My Story-Telling Perspective

 

Previously, I was talking about characters and specific designs I enjoy handling and studying the most. I want to talk about my love for the stories and emotions from my favorite films. 

In my opinion, animation seems to have more original and conceptual ideas to their films, since you could do anything with it. It's your imagination. The Tex Avery cartoons were well-known for their vivid motion and sharp slapstick and gags, and while I still love those cartoons to this day, they didn't have a deep and motivational premise, it was all for comedy and jokes.

I felt like I could understand more mature and appealing concepts when watching non-animation films, it was difficult to manage but I could finally see why they were impactful and iconic. I didn't like Casablanca at first, but re-visiting a few moments and knowing a more relatable and serious story makes it more intriguing and heartwarming. 

My favorite films of all time are mostly focusing on a structured plot and deep emotion. A few mentions are The Great Piggy Bank Robbery, Heavenly Puss, and Pluto's Judgement Day. 

Pluto's Judgement Day has a ton of eerie and haunting imagery. Usually the Mickey Mouse characters tend to be tame, but in scenarios like this I can live for. I could imagine these characters actually feeling frightened in these horrifying situations, and for it's mild runtime it actually works. 

I'm not only influenced by stories from animation obviously, which is why I tend to collect books. Little Golden Books. If you were going to tell my all-time favorite story it would be Matilda. I loved the Roald Dahl stuff when I was younger, not all of it but I do like James and The Giant Peach as well, but Matilda in particular interested me more than any other story, the movie is one of my all-time favorites as well. 

Same with Bambi, instead I haven't read the original story at all, but there's an undeniably dark and sometimes cruel element to the movie. It focuses on a good protagonist followed by real-life situations. Animal vs Man, and it is that character to be challenged and take responsibilities. 

Something like Fantasia, and An Optical Poem has a great abstract sense to it, but it barely shows depth and structure, they have great animation but that's it. Take more character-oriented films like The Secret of NIMH, Pinocchio, and The Goddess of Spring and add those elements but not for too long, that way we can focus on the character's actions as well, they don't need alot of dialogue or zany energy they can just connect to the environment. 

Sometimes a movie can take on another level of story-telling, take It's A Wonderful Life, the ultimate movie.

What makes this movie incredible in particular is how extremely real it handles life as a whole, you don't know what could happen, yet you have to be careful, and be prepared and honest whatever the situation may be. That's what I love about George Bailey. The scene with the guardian angel was just tear-jearking and so beautiful. The acting was just impeccable, as well as the message.

I could kinda see animation having human emotion and deep understanding like those movies. It just doesn't happen in short films it's more in movies and that's kind of a shocker. 

Animators like Rod Scribner, I truly love not because it's funny drawings, but those drawings actually show off human acting and alot more distinctive expression, and with short films like The Great Piggy Bank Robbery I could live with. It's mostly chaotic but it's well-thought out, there's a ton of imagination and unexpected possibilities, and the color schemes were unique. 

I love looking into different variants of illustrated art. I love alot of vintage paintings and magazines. My favorites are the two-tone colorized illustrations and paintings by Edward Hopper, Maxfield Parrish, Claude Monet and Albert Bierstadt. 

I could just imagine an animated film with this sorta style and having traditional 2D animation, with a serious but interesting story and I would've loved it. 

I felt like story-telling being simple and novel was the best. I don't really enjoy movie franchises, or TV shows as much as other people, I tend to like a short journey onto the next, it's more fun that way in my opinion. Some exceptions are The Backyardigans, my favorite episodes were some of my younger childhood experiences like International Super Spy, A Giant Problem but also liked episodes recently like Who Goes There, Fly Girl, and Escape From Fairytale Village, even with title names like that, you would be invested in them.

Now I definitely know that people have different interests and they prefer more complex stories, and that is totally fine, like what you like, I don't force people to enjoy what's best for me. 

I do think what I'm interested in feels unique and interesting in my tastes. I find myself liking these dark, sometimes cynical but positive outlooks of life. 

When creating something myself, I don't revert to past experiments, I tend to love the old stuff, but since quality has evolved over the years, I want to use those inspirations for a modern approach. 

The older Disney movies for example. 1937 to about 1953, had some excellent and wholesome energy to them, but they weren't always flawless. I do tend to count some moments I didn't specifically like in those movies like the War-Time era movies mostly being package shorts, the songs can sometimes come off as silly, or one long overdue scene, but those happen rarely and I'm happy for that.

If you want to know what Disney era was best, it was the Dark Age. Yeah, no kidding. 

The Many Adventures Of Winnie The Pooh, The Great Mouse Detective, The Rescuers, Robin Hood, heck even The Black Cauldron, an extreme guilty pleasure of mine are all classics, and guess what? (gasp) No sign of Disney princesses! No silly prince! The one unexceptional film from that era was The Aristocats, but even then that's ok. What I loved about those movies was that the story-telling and characters were at their absolute finest, they had more darker imagery, and interesting villains. 

