Dads love their kids but have trouble saying it.
We learn that cute girls like wimpy guys.

We shouldn't force kids to learn lessons in cartoons, especially the same ones over and over again that we don't ourselves believe.

So what's good about it? Unfortunately, nothing that is reflected in the stills.
This guy, when he gets really fat is very cartoony and fun to look at. I wish I could show you.

THE WAY IT MOVES:

The characters move about 50% Cal Arts formula, and then 50% cartoony.

There are some funny walks and runs. If only they would turn off the motion blur we could appreciate them better. The characters make expressions that the artists just made up for certain scenes. Yeah, you see a lot of stock Pixar faces and actions, but there are just as many original ones.

Posing:
The poses are refreshingly clear and cartoony and original. Clean silhouettes and lines of action just like in old cartoons.

Not Ashamed Of Being Animated
It looks like a big step towards not being ashamed of being a cartoon. Even though the story and characterizations are stock, the animators went ahead and had fun anyway and they were lucky enough to not have someone stop them each time.

That, in my long experience is a miracle in itself.

The artists are allowed to make fun of the formula
Even when there are the typical stock contrived pathos scenes, the animators or storyboard artists try to keep something funny looking or interesting happening at the same time to take the edge off the insincerity.

The girl moves in uniquely girl ways:
She may be a generic design - right out of The Incredibles and every second Nickelodeon or Nelvana cartoon, but she actually moves very well. It's hard to pose girls naturally, but the animators do an excellent job of it. She makes a lot of unique expressions too - although not in this or any of the stills. In fact, she hardly ever has completely symmetrical expressions like these.
Hands

The hands are very interesting in the cartoon. They are designed well for CG and they move in very interesting ways.


Budget:

Well the budget has to be astronomical, because it's non stop crowd scenes and there are tons of environments. I would rather see less clutter and a better use of composition and individual characters. Money doesn't equal quality, and the movie had lots of obviously talented people working on it that could have spent more time on less noise.

Interesting backgrounds and props:

Unfortunately, I couldn't find the best ones in the stills.

The kid's lab is much more interesting than this still shows below, so I'm not sure why it isn't being featured in the promotion.

This gives a better hint of it:
The best part is the visual cartoony effects:

There are lots of surreal scenes of strange things going on that I can't find a single image of. They mostly happen at the climax that doesn't make any sense but has lots of fun looking things going on. There are weird slimy blobs coming out of who knows what and the textures and lighting are the most creative I have seen in a CG movie yet. Usually the BGs are realistic, which has never made any sense to me.Like, why is this in an animated movie?


My Rating:

I would give this an even zero - which is leagues ahead of any other animated feature today. Most cartoon features are thousands of points in the negative.

It's not like the old days, where cartoons were expected to be entertaining. In the 1940s you might rate cartoons between 50% and 100%, because they had higher entertainment standards to begin with. Even a Terrytoons has some entertainment value - because it's not purposely trying not to, unlike modern animation.

I had a tough time sitting in my seat through Meatballs, because what was happening and who it was happening to was not remotely interesting. It's hard to pace a story around characters with no personality.


But as a cartoonist and designer, there was enough visual interest and unique action throughout the movie that intellectually I found things to stimulate me.


It was an optimistic portent of what could be. It's basically an undirected film - but one that allowed many of the artists to take nothing scenes and add some kind of cleverness, design and action to the formulaic events being told by the story.


This in itself is so far ahead of an overdirected film (overdirected by executives typically, not by directors that actually have a point of view or style) that stops creativity from happening every step of the way, just so that more stock plot points, filler and bad puns can happen.



If I was a kid, I would love the movie, because it at least gives kids some of what they like - weirdness, action, impossible stuff and some zaniness.


Oh, and it's the first CG film where the CG is better than than the accompanying 2d short.

I have to repeat what I said about the stills: None of them show any of the unique and appealing attributes of the film. It's almost as if someone at Sony knows that the film is unique and is trying to hide it from the masses.

Johnny Hart and Specific Characters

SPECIFIC CARTOON PERSONALITIES ARE RARE BUT SPECIAL

One of the things about Hart that really influenced me is how specific some of his characters were. Most cartoon characters are pretty simple stereotypes, but the kind of cartoons I respond to most are the ones with the most unique personalities - and the artists who are able to draw the personalities, not just write them.

Popeye, Bugs Bunny, Yogi Bear, some Peanuts characters..there really is only a handful of complex characters in our whole history. Specific is naturally funny.

WHAT IS A SPECIFIC PERSONALITY?

What do I mean by specific?



I could also say a character who has a few traits that you would never think to put together, some odd contradictions and some random unrelated traits. That's how real people are.

