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Tuesday, September 12th, 2023

Instruction: Writing Cartoons Pt 2- A Continuity Emerges

When I was beginning to draft this series of articles, I remembered a folder of thumbnails that Grim Natwick’s family gave me. The folder was labelled "Valiant Tailor Gags". I thumbed through the drawings several times over the years, but I only looked at the drawings individually- I didn’t look at them as a group. I pulled the folder out this week and upon closer examination, I discovered that the drawings formed a clear record of a gag session from 1934. This set of sketches is particularly important because it shows how the gags were created, how they evolved and grew as the artists discussed them at the story meeting, and how they found their way into the continuity of a finished cartoon.

The basic premise of this sequence is… The King is being chased by bees. He dives into a lake to escape them. The Giant arrives and harasses the King. The Tailor defeats the Giant and saves the King. Grim Natwick directed this cartoon, and his notes appear on the drawings in red. A check mark indicates that the gag is approved for the film. A question mark indicates that he isn’t sure where to use it yet.

Here are some of the gags that the staff of the Iwerks Studio came up with for this premise. At the end is a Quicktime movie of the complete cartoon, so you can see how these plans were realized in the finished film.

William Hamner suggests a gag where the King is swallowed by a whale and is shot out his blow hole. (Since the character design hadn’t been established yet, Hamner draws the character as Otto Soglow’s Little King!)

An artist named Hudson elaborates on Hamner’s basic idea, adding a tail flip to the end.

This gag suggests that the King be underwater, hiding from the Giant. The Giant tries to catch him like a fish with a gold watch as bait.

Underwater, the King uses a looking glass as a teeter totter.

The Giant blows on the water and a passing octopus offers him Listerine.

Ed Friedman suggests a gag where the Giant breaks a limb off a tree and uses it as a boomerang.

Another variant on the broken tree branch- The Giant uses it as a straw to drink the lake dry.

Several unrelated gags: The King runs out of the lake with streams of water from his crown. / The King is poked in the butt by a sword fish. / The Giant gets honey poured on his head. / The King is stung by bees on the patch on his butt.

The Giant runs from a swarm of bees and stumbles over some wagons.

Grim suggests a gag where the Giant takes a header into the dirt, plowing the ground in a furrow.

He attempts a topper gag with a farmer using the Giant to plow his field.

Now comes the really interesting part! Here are Grim Natwick’s thumbnails showing how he takes the random gags and works them into a rough continuity. The drawings are very rough. You might want to print them out so you can compare them to the finished film.

(32) The King enters scene and does a trout dive into the lake to escape the bees. We pan with the soldiers as the pursue the Tailor and chase him up a tree.
(33) The King bobs up and down in the water as the bees circle in a repeating cycle above him.
(34) A thunderous laugh is heard in the distance. The Giant steps over the crest of the hill and takes a few steps over them.
(35) The Giant scares the soldiers away. He looks at the King and laughs. The King ducks.
(36) The Giant blows on the water and throws a stone at the King.
(37) The King reaches up into the tree and grabs a branch. The Tailor jumps to another branch.

(39) The Giant uses the branch like a gaffing hook, reaching to catch the King with it.
(40) The hook at the end of the branch catches in the patch on the King’s butt.
(41) The Tailor sees what is happening and ducks into a hole in the tree. The camera pans down the outside of the tree to its base, where the Tailor crawls out of another hole.
(42) The Tailor sneaks past the Giant and runs off screen
(43) Dissolve to: Interior tailor shop. The Tailor grabs a jar of honey.

(44) Exterior Tailor Shop: The Tailor runs down the street with the jar.

(45) Dissolve to: The Tailor diving back into the hole in the tree trunk.

(46) The Tailor, standing on a high limb of the tree, drops the honey jar.

(47) The pot of honey dumps all over the Giant’s head.

(48) The King comes to the surface of the water as the bees go after the Giant.

(49) The Giant runs from the bees. He shoves his head in the dirt to escape them. He runs through a barn and a church over the hill and into the distance.

The sequence went from here to the storyboard stage, where the action was defined better and the gags were plussed. Watch the film and see how it came out…

The Valiant Tailor (Iwerks/1934)< (Quicktime 7 / 7 minutes / 18.5 megs)

The next article in this series will show how the structure of cartoons became more sophisticated in the mid-1930s, and the development of organizational tools that made that possible.

Stephen Worth
Director
Animation Resources

This posting is part of an online series of articles dealing with Instruction.

Posted in grim natwick, iwerks, storyboard, theory, writing | Comments Off on Instruction: Writing Cartoons Pt 2- A Continuity Emerges

Monday, September 11th, 2023

Instruction: Writing Cartoons Pt 1- The Gag Session

Disney Studios

If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably daydreamed about going back in time to be a "fly on the wall" at a golden age cartoon studio. Imagine getting the chance to witness how your favorite cartoons were written and see the twists and turns they took from initial idea to finished story. Unfortunately, that isn’t likely to happen. But we can find out an awful lot about the process used to write classic cartoons by looking at the scraps of paper left behind by the great artists who wrote them. I’m going to do just that in a series of posts over the next few weeks.