Anyways, I feel like I'm fine with what I've talked about today. If you want to check out my previous post of focusing on cartoon characters, feel free to check that out. 

Trying To Understand What Being An Animator Is Like Part 5

I'm revisting a series I enjoyed making on my blog. This is Trying To Understand What Being An Animator Is Like Part 5. 

This is talking about specific and experimental traditional 2D character designs. They're not overly simplistic to draw, it's challenging but also useful and helps improve your skills.

I'm someone who wants to enjoy a moment of their life drawing and improving traditional animation techniques. I'm already getting the hang of constructing different characters and acting methods. I looked into my old drawings I did back in July filled with very basic and quick doodles, I observed more into pencil sketches and screencaps rather than on-screen movement nowadays. 

I already talked about my inspirations on the Song of The South scenes, because they're just too goshdarn good looking! This isn't actually that bad to me. I could kinda draw these characters very well, or sorta capture the style. 

The Wolf is heavily inspired by Brer Fox, so I tried practicing more detailed and constructive surfaces of the design, starting off with a red coloring pencil to sketch the circular head and adding curved lines.

Then I really start adding the details.

Finally, I use my normal pencil and finished. 

I tried to fully capture the charm and complexity of a well-designed villain. 

Take Ratigan and Brer Fox as examples of the best animated villains.

Close-ups also help too. It's much more menacing and creepy in the best ways possible. When I first watched these Brer Fox scenes I was astounded, I immediately wanted to know more about this character, he was just like what I enjoy in the older Disney movies, the fresh and fierce moods, especially with stuff like the Pleasure Island scenes, Maleficent, the fight with Peter and Captain Hook and The Headless Horseman.

There's something to love about the modern Disney movies like the ones from the Bronze Age and Renaissance but that's for another post. 

I tend to be invested with these characters because they have more of a presence and feel more human to their surroundings. 

Someone like Mickey and his friends are very memorable but they lack deep emotion or sense. Something like Mickey's Christmas Carol I can give credit for, but the short films, and the pre-school TV shows just makes these characters less likeable to me. Sometimes Donald can be blinded to reality and just reacts not suitable to the situation like in his Chip and Dale cartoons. It's just the average short-film personality.

I stopped watching cartoons because the characters were so tame and don't progress in my opinion. It's like those under 60 minute old westerns. I could understand people liking the characters but they aren't the most well-written or relatable characters ever. That's why I'm trying to explore more deeper and inspirational stories and personalities. 

I want to fully talk about how I'm now drawing characters with red pencils, it all came from one image of Brer Rabbit.

Since I obviously love the designs of the characters, the red pencil details were so interesting to me, I thought it was useful and better to draw the more detailed proportions. 

This is another drawing of The Wolf and his sidekick Cauliflower. 

This drawing took me less than 10 minutes to make. I researched into how much time was it to draw one additional frame or drawing, it just depends. You could draw something extremely detailed and sharp and it'll take over countless minutes or even hours to make it work. I did look into more aspects of the animation theory like in-betweeners, turns out not a single animator could control all of the scenes themselves, kinda interesting to be honest. 

All I have to say is, it would've been possible without my animation heroes, Preston Blair, love his book. 

This is what started the saga.

I want to freely talk about my interests in story-telling next since it's obvious now that this series is taken rest again after a few months.

Great Vintage Stuff 3

 

It is that time again! For another vintage stuff post! To start off, this is a great painting by Mead Schaeffer. 

Limited colors = Brilliance 

Here's another great one by him.

Too late to celebrate Halloween nowadays, but I thought this was just beautiful. J.C Leyendecker is such a wonderful artist!

Here's 2 artworks created by Charles Relyea. He's an incredibly talented artist. I'm a huge fan of his art nowadays. This is some of my 3 favorites so far.

That final image's color palette is stunning!

I love the two-tone color schemes so much, do you know who also seems to enjoy it? Chuck Jones. I immediately loved these and wanted to share it to you guys! 

Now here's something unreal that it's outstanding, Frederick Edwin Church's 1853 painting Mount Ktaadn. 

Lastly is some nice vintage art of Sleeping Beauty from a French magazine. I've grown to like the film alot more. Maleficent is a fantastic villain and the animation of her dragon transformation will never not astound me.

The Disney+ AI Situation

Just about a few days ago, Bob Iger, CEO of Disney officially announced that Disney+ will soon feature AI generated user content, stating that it'll "provide users of Disney+ with a much more engaged experience." So that means subscribers of the platform will create some of their own types of content only using artificial intelligence.

Now all of that is unimpressive so far but there's also this to mention.

To be honest, we knew that the company would continue to push boundaries like this, but this is going TOO far.

Disney has already declined over the years for it's obsession with quantity, their control with materialism over idealism and taking the advantage to promote films nobody seems to care about because they're either tame or unoriginal. Ever since Disney's consumption, they're owning these other companies that feel unnecessary for a film studio to possess. They have owned countless studios like Marvel, Lucasfilm, 20th Century Fox as well as other properties like ESPN, and Hulu. Disney+ in particular adding shows and highlights from those channels and studios for more consumerism. 

