Monday, September 25th, 2023
A couple of months ago, I did an interview with Jennifer Crittenden’s creative podcast "Books, Shows, Tunes and Mad Acts". (I probably fit into that last category!) Bill Aho was on board too, and it was a lot of fun and the podcast is well worth checking out. Enjoy!
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Friday, July 28th, 2023
People who aren’t members of Animation Resources don’t understand how comprehensive our Reference Packs are. Over a couple of weeks, we are posting what each section of our current RefPack looks like. Today we are sharing the Early Anime section. If you are a member of Animation Resources, click on this post to go to the Members Only page. If you aren’t a member yet, today is the perfect time to join! Our current Reference Pack is one of our best yet, and General and Student Members get access to a special Bonus Archive with even more material from past Reference Packs.
What are you waiting for?
JOIN TODAY!
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SD VIDEO:
Hustle Punch
Curated by JoJo Baptista
Eps. 1 & 3 / Toei, Yasuji Mori (1965)
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Hustle Punch first aired on November 1st, 1965. The main characters are three animals: Punch, a bear whose head is so hard he can break holes in walls with it or be hit on the head without injury; Touch, a girl mouse who uses her charm and size to her advantage; and Bun, which in English translates to "Boom" a weasel who is a crack shot with a slingshot. They live in a junkyard and fight the villains: Professor Garigari, a wolf who invents gadgets to steal and plunder the city; Black, a cocky cat who loves to shoot guns but has lousy aim, and Nu, a dumb pig with a soft spot for Punch and his friends.
Hustle Punch was created by Yasuji Mori, who directed The Little Prince And The Three Headed Dragon, which we featured in a previous Reference Pack, as well as illustrating children’s books. He was a senior artist at Toei and mentored many animators who went on to do great work, including Hayao Miyazaki (who worked on this series), Isao Takahata, Yasuo Otsuka and Yoichi Kotabe. Mori was responsible for the cute animal designs in several Toei features.
It seems that the Japanese animators who made this show had recently seen American television cartoons by Hanna-Barbara. Hustle Punch lifts designs and animation from The Huckleberry Hound Show and character design elements from Top Cat. In the title sequence there’s even a jazzy theme song, and a scene at 45 seconds of the car peeling out that directly references the title sequence of Huckleberry Hound. Also, at 4:05 in the first episode, there is a gag that appears to have been inspired by a Mike Lah scene in a Droopy cartoon. This series is unique because it looks more American than Japanese.
The first episode, titled "Throw Out The Trash" is the pilot episode that explains the basic premise of the show. The three animals live in an old broken down limousine in a junkyard. Professor Garigari’s mansion is right next door, and he sends his two henchmen over to assassinate the three friends to get them to move out so he can take over the property.
At 4:32 there are some nice smears in the animation and at 5:38 Black pulls out a pistol and Nu ties the trio up and throws them out into traffic on a busy street. (You’re not likely to see gags like that today!) Sprinkled throughout the show are nice poses and layouts, mixed in with efficient limited animation. One standout sequence is a bit at 17:00 where Black practices his "quick draw" technique in a mirror. Another good sequence involving gunplay and fireworks starts at 18:50. It finishes off at 21:15 with some electrocution gags involving an electric chair! Hanna-Barbara cartoons often leaned a bit too heavily on dialogue to tell the story. Even though there is a lot of dialogue in Hustle Punch, there’s plenty of visual action moving the story along.
The third episode, is titled "Black Benny’s Secret". It starts out with some fun crowd shots at 4:11. The designers clearly had a lot of fun defining each character in the crowd in this episode and organizing them into groups. I won’t point them out here, but this episode is full of simple animation touches that put across personality expressively without the need for elaborate animation. Even though I don’t understand Japanese, I can tell the attitudes of the bad guys when they argue at the table getting drunk on wine. But the highlight of this episode is the chase between the villains and the heroes which culminates with a cannon, an ambulance, and machine guns!
Like many Japanese shows of this era, the episode ends with a teaser for the next week’s show. Let me know if you’d like to see more of this unusual series.
