Jonathan Lyons

Too Funny for Words – excerpts, part 2

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Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston break down Disney sight gags into 8 categories.   One good reason to buy the book is the large number of pictorial examples. Each type of gag gets it’s own chapter to further describe them.

DISNEY SIGHT GAG CATEGORIES

1.  THE SPOT GAG:  The spot gag is the simplest and easiest to write.  It is the isolated, single joke, the funny visual event that is complete in itself.  It needs no introduction and no climax for an ending.  It fills a spot in the continuity, or the character’s performance, without effecting the story.

The illustrated example: A dachsund forming it’s body into steps for Mickey Mouse to board an airplane.

2. THE RUNNING GAG:  A running gag is one that occurs several times throughout a picture, becoming funnier through repetition rather than through any development.  3. The gag that builds.

The illustrated example: In “The Band Concert”  Donald Duck repeatedly pulls a fife out of a pocket, despite the other band members trying to stop his playing.

3. THE GAG THAT BUILDS.  In contrast to the isolated spot gag or the repetition in the running gag, the gag-that-builds is made up of a series of gags that increase in intensitiy.  Starting with a comic situation, individual gags relating to the  same circumstance are carefully added, each becoming wilder and funnier until a climactic event crowns a complete routine.

The illustrated example:  The Big Bad Wolf gets run through a “wolf pacifier” machine that ends with him being shot out of a cannon.

4.  THE ACTION GAG.  Unlike the spot gag, which focuses on a single event, the action gag is based on timing and the unique way a character moves.  An action gag … is concerned less with what the gag is, then how it is performed.  It requires entertaining actions and comic movements.

The illustrated example: Goofy trying to be a hurdler, and tripping over the hurdles.  Tripping over hurdles is not funny in itself, but how Goofy does it makes it ridiculous.

5. THE TABLEAU GAG is a held picture at the end of an action, in which the character is left with a ridiculous appearance due to some foreign substance or object having been placed on, around, over, or in his face or figure.

The illustrated example:  Donald Duck gets beard and hat that makes him look like a Russian cossack.

6.  THE INANIMATE CHARACTER GAG comes from the humor in giving an object or machine a personality that cleverly fits both it’s appearance and it’s function.  Walt felt that everything in the world might have a personality if only it could be brought to life in human terms.

The illustrated example: A steamshovel head becomes a momentary character with eyes and mouth.

7.  THE FUNNTY DRAWING is special to animation.  Perhaps it could be compared to the clown makeup of a live performer, or a ridiculous costume, or anything that gives someone a laughable appearance.  In animated films it is the drawing itself that makes the gag funnier.

The illlustrated example: In the Jungle Book, an elephant is using his trunk like a trumpet, another elephant squeezes it, causing him to inflate a little before it goes limp.

8.  SPECIALIZED GAGS.  The color gag, which was based on the accepted role of various hues in creating emotional responses, and the effects gag, which made fantasy available through the careful and precise rendering of everything from fire and smoke to a swarm of disgruntled hornets.   Finally there is the surprise gag, which many consider to contain the most important element of any gag, since interest and expectation are added to even the most mundane situations.  Actually, a fresh new method of performing any action has to be a surprise to the audience by definition, ad the gag that is presented with this element startles them into an impulsive laugh by introducing the unexpected.  In fact, preparing the audience for a more traditional occurrence is the best way of surprising them with the unforeseen gag.  It is so consistently used with the rewarding results that it could be listed here as the eighth primary source of humor in our films.

The illustrated example:  Pinocchio with finger on fire.

 

Too Funny For Words – excerpts, part 1

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Back when I worked as an assistant animator at Kroyer Films, (Ferngulley the Last Rainforest.) we had a visit from two famous animators, Ollie Johnston and Frank Thomas. I managed to get my copy of their great book Two Funny for Words; Disney’s Greatest Sight Gags signed before Bill Kroyer chased us kids away, as if we were bothering them.

The book is currently out of print, with used prices starting at about $15. That’s an incredible value.  I can’t recommend it enough as a great resource for understanding classic comedy techniques.  I have selected some excerpts from the book to share here.   It will seem a little random, but I’m sure you will be able to sort it out and learn a few things.

On the topic of classes held at the Disney studio:

In addition to presenting all aspects of drawing and composition, these classes included screenings of the classic comedies starring such talents as Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, and Laurel and Hardy.  Whenever a famous vaudeville act would come to town, Walt bought tickets for his top men to be sure they would see these fine performances and remember them.

On finding the unique personality in Walt’s characters.