The whole AI situation to me is terrible because it's basically trying to consume subscribers by watching the unnecessary content but this time, not made by naturally hand-crafted artists. 

I've been influenced by alot of Walt Disney's quotes over the past few weeks. This is probably the best example from researching upon the situation.

"You can design and create, and build the most wonderful place in the world. But it takes people to make the dream a reality."

This quote has been ignored and panned for a long time. Now I haven't fully checked out too much on what Iger states about the future of Disney but you shouldn't just jam down our throats to make a statement like that and BOOM! out of nowhere is trending on social media. 

We us as a community are instantly disappointed and unable to handle this issue, and if that's how it's gonna be, then let it arise. Hate it or not. You can still be fine with what you experience on the platform even if it's distracting or disputable. This isn't a message for everyone, as I am fully aware of people in general, having different interests and hobbies. 

As someone who is more of an older Disney movie fan, into the 30s-50s films, this doesn't affect me that much. The beauty and passion that went into the animated films inspire me the most, so the recent news about stuff happening with Disney doesn't particularly interest me at all.

Oh and as of writing this, Disney announced the trailer for the live-action Moana. How wonderful...

All I have to say is, appreciate what interests you the most, if you don't like the changes, avoid them. You can like what you like, that's why I have DVDs so if the streaming service gets more expensive and the artifical generated content is gonna spread, I have them anytime. They have scene selections, and more interesting bonus features.

Here's the link if your curious.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/disney-plus-gen-ai-user-generated-content-1236426135/

Owls

 

Owls are one of the most interesting types of birds. I love them myself, they're classified as being morally analytical, and solitary. I recently created a new edition to the Art-Mania Villain crew. This is The Wise Ol' Owl, he believes in the willpower of wisdom, but he can be very deceitful, and tries treacherous methods to change people's minds from becoming completely normal to geniuses of his teachings.

This is what he looks like, notice that smug, yet wicked facial expression in the middle of the sketches. This is a true glance of his devious personality.

This idea started off as I was watching the extras selection of the 2005 Bambi DVD, it's becoming one of my all-time favorite movies, and Friend Owl in particular is a very expressive character, so it's a very useful example of studying specific owls.

They actually showed live-action owls, but these are images I searched on the internet, mostly for key reference. The narrow eyes show off suspicion.

This owl is flying mid-air, owls themselves don't usually walk on ground, so it's useful that they use their feathers.

Now Wise Ol' Owl may be a little more anthropomorphic, but he still decides to act traditionally anyway.

An owl is shocked, or maybe even surprised. Their eyes are more wide open, in a cautious sort of way.

Mr. Owl isn't particularly that shocked. The film theory is that the heroes are particularly more confident at handling challenging situations than villains often do. 

There's not a bunch of owls in animation. They're fun to draw, in fact my high school mascot is an owl. Last year, I designed and promoted virtue art until I graduated.

Cheese Chasers (1951)

 

I have discussed about Chuck Jones Looney Tunes cartoons in the past, like Chow Hound, Drip-Along Daffy and recently Haredevil Hare. I would love to discuss more of his cartoons since he's becoming my favorite of the Looney Tunes directors. 

This cartoon is titled Cheese Chasers (1951). It's a very cruel but enjoyable short. It starts off with Hubie and Bertie sick after eating a huge chunk of cheese. Seriously guys, you should've noticed about this sudden change even sooner. 

Anyways, these guys are hilarious. They are the perfect pair. These miserable faces their making are insanely well-drawn. I love all of Chuck Jones's animation staff back in the early 50s, Ben Washam, Phil Monroe, are just great. 

The story gets more depressing as Hubie and Bertie end their lives by going into Claude's mouth. Man, this is some dark stuff. Whenever I watch Clampett or Art Davis cartoons, they just stick to those average normal routes of having fun and engaging with jerks and loud wacky characters, it's OK but I tend to like more relatable characters like Claude and the two mice. 

Anyways, look as these glorious and menacing facial expressions of Claude Cat! This is some stellar stuff. I remember my first time watching this and being shocked at these scenes, but I still loved the cartoon. 

You can really tell how infuriated Claude looks in this scene. I kinda relate to him not because he's going mad, but if anyone was trying to do something that seems awfully immoral and saddening in front of me, I seriously need them to stay away from me at all cost. 

Throughout the cartoon, Claude still makes some very funny faces.  

Easily my favorite moment is when the bulldog tries handling the situation, just like Claude, he makes some very relatable and funny faces, and says his most iconic line.

"IT JUST DON'T ADD UP!"

I downloaded the final three minutes of this cartoon so you can experience it yourself. 

Want to see my review on Chow Hound (1951)? Click the link.

https://sngexplorationblog.blogspot.com/2025/03/chow-hound-1951.html?m=1