The specifics of the process of writing cartoons in the classic era varied a bit from studio to studio and from time period to time period. Like every other part of the production line, there was an evolution as experimentation led to the development of more effective techniques. But the general outline of the progress of a story from raw idea to boards ready to put into production didn’t vary all that much. I’m going to show you some specific examples that illustrate these general concepts in the hopes that you might come away with a better understanding of how cartoons were created.

Warner Bros.

THE GAG SESSION

The idea for a cartoon would start with a simple premise- a few sentences that described the general theme of the cartoon. For example… "Porky is a bullfighter." or "Mickey, Donald and Goofy are ghost exterminators." In the premise there would be no real attempt at describing details of the plot, just a simple statement of a situation or series of situations that might offer entertaining possibilities.

Premise for a 1930s Barney Google/Snuffy Smith cartoon.

Once the premise was chosen, a group of artists would be called together for an initial gag session to come up with ideas. At Warner Bros, this meeting was referred to as a "No No Session", which meant that no one was allowed to say "no" to any idea- all suggestions were fair game. At this stage, the gags were generally isolated variations on the basic theme of the premise, with no attempt to put them into any sort of continuity or plot. The goal was to come up with funny situations that could be expanded upon and reworked into something more specific further down the line.

Terry-Toons

The artists would sit with pads and pencils or lap boards, jotting down notes and doodling up thumbnail sketches of what the ideas might look like. The sketches might be pinned up on a cork board so the other artists could work gags off if it. One person would be responsible for taking notes for the group, so after the meeting was over, the story man could go back and refresh his memory of a specific gag. As the doodles and notes piled up, certain themes would form, gags would lead to follow up gags and build to "topper gags". A continuity would begin to take shape.

EXAMPLES

The notes taken at early story meetings were usually for the artists’ own reference, so the sketches were loose and the notes were scribbled down quickly. This makes them quite difficult for the layman to read. A certain amount of deciphering is required. At the bottom of each example, I summarize the contents of the notes. You might want to print them out. It’s easier to study them in a hard copy than on the computer screen.

Here are story notes from an unmade Fleischer Screen Song cartoon from the late 1920s. Based on the song, "Mysterious Mose", this premise was shelved and revived a couple of years later as a Betty Boop cartoon.

It appears that a little bit of development had occurred by the time this document was created, but not much. The lyrics are typed out with lots of space for drawing out the action between each line. The character of the piano player is to be in live action, while the moon and the cat are animated. The first page refers to the location of the beginning of the song on the bar sheet and indicates that a scene of the moon on the second page should be moved forward to this page, to allow the cat to be the focus of the shot the second time up.

The notes say that the second shot on this page should be focused on the cat, and he should jump from this scene cut to the next scene for the bouncing ball sequence.

Here we have all the lyrics of the song, and a quick outline of the sorts of gags the artists should come up with for the bouncing ball section of the film. By the end of the meeting, the director would have a stack of gag drawings to choose from. In the early days of animation, the story process was very informal, and the individual animator was often expected to flesh out the specifics of the action in his scenes on his own, co-ordinating with the animator of the preceding and following sequence on the hookup between sequences. Dave Fleischer was known to add gags all the way up to the animation stage.

There aren’t a lot of doodles on this next document, which dates back to the Charles Mintz Studio around 1934. Some gags are indicated by just a few terse words. This probably means that these notes were accompanied a pile of drawings, which the story man was trying to order into a basic continuity. The action has been divided into seven segments, each one representing approximately a minute of screen time.

The First Segment shows a circus parade arriving in town. A drum major disappears into his oversized hat; a french horn player pops out of a tuba to take a solo; a team of horses pans through pulling a street sweeper behind, a lion cage is propelled by the lion’s own legs- no wheels; and a polar bear drowns in an ice wagon full of melted ice.

In the Second Section the parade continues. A clown in a horse costume sticks his head out the tail and gives the crowd a razzberry; a clown jumps through a paper hoop- but it’s actually a Chinese gong; a parade of elephants- each one smaller than the one before- ends with an elephant so tiny, a clown has to use a magnifying glass to see it.

The Third Section includes a giraffe whose neck extends to eat the fake fruit off the hat of a lady in the crowd; a fat lady riding a hippopotamus wagon, and a gorilla who plays the harp on his cage bars, then escapes and kidnaps a girl. He snatches her up to the house tops.