Most people don't analyze things into their separate parts. If they did, they would realize that many things and people they think of as whole entities are really mishmashes of odd parts. We glue the mismatched parts in our heads and don't question them. The most interesting people are the ones with the most mishmash.

SIMPLE CARTOON PERSONALITIES

Think of how many generic cartoon stereotypes there are.
The big dumb strong guy. The little mean guy. The wiseacre. The normal guy. The 'tude guy. The assertive modern girl. None of those characters make up whole characters. There aren't enough mismatched unrelated traits.

Animation has the worst history of shallow characters. Mickey, Sneezy, Grumpy, Happy, etc. Characters who either have no trait at all, or just one.

JOHNNY HART'S RANGE OF SPECIFICITY

Johnny Hart has characters that range from the completely generic to the most specific.

B.C. has no personality.

Thor is a frustrated inventor who sometimes has a way with girls. Not enough to make a full character.

Peter is a snooty know-it-all. We've seen that many times.

Curls is sarcastic.

The cute girl is the cute girl. That's it.

The fat Broad is more interesting. She is a man-hunter. She loves men but also wants to dominate them. She hates snakes and beats them to a pulp.

Hart's most specific characters though, have the oddest traits.

CLUMSY CARP

Clumsy Carp is clumsy. By itself, not much of anything.

He also is an ichthyologist - he studies fish, especially rare prehistoric ones. He spends hours a day with his head under water watching the odd fish go by.

WILEY

Wiley is the oddest, most specific character of all. He has the most unique and unrelated traits:

He is a poet.
He hates water - actually fears and is repulsed by it.

He is scraggly and has a peg leg.

He is superstitious. Superstition is one of the funniest traits a human can have and Hart really draws superstitious fear and outrage with great conviction.

He distrusts anything new - especially women. The very fact that women are so appealing makes him distrust them. When Hart combines Wiley's phobias it's really funny.

I always wondered - how did Hart decide on these weird combinations of traits? They work great and real people are like that, but it's not usual to see it in cartoons. Did he just sit down and make a list of these traits and build a character around them? Or did he draw Wiley first and then come up with traits for him?

Other specific characters in comics and cartoons tended to evolve. Popeye wasn't quite as weird as he became later. Bugs evolved over a few cartoons. The Peanuts characters started as generic characters and little by little grew specific odd traits. Linus is insecure and needs to clutch his blanket. We accept that as normal now, but how did Schultz come up with that? Schroeder was just a small kid but then started playing the piano. I can't remember whether Lucy sprung into character full blown or whether she evolved.

Hart and Schultz' comics are not as funny as the best animated cartoons, or Don Martin comics, but they have something else that we instinctively crave in entertainment- characters that seem real - and by real, that usually means unexpected combinations of odd traits. We read those comics because we like to follow the adventures of the characters. We don't need a belly laugh every step of the way. The weirdness of the personalities and how they play off each other is entertainment.

CARTOONISTS ARE AT A DISADVANTAGE TO ACTORS IN CREATING CHARACTERS

When live actors create specific characters for TV and movies, they bring a lot of themselves to the character. Even if the script doesn't create fully blown personalities and quirks in the writing, an interesting actor can fill in the gaps with his own idiosyncrasies, look and voice.





We in cartoons have to come up with it almost from scratch and that's why cartoon characters in general are pretty stereotypical and simple compared to live characters. So when someone like Johnny Hart comes along and creates specific characters from scratch, it's mighty impressive.

STEREOTYPICAL GROUPS MADE UP OF UNRELATED RANDOM TRAITS

You could take this idea of unrelated odd traits a step farther and think of whole groups of people who are stereotyped. Like, you're either a "democrat" or a "republican". When you actually list the beliefs and traits that make up either group, you can find a lot of unrelated randomly selected attributes that the poor members have to believe and accept in order to belong to their chosen stereotype.

Republicans believe in Guns and Jesus - 2 completely incompatible philosophies.
They believe in "right to life", until you grow up and then they send you to get your head blown off. They believe in unrestrained capitalism, even though a huge chunk of their group are poor rednecks who are the last to benefit from this belief.
Like Joe the Goddamn Plumber. Republican radio hosts have hard rock music for their intros. Someone explain that one to me. Shouldn't they only have country music?


Democrats believe in defending the rights of the poor, but wouldn't be caught dead hanging out with any of them. They also believe in political correctness and not offending other groups - even though the poor people they defend are probably the least politically correct people in the country.You could make a long list of the beliefs and traits of any group of people and find totally random unrelated parts that make up the whole we recognize as the group.