Comedy For Animators

I used to watch Wacky Races, the Hanna Bar­bara ani­mated show, when I was a kid, and I love this ad. I so want a good look at the wacky cars, they are not repro­duc­tions of the car­toon, but real­is­tic ver­sions of them. Obvi­ously Peu­geot wants you to look at their model.

The Pene­lope Pit­stop end­ing is so right.

If you are unfa­mil­iar with the orig­i­nals, here they are:

Start­ing a blog post often leads me to fun dis­cov­er­ies. In 2009, the Wacky Races were repro­duced at the Good­wood Fes­ti­val of Speed. They did a fab­u­lous repro­duc­tion, and I so wish I could have seen them. Here are the cars:

And some of the crew.

I was in a pretty lit­tle book store in Point Reyes, Cal­i­for­nia and I found some inter­est­ing books for artists. I chose to buy “Steal Like an Artist” by Austin Kleon. Mostly because it was cheaper than the other one I was considering.

But I had heard of the book before, and was inter­ested. I had grown up with the idea of being “orig­i­nal” branded into my young mind. One thing I never wanted to be called was a “copy cat”. And I am sure I am not the only one. I have read quite a few inter­nets rants about how one movie was sim­i­lar to some other movie.

Using the word “Steal” in the title is provoca­tive, inten­tion­ally I’m sure. This book is mostly about find­ing inspi­ra­tion. Kleon basi­cally rec­om­mends gath­er­ing mul­ti­ple influ­ences and syn­the­siz­ing your own inter­pre­ta­tions. It’s really true. This entire blog of mine is about all those peo­ple who pro­duce mate­r­ial that makes me laugh.

Kleon sup­ports his idea that artists can take from other artists with many excel­lent quotes. I par­tic­u­larly liked this one from Mark Twain:

It is bet­ter to take some­thing that does not belong to you than to let it lie around neglected.

I have said as much about jokes. Should a joke be copy­righted, or shared per­son to per­son to travel as far as it can go?

Kleon is care­ful to dis­tin­guish between good steal­ing and bad steal­ing. Good steal­ing rec­og­nizes and hon­ors mul­ti­ple sources. Bad steal­ing is a repro­duc­tion to which you con­tribute nothing.

The sub­ti­tle of the book is “10 things nobody told you about being cre­ative”. My only crit­i­cism is that in reach­ing the num­ber 10, it drifts into some generic advice such as “be nice” or remind­ing us that the inter­net has removed geo­graph­i­cal restric­tions to our cir­cle of friends.

One item that did res­onate with me was this line: In the begin­ning obscu­rity is good. When an artist becomes suc­cess­ful, then there are way more expec­ta­tions on him or her. Think of the abuse heaped on George Lucas, or a rock star dri­ven to sui­cide by a record com­pany. Being obscure is a form of free­dom to do just what pleases you.

This short isn’t sup­posed to be funny, but I think the stop motion ani­ma­tion is excel­lent. Misha Klein spent sev­eral years work­ing on it between jobs. I’ve been there myself, and he deserves a tip of the hat.

Fred from Misha Klein on Vimeo.

While perus­ing my library for blog mate­r­ial, I picked up Char­lie Chaplin’s One Man Show, by Dan Kamin.   For study­ing Chaplin’s phys­i­cal per­for­mance, you can’t find a bet­ter book.  But the pas­sage that caught my eye isn’t specif­i­cally about Char­lie.  It’s about study­ing per­for­mance in general:

One of the dif­fi­cul­ties of watch­ing films from a past era is in dis­tin­guish­ing what is intended to be styl­ized play­ing and par­ody from the man­ner­isms and move­ments char­ac­ter­is­tic of “real” peo­ple of the period.  From cen­tury to cen­tury, and even from decade to decade, fash­ions in move­ment change as do fash­ions in cloth­ing.

I like the word “fash­ion” being used here.  The word “style” doesn’t quite sug­gest the pass­ing nature of what’s being dis­cussed.  And it also brings to mind how human move­ment dif­fers not only over time, but from place to place.

Humans learn to move in the same way we learn to speak.  We pick up motion the way we pick up our local accents.  It’s sub­con­scious.  We do it to fit in, to be like oth­ers.   If a con­struc­tion worker sud­denly started swing­ing his hips like a street­walker, his cowork­ers would notice.  A punk rocker moves dif­fer­ently from a clas­si­cal pianist.  Each sub-culture will have it’s char­ac­ter­is­tic movement.

The actor Sacha Baron Cohen under­stands this.  His char­ac­ters involve trans­form­ing every part of his appear­ance, voice and even his movement.

Borat moves in a rigid, angu­lar manner.

Bruno is much more loose and swishy, while Ali G. strikes all the hip-hop poses.

Most actors don’t do this.  Jack Black always moves like Jack Black.  Jim Car­rey has vary­ing degrees of his sig­na­ture wack­i­ness, from Ace Ven­tura on down to his seri­ous roles.   If they have found suc­cess with it, they wouldn’ want to change.  Ani­ma­tors need to think like Cohen, and look for great styles of move­ment to give characters.