Part Four: The circus performers attempt to rescue the girl. A tightrope walker walks on telegraph lines to reach the ape; a man is shot out of a cannon and the ape socks him in the nose; the ape perches on the top of a building and bees buzz around him like the airplanes buzzing King Kong.

In Part Five, an elephant shoots peanuts at the ape like a machine gun as an organ grinder’s monkey dances on the rooftops.

Part Six: The ape scares a flagpole sitter away from his perch and replaces him on the top of the pole. The organ grinder monkey cuts down the pole, gives the ape a big kick in the ass and marches him away.

Part Seven: The ape sees his reflection in a mirror and makes faces. The reflection swats him. The ape, who we expect to act like a he-man, acts like a pansy instead. The parade marches off into the distance as the ape rubs his sore ass from where the monkey kicked him.

In the next installment of this series on Cartoon Writing, I will show you a batch of sketches that document a story session at the Iwerks Studio in 1934.

Stephen Worth
Director
Animation Resources

This posting is part of an online series of articles dealing with Instruction.

Posted in fleischer, mintz, storyboard, theory, writing | Comments Off on Instruction: Writing Cartoons Pt 1- The Gag Session

Wednesday, August 23rd, 2023

Theory: Eric Larson On Music And The Animated Picture

Andreas Deja and Eric Larson

An’ the dawn comes up like thunder outer China crast the bay!

There may be no way of drawing a comparison, emotionally or in magnitude, between a spectacle of nature as painted in Mr. Kipling’s lines and Mickey Mouse’s performance in glorious black and white, as he bounced through Steamboat Willie, the first animated cartoon with sound. But, one thing is certain- Mickey and his music have had the greater impact world wide.

The sunrise, inspiring as it is, is for now- Mickey and his music is for days and days into time.

Steamboat Willie, the third Mickey Mouse short to be made, was the first to be exhibited. The opening was on November 18, 1928, at the “Colony” theater in New York City.

The day Mickey started bouncing to the sound of music, the entertainment curtain opened wider and wider and the animated picture took on a new and exciting dimension. The shorts pictures to follow were musically constructed to the beat- all carefully planned out in entirety by the director and his musician, cozily housed in their “music room”, before animation was even begun. Characters walked to a beat- ran to a beat- re-acted on the beat- punched one another to the beat- it was beat, beat, beat, and as people in the theater watched and listened, the unconsciously tapped their feet in sync. In the cartoon, sight and sound had joined forces and new horizons beckoned.

Fantasia, far ahead of its time and, to this day, still way out front, could well be considered the greatest marriage of the animated picture and music. In it, the creative relationship of one to the other is unsurpassed, offering the audience a memorable experience in the fanciful and the dramatic.

Gradually we began to look to music to further enhance our pictures, rather than to “control” them. We pulled away from the beat domination. With Snow White the animated picture became an exciting competitor to the live action film. Linear drawn characters, moving in the imaginative world of Walt Disney animation, pushed to the front, right as Stromboli would say, “In de pooblic’s eye”, and with those drawings came a new and expressive use of music in our films, giving support and punctuation to moods, locales and action. Music became a vital part of our story, adding new emotional pleasures and meaning to our pictures.

And then came those wonderful moments when musical instruments interpreted the personalities and the characters “did speak through music”.

In Peter and the Wolf the bassoon, you remember, was the personality and voice of the “Grandfather”. The oboe, melancholy in its sound, was Sascha’s friend the “Duck”, The flute, with its pitch and note capabilities, was the nervous, explosive little “Sascha”. Each of the other characters, too, found his identity in an instrument and melody.

In Peter and the Wolf, so closely were the intruments and music related to the characters’ personalities and actions that all musical notes in the score, where relevant to the scene, were copied onto the exposure sheets in proper place, often in a diagonal way that would suggest the “up-scale” or “down-scale” movement of the musical phrase, giving a positive “dialogue” inflection and interpretation.

This demanded that the animator “read” the musical phrases noted on his exposure sheet as he would “read” dialogue phrases, looking and listening for accents and moods which would inspire the attitudes and timing in his characters’ actions. We seldom give thought to music “talking”, but it does and it can be as expressive in any given mood or action as dialogue can be. Music, like dialogue, has flow and accents which must be “caught” in our animated action. Let’s think back on Dance of the Hours, on the Rite of Spring, on the Sorcerer’s Apprentice and the rest of Fantasia and remind ourselves of just how important and how delightful musical sync can be.

Of course, songs and dance music written for a picture, must be pre-scored. But the mood music, always a very important part of our entertainment, is written after the picture has been well developed, and in most cases, after “rough animation” is done and okayed. For the musician, it becomes a challenging work. He often has to catch, musically, emotional outbursts and actions our characters might display. The musician frequently has to make a frame by frame study of an action in order to give it the desired musical support. For instance: A character is in a running action, trips and has difficulty getting back into stride. This presents the muscian with the problem of working out a musical pattern that will give accent to the “trip” and musically “illustrate” the effort the runner makes, through frantic off-balance steps, to get back into stride. It might be called “a little stumbling music”, and in writing it, the musician would be checking and studying the animated action frame by frame.