Almost from the start, Walt thought of his cartoon characters as being definite personalities.  He knew instinctively that while some gags are funny in themselves, regardless of who is involved, most situations are funnier with one type of individual than with another.  As Marcel Marceau explains: “The personality of the victim of a gag determines whether it will be funny”

About growing from the simplicity of the early shorts to the more developed stories.

In these early pictures, he was looking for refreshing, intriguing, unexpected, related occurrences, that would increase the enjoyment of the film.

Walt began to discover his exceptional talent as a storyteller as he built these little dilemmas into a full plot.  These were not carefully organized story lines, because Walt was never interested in structure.  He knew what was funny and what would hold an audience, and he taught us never to load a picture up with logic.  Grab the audience’s interest first, and the best way to that is with laughter.

Whether we recognized it or not, the key to Disney humor had been found.  It was simply this:  the right gag in the right predicament, for the right personality.

I will transcribe more for tomorrow.

 

Gerald Mast on Buster Keaton

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I’ve done quite a few posts about Chaplin, and it’s time I start giving Buster Keaton more time.   While I find the Chaplin life story absolutely fascinating, I am much more likely to spend my movie viewing time with Keaton.    Here are some selected quotes from Gerald Masts’  The Comic Mind.

Whereas Chaplin’s comic technique centered about his face, hands, and legs, each of which operated as separate entities, with individual limberness and subtlety, the Keaton comic technique centered about the body as a whole, single physical object  that could comport it’s self in space the way no physical object ought to have the right or power to do.  When Keaton takes a fall, his body doesn’t merely fall.  It lifts itself several feet into the air and then hurls itself down to the ground.  When he does a flip, his body doesn’t merely flip.   It leaps into the air tautens itself into planklike stiffness, then tucks in it’s knees and tumbles over itself in mid air.  The body is alternately, indeed simultaneously, both elastic and bone, the most malleable and the most tensile of physical substances.

Unlike Chaplin he consistently caught the perfect performance of a gag in a single take.  He would have to. Such stunts did not bear frequent repetition.

Keaton is not a little guy set against malignant social forces, like Chaplin; he is a little guy set against elemental forces. …

Nature has no will.  Only man has will.  And Keaton’s films consistently reveal the triumph of human will and spirit over natural opponents.  The Keaton comedies are more epic than Chaplin’s because they show man in conflict with traditional epic forces rather than individual men and social attitudes.

Keaton films were outdoor films; Chaplin films were not.  (Even outdoor films such as Sunnyside, The Pilgrim, and The Gold Rush seem claustrophobic – intentionally)  The outdoors gave Keaton space to move  and vast panoramas to contrast with his moving body, that small piece of elastic granite.  Chaplin could generate a world of excitement from a single room ( for example One A.M. ); Keaton needed the world.

Film gave Keaton the freedom the stage never could, which is why his work is the more cinematic of the two.  Film did offer Chaplin the opportunity for close ups.

Little man juxtaposed with big universe – this was the Keaton theme, cinematic principle of  composition, and basis of story construction.  It also influenced the kinds of objects that Keaton chose to play against.  Huge inanimate objects and living opponents were merely a manifestation of the hugeness of nature.  Keaton played against a dinosaur, a waterfall, an ocean liner, a landslide, a herd of cattle, a locomotive, the entire Union  and Confederate armies, a steamboat, a Tong war, a gang of bootleggers, a storm at sea, a tribe of indians, and the entire New York police force.  In most of the films, Keaton began playing against the enormous object and ended up playing with it.  The object that dwarfed him at the film’s beginning became equally an ally that he used to defeat others by the end.

The consistent Keaton motif is the ridiculing of all inhuman definitions of human worth.  To define a man by his uniform, wallet, muscles, or family name is not to define him as a person.  In his denigration of the value of clothes (despite his elegance in wearing them) and surface characteristics as a means of defining a man, Keaton is the opposite of Brecht ( A Man’s a Man ) and, therefore, of Chaplin ( Who’s tramp’s clothes are the tramp).  What Buster accomplishes often has little to do with social and literary cliches about what types of men can accomplish.  The Keaton character consistently shows how much a little, unheroic, unromantic man can do simply by going about his business in his own way, exercising his individual human abilities and will.

 

Satoshi Tomioka – Japanese CG cartoon director

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Satoshi-Tomioka
I have finally figured out the genius behind Kanaban Graphics. It’s director Satoshi Tomioka. This is a director worth studying. He is definitely on the edge. But the trail on him runs cold at around 2009. Does anyone know what he has been up to lately?

These first two clips are from a Play Station Portable game called Exit CF.

An MTV art break

This next one is unusual because it contains dialog.

He has quite a few videos on Youtube, and several of them are less slapsticky, and more surreal, such as this one.

As a former deep sea diver, I am fascinated with this next one.