Please Help! Animation Resources depends on your contributions to support its services to the worldwide animation community. Please contribute using PayPal.
Project Angels
John Kricfalusi, Mike Van Eaton, Rita Street, Jorge Garrido, Andreas Deja, John Canemaker, Jerry Beck, Leonard Maltin, June Foray, Paul and John Vinci, B. Paul Husband, Nancy Cartwright, Mike Fontanelli, Tom & Jill Kenny, Will Finn, Ralph Bakshi, Sherm Cohen, Marc Deckter, Dan diPaola, Kara Vallow
Project Heroes
Janet Blatter, Keith Lango Animation, Thorsten Bruemmel, David Soto, Paul Dini, Rik Maki, Ray Pointer, James Tucker, Rogelio Toledo, Nicolas Martinez, Joyce Murray Sullivan, David Wilson, David Apatoff, San Jose State Shrunkenheadman Club, Matthew DeCoster, Dino's Pizza, Chappell Ellison, Brian Homan, Barbara Miller, Wes Archer, Kevin Dooley, Caroline Melinger
Project Volunteers
Gemma Ross, Milton Knight, Claudio Riba, Eric Graf, Michael Fallik, Gary Francis, Joseph Baptista, Kelsey Sorge-Toomey, Alexander Camarillo, Alex Vassilev, Ernest Kim, Danny Young, Glenn Han, Sarah Worth, Chris Paluszek, Michael Woodside, Giancarlo Cassia, Ross Kolde, Amy Rogers
We’ve updated our Animation Resources podcast featuring insider secrets about how to break into the animation business and setting a course for creative growth as an animator. Join Animation Resources Director of Programming Davey Jarrell and Director of Publicity David “Pez” Hofmann as they share their experience and provide resources.
Fall is time to join Animation Resources as a student member. Annual dues for full time students and educators is discounted. It’s the biggest bargain in animation at only $70 a year. Animation School is great, but it doesn’t give you everything you need to become a professional animator. You need to invest in self-study to be successful in this highly competitive field. That’s exactly what Animation Resources can help you do if you become a member. Each day we’ll be highlighting more reasons why you should join Animation Resources. Bookmark us and check back every day.
There’s no better way to feed your creativity than to be a member of Animation Resources. Every month, we share a Reference Pack that is chock full of downloadable e-books and still framable videos designed to expand your horizons and blow your mind, as well as educational podcasts and seminars. It’s easy to join. Just click on this link and you can sign up right now online.
We had a question from a Facebook follower… “What kind of relevance do the the motion and principles of cartoons like Popeye and Mickey Mouse hold to contemporary cartoons or cartoons with more realistic designs with anatomy and different styles of motion?”
That is an excellent question, and it goes to the heart of how we as human beings learn.
When you start out to master any difficult skill, you should learn it in a progression from simple to more complex. If you try to juggle too many complexities when you are just starting out, you end up making a high splat on the wall and you end up learning nothing.
The great jazz pianist Bill Evans discusses this idea in relation to musical improvisation in this video. Please watch this video before reading further. Don’t just skip by this video. It’s very important to what I am trying to explain here, and it gives an astoundingly clear demonstration of this particular principle in practice…
When you begin to play a musical instrument, you start with scales. You don’t start out playing Bach or Liszt. Animation is no different. Drawing volumetrically and solidly is difficult. Drawing a complex realistic human form volumetrically and solidly is extremely difficult. Animating a realistic human form volumetrically and solidly is completely impossible for someone just beginning to develop their animation skills.
The animators who created Snow White and Pinocchio all started animating in the rubber hose style. Using simple forms allowed them to focus on learning how to convey the spirit of a walk cycle or express personality through rhythms, gestures and expressions. The simplicity of the model allowed them to refine and perfect their basic principles… line of action, clear silhouettes, control of volumes in space, appealing proportions… without having to add the compounding difficulty of complex planes, anatomy, musculature and turning highly organic shapes in three dimensions.
When you have learned the principles one by one through experimentation and practice using simple forms, you can begin to add complexity a little at a time, and over a period of years, perhaps you will have the experience and understanding to attempt to animate a realistic human form. Milt Kahl and Mark Davis weren’t born with the experience and draftsmanship to be able to animate realistic human characters the way they animated them in Sleeping Beauty… They worked their way up to it by animating characters with more basic shapes and built their chops. They animated rubber hose characters. And the rubber hose animation in the early 30s Mickey Mouse and Popeye cartoons is drop dead brilliant. If you can’t see the genius in the Popeye walk cycles Nicholas has been posting, go back and look at them again and analyze them for the principles of motion, posing and staging they embody. I bet you’ll find that you were looking at the surface level- the model of the character- and not even considering the way it’s posed and animated.
Students are always impatient and they want everything now. That’s only natural But if you allow your impatience to prevent you from learning in a logical, orderly progression, your impatience can cripple you. Keep your eye on the ultimate goal, but keep putting just one foot in front of the other until you get there.