I’ll have more early Japanese TV series to share with you in our next Reference Pack.
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by Thursday, July 27th, 2023
People who aren’t members of Animation Resources don’t understand how comprehensive our Reference Packs are. Over the next couple of weeks, we will be posting what each section of our current RefPack looks like. If you are a member of Animation Resources, click on this post to go to the Members Only page. If you aren’t a member yet, today is the perfect time to join! Our current Reference Pack is one of our best yet, and General and Student Members get access to a special Bonus Archive with even more material from past Reference Packs.
What are you waiting for?
JOIN TODAY!
https://animationresources.org/membership/levels/
SD VIDEO:
A Quiet Glade
Boris Dyozhkin / Soyuzmultfilm, Russia / 1946
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In past RefPacks, we’ve featured several films by Boris Dyozhkin, including "Cipolino The Onion Boy", "Goal! Goal!" and "Snowy Roads". Dyozhkin is best known for his sports cartoons, and this time, we’re sharing the first film he made on that theme, "A Quiet Glade".
Boris Dyozhkin was one of the most respected and prolific animators in Russia. In the 1930s, he broke with other Soviet artists who rejected the Western style, studying Fleischer and Disney films frame by frame to break down the techniques being used. His study led him to an unique understanding of the synchronization of rhythm between music and motion, which made him one of the most sought after timing directors at the studio. During WWII, he was staying at the home of fellow animator Roman Davydov when the Nazis bombed the area from the air. He threw himself over his wife to protect her from the blast, saving her life, but he lost his left eye to a shell fragment.
"A Quiet Glade" starts off as a typical three bears cartoon. They look for a quiet place to hang their hammocks and nap, but noisy woodland creatures prevent that. It seems as if Dyozhkin discovered this story was too thin to sustain a whole cartoon, so halfway through, he introduces a soccer game with rabbits. The fast action perfectly suits Dyozhkin’s style of snappy timing, and this sequence established the format for many of his films to follow.
Make sure to still frame through this film to break down the timing of the action. It isn’t as tightly polished as "Snowy Roads", but there’s plenty to learn here.
Silhouetten Opernhaus: Carmen
Lotte Reiniger / Germany / 1933
Lotte Reiniger is one of the most important figures in the history of animation. She made the oldest surviving animated feature film, The Adventures of Prince Achmed, she pioneered the merging of animation and music, and developed a multi-plane camera stand over a decade before anyone in Hollywood built one.
In 1923, Reiniger and her husband and business partner, Carl Koch began work on an ambitious project… a feature length silhouette puppet film based on One Thousand and One Nights titled The Adventures Of Prince Achmed. She worked with animator Bertold Bartosch and background artist Walter Ruttman for three years on the film. The paper cutouts were jointed using wires and delicately arranged on top of a lightbox, where it was photographed frame by frame. Reiniger continued to animate her distinctive silhouette films up into the mid-1970s. She passed away in 1981.
This film is a fantastic example of the way Reiniger merged motion and music seamlessly. Her puppets never feel flat or stiff, and their movements never feel limited. In fact, the characters are able to dance, run, jump and act as well as any animated character in any technique of animation. The staging is flat, yet she employs camera moves alternating left and right to create a visual rhythm to match the music. Even if the characters can’t move deeper into the stage in perspective, Reiniger pushes background elements into the distance below her camera platen to give a feeling of depth. Look at how the timing is so natural and specific to the character. She is expressing personality with the way the character moves. The scenery and costumes are beautifully designed. There is a very good reason for this… if you are going to be showing the audience one puppet or a single background over and over from frame to frame and shot to shot, it should at least be as beautiful as you can possibly make it to maintain visual interest.
An animator working in the field of limited animation would do well to study and break down how Reiniger achieves her effects. She knows how to get the most out of her puppets, and she knows when to use a special pose to keep the movement from becoming robotic. All of this is useful reference for animators who work with asset libraries in Flash animation.