A wonderful exercise in writing to the animated action was experienced by the musician in the business of Thumper getting Bambi onto the ice and the confusion and maneuvering that followwed, ending up with the two of them in the music.

In duscussing the musician’s role, Buddy Baker answered the question this way…

A note every frame? Well, we don’t go that far but we do get into two frame notes, and that’s pretty fast. That’s about as fast as an orchestra can play. We have to make an analysis of the story and animation, break it down in every way possible, select the mood of the music that is necessary, get the rough andimation and start laying out our music to match.

One thing Buddy didn’t mention in his discussion was the need to work and re-work music to get the desired result- just as we work and re-work story and animation. It always takes the team effort to get a final result on the screen.

Our pictures demand music with mood and vitality. Once written, we rely on good arranging and full orchestration to achieve a maximum effect. But, music is emotion, isn’t it? It reflects spirit and mind; so there are those times and situations when the strength and joy of our music finds its outlet in a simple form, which by comparison to that of dramatic scope and splendor, would be like a one finger exercise on the piano.

Music can interpret any visual happening. The sweep and grandeur of the countryside transcends reality when sounds of music are part of the picture. And the fury of a thunderstorm over the canyon, or that which was Maleficent’s, reaches a visual crescendo when supported by interpretive music. The humor and charm so often seen in the personality and movements of a bird, an animal or a human is two fold when supported by complementary music. As noted, in Peter and the Wolf the choice of the instrument, as well as the musical theme was important to the development of a given character on the screen. It was a strong identification of that character’s personality. It was as much a part of him as were his physical make-up and actions.

It was so with the Araucuan Bird, a South American native that we used in several pictures. He had a very simple and exciting musical theme- very repetitious! It was “go-go-go!” and that was the Araucuan- loose, free and unpredictable! In contrast, the tortoise in Tortoise and the Hare had a theme that instantly said, “Slow- persistent- determined”. In each of these themes, like many others, the animator found a “spirit” to use in their animation.

This is true in all we do, we try to be on target. The crisp action and charm of a bird, a small animal or a child, as suggested a moment ago, could hardly find interpretation in the hands of a tuba. This then, is the musician’s problem- to write music befitting the character, his moods and his actions, and then to find the most descriptive instrument to play it on.

As animators, we should be ever aware of music and its value to us. We remember sitting in a group studying the pantomimist’s acting routine. It was very simple- opening and closing a door- happily walking across the room- sitting down in a chair- being pricked by a pin, looking at it and tossing it away and then sitting down again, relieved. Without music, the routine was entertaining, clear in thought and acton- nothing wanting, but…

The action was repeated to music, the music being a very simple tune played on a piano. The pantomimed action got a boost as interpretive musical phrases gave emphasis to actions such as the opening and closing of the door- the happy move across the room- the reaction to the pin prick- the viewing of the pin and tossing it away- then happily sitting down. Music just made a goood act better!

Oliver Wallace and Walt Disney

Music, has always given an added quality to our “sound effects” by “rounding” them out, taking off the sharp edges and “sweetening” them to give added dimension and resonance. Often, the music carries the whole “sound effect” beautifully. It was always a treat to hear Ollie Wallace, one of our musicians of a few years back tell of his early days at the old movie theater organ, blasting out, spontaneously, mood music for the silent film flickering up on the screen above him. If the picture needed chase music- Ollie provided it. If it needed a love theme- Ollie gave it the old Hearts and Flowers. If it needed the fury of a cowboy and Indian fight with gunfire- Ollie let ’em have it, Bang! Bang! and when the villain was sneaking up behind the heroine- Ollie sneakeed in some sneak music, and the audience yelled “Look behind you!” Through the whole silent movie no frame or act got by without Ollie’s musical support.

Perhaps today, Ollie’s show would be considered crude, but it surely is a graphic illustration of the value and need of music in our entertainment.

Think about it: Sight and Sound… so complementary, one to the other!

Eric Larson
October 20th, 1981

This posting is part of a series of articles comprising an online exhibit entitled Theory.

FEATURED EXHIBIT

Adventures In Music

Music shares an indescribable magic with animation. It’s hard to describe in words exactly why certain walk cycles or pantomime gags are so wonderful. Music is a source of non-verbal delight as well. The rhythms and pacing of cartoons often mirror the construction of popular music with a statement of theme followed by variations, culminating in a restatement of the theme and a big finish. If you think about it, the best cartoons are inseparable from music. Adventures in Music explores the wide world of music with an eye to revealing the relationships between music and creativity.