Back To School Days At Animation Resources
Fall is time to join Animation Resources as a student member. Annual dues for full time students and educators is discounted. It’s the biggest bargain in animation at only $70 a year. Animation School is great, but it doesn’t give you everything you need to become a professional animator. You need to invest in self-study to be successful in this highly competitive field. That’s exactly what Animation Resources can help you do if you become a member. Each day we’ll be highlighting more reasons why you should join Animation Resources. Bookmark us and check back every day.
There’s no better way to feed your creativity than to be a member of Animation Resources. Every month, we share a Reference Pack that is chock full of downloadable e-books and still framable videos designed to expand your horizons and blow your mind, as well as educational podcasts and seminars. It’s easy to join. Just click on this link and you can sign up right now online.
Yesterday, I received an email that changed the way I think about the world we live in and the work we do here at Animation Resources…
A gentleman sent me photos of a hand drawn book that he had found. It consisted of a cover to cover copy of “How To Draw Funny Pictures” by E. C Matthews and Eugene "Zim" Zimmerman. He told me that the book consisted of over 80 carefully drawn pages, each one dated with a date from the early Spring to the Fall of 1940. He asked me what it could have been made for. I started to explain that it looked like a student’s copy of the book, but then I stopped and thought for a moment…
Why would a student copy a book text and all? It was a mystery. But the more I thought about it, the more the explanation became clear.. This book was published in 1928. By 1940, it would have been long out of print. The only place a student could access a copy was at the public library. But back then, they didn’t have Xerox machines or cell phones with cameras. The only way a student could get a copy of the book for himself would be to copy it by hand. This student obviously saw the incredible value of these lessons and wanted a copy of them to work with… so he spent week after week for months going to the library to copy every page by hand. Think about that for a minute. Imagine the dedication it would take to resolve yourself to copy a whole book by hand just so you would always have access to its information.
Today, we’re spoiled. If we want to see great artwork, we can Google it up from the internet. If we want a book to study, we just order it from Amazon and it’s delivered to our doorstep in two days. We take it for granted that all of this information is available to us so easily. We don’t have to spend the time that this artist did. I can’t even fathom how precious this sketchbook copy must have been to him. He invested his time and energy into fully absorbing it page after page, week after week, until the information became a part of him. As he got deeper into the book, he must have grown as an artist as well.
Now I’m not recommending that students hand copy important books. But I do want to get across the idea that the material artists feed their brains with is important to their growth. We should appreciate the motherlode of great reference material we have access to. Animation Resources republished the entire Zim Course for its members— over 700 pages of great lessons, advice and inspiration. I’m sure a lot of you have it sitting on your hard drives and you’ve spent some time browsing it. But have you spent the time and energy to absorb it to the degree that this artist did? We should all have that much dedication!
Every other month, Animation Resources publishes an e-book for its members. They’re jam packed with valuable and relevant information from the past to help you grow as an artist. Ralph Bakshi once commented that he hopes the kid artists out there appreciate the treasures that Animation Resources shares with them. Ralph didn’t have those sorts of opportunities when he was first starting out. But today, artists who are members of Animation Resources get the good stuff that he he spent years researching and seeking out handed to them every other month as a convenient digital download.
If you are an artist who is interested in bettering yourself with new ideas, new skills and great inspiration and you aren’t a member of Animation Resources, you should ask yourself if you are as dedicated to reaching your goals as this artist was. Do you appreciate the work Animation Resources is doing? If so, why haven’t you joined yet?
Every other month, you can receive a Reference Pack with an e-book and downloadable animated films… the sort of thing that would have made the artist who meticulously copied this book jump for joy. Support the group that supports your growth as an artist. Dedicate yourself to helping us raise the bar for cartooning, illustration and animation. It’s worth it. The foundation of knowledge from the past will help us create a whole new world that surpasses the Golden Age. What are you waiting for?
Back To School Days At Animation Resources
Fall is time to join Animation Resources as a student member. Annual dues for full time students and educators is discounted. It’s the biggest bargain in animation at only $70 a year. Animation School is great, but it doesn’t give you everything you need to become a professional animator. You need to invest in self-study to be successful in this highly competitive field. That’s exactly what Animation Resources can help you do if you become a member. Each day we’ll be highlighting more reasons why you should join Animation Resources. Bookmark us and check back every day.
There’s no better way to feed your creativity than to be a member of Animation Resources. Every month, we share a Reference Pack that is chock full of downloadable e-books and still framable videos designed to expand your horizons and blow your mind, as well as educational podcasts and seminars. It’s easy to join. Just click on this link and you can sign up right now online.
Please Help! Animation Resources depends on your contributions to support its services to the worldwide animation community. Please contribute using PayPal.
Please Help! Animation Resources depends on your contributions to support its services to the worldwide animation community. Please contribute using PayPal.
Please Help! Animation Resources depends on your contributions to support its services to the worldwide animation community. Please contribute using PayPal.
by 