Revolt Of The Toys
Hermina Tyrlova / Czechoslovakia / 1947
Hermina Tyrlova isn’t mentioned often when people refer to female animators, but her impact on the art form in Czechoslovakia was significant. Born in central Bohemia in 1900, she initially wanted to be an entertainer in vaudeville, but when she was a child, her father had been a woodworker and had taught her how to carve puppets and wooden figures. She had many creative talents. She wrote for magazines and did illustrations for a time before being hired by Studio AB, a company that produced animated advertising films. She met Karel Dodal there (see our previous Reference Packs for examples of his films) and married him. They became a team, animating five films together, including the first Czech stop motion film.
When the Germans invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939, Dodal fled to America and then Argentina, but Tyrlova remained behind, relocating to Moravia to work at Bata Studios.Over the next 40 years, she produced over 60 animated films, working well into her 80s. Tyrlova is commonly referred to as the “mother of Czech animation”. She received a lifetime achievement award in 1981 at the Paris International Film Festival.
"Revolt Of The Toys" is unique among her work because it combines live action and animation. It’s also unique because of its use of violence. Tyrlova said that she didn’t care for the American style of animation, with its slapstick pratfalls. She preferred to animate characters as objects existing in their own worlds outside of our awareness of them. Her films aren’t overtly political like those of her contemporaries. Instead, they are targeted to children and exhibit a sense of discovery and wonder, rather than gags and action. Even though this film is different from her other work in many ways, it is still an excellent example of her simple, appealing design style and clever stop motion techniques.
Dog, Cat And… Ep 5
Alina Maliszewska / Studio Miniatur Filmowych, Poland / 1972
In this Reference Pack, we are sharing another short cartoon from a series produced by Studio Miniatur Filmowych, Pies, Kot I… which translates to Dog, Cat And… The episode is titled "Tape Recorder".
This series is a different sort of take on the Tom & Jerry model, with the opponents outsmarting each other instead of just chasing each other out of hate or hunger. There is more to the relationship between the characters than just rivalry. The relationship of the characters makes it easy to see how it relates to slapstick comedy teams like Laurel & Hardy and Fatty Arbuckle and Buster Keaton. The dog and cat are not just generic animals, but individual personalities with a dynamic relationship that is much more engaging than most “cat and mouse” or “dog and cat” cartoons.
These cartoons are almost devoid of dialogue with the focus on loose, funny animation. In fact, the drawings are often hilarious on their own, even removed from their context within the gag sequence. The facial expressions are well observed, and the poses employ clear silhouettes that form funny graphic shapes.
Well, Just You Wait!, and Dog, Cat And… both are very efficient at what they do. They could easily serve as a model for internet animation. The internet encourages repeat viewing more than television does. When you watch a dialogue driven cartoon on TV, once you’ve heard the jokes, you don’t need to watch it again. However, a short cartoon that looks and moves funny is entertaining no matter how many times you watch it. And for the animator who is making the cartoon, it’s a lot more fun to animate simple funny characters than it is to animated a lot of tedious lip-sync.
Dog, Cat And… looks like it was a lot of fun to make. The film makers at Studio Miniatur Filmowych didn’t feel constrained by the ordinary lives of animals. Their characters can drive cars, build their own houses and go to exotic places. That freedom allowed the animators to keep their series fresh, and gave them the opportunity to experiment within a 10 minute format. Simple drawings, funny movement and no rules… these are the kinds of series that would work well as episodic internet cartoons.
We will have more episodes from this series in upcoming Reference Packs.
JOIN TODAY To Access Members Only Content
Animation Resources is one of the best kept secrets in the world of cartooning. Every month, we sponsor a program of interest to artists, and every other month, we share a book and up to an hour of rare animation with our members. If you are a creative person interested in the fields of animation, cartooning or illustration, you should be a member of Animation Resources!
It’s easy to join Animation Resources. Just click on this link and you can sign up right now online…
Animation Resources depends on your contributions to support its projects. Even if you can’t afford to join our group right now, please click the button below to donate whatever you can afford using PayPal.
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