Research
Researching the design of characters drawn in 1930′s cartoons, its easy to see the similarities of the style, but understanding them is something different. Looking at different characters there are some consistent styles and sometimes the rules are broken, but it still works. Why? Well lets look at two different characters from this time period.
Oswald the Lucky Rabbit
Oswald, created by Ub Iwerks is from the 1930′s was created for Disney however the rights were taken and he became a Universal Studios character. Disney then created Mickey Mouse to rival Oswald and did so with success. However with Oswald coming first, it is clear that there is some antiquity to him that there is to learn from. He is a classic example of what the rubber hose style was trying to achieve.
Studying him, you can see how simplistic his design is. They have taken into consideration that the main character will be drawn many times, 27 original reels in fact, and he will need to be consistent and easy to draw fast. You can see his head is round from literally every angle. Most of his emotion can be seen in his mouth and hands. His mouth being simple geometric shapes and his hands being either a circle or a circle with stubs protruding from them. His eyes are colored in circles along with his nose. These design aspects paved the way for the rubber hose style. One of his most recognizable features is his long flailing ears, but even they they are just oblongs. Simple shapes are the key to classic characters. I’ll show you a later example of a character which strayed away from the rubber hose to be more relatable and realistic.
Betty Boop
Betty Boop, was created by Max Fleischer. She was created in the 1930′s originally as a caricature of Helen Kane. This meant that she was created to look like a real person. This is why she strays away from the ideals of the original cartoons. Despite this though, she became extremely popular and an icon, being used heavily for merchandising. I believe this might be one of the reasons Disney changed to more realistic animation of princess movies.
As you can see, there are many differences here to Oswald. Betty’s head is an odd shape that would be strange to draw from different angles. Her mouth is tiny and almost no expression comes from it. All her expression is from her posture and her eyes. There are lots of complexity like with her fingers being realistic, arms and waist being drawn with drawn without any ease of giving her fluid motion. The eyelashes are also a far stretch from what Oswald represents. This is what I will probably be trying to avoid when designing my character.
The 1930′s were very limiting times for animation. Everything was done by hand and then layered so that a camera could physically take a picture. This means certain features we use today just wasn’t possible then. Animation techniques were slim to none and they couldn’t be lazy. This means that when I’m animating I can’t be lazy, I will need to produce the fluid motion by drawing frame by frame. A technique animators use now days is smear frames. These weren’t used then, however spin lines were used but not often and only for a very dramatic effect.
One of the most notable things that they would do in the 1930s, would be pose-to-pose animation. This style makes it much easier and organised for a studio animators to speed up their work. This is because with pose-to-pose, the primary artist is drawing about 4 different pictures of a character moving to a pose. They then hand them off to the in between animators who will draw all the poses in between those frames, sticking to the animators original vision as much as possible.
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If you look at these four different poses above, you’ll notice they tell the story of a character jumping over the gap. This is the four KEY frames for that action. These frames allow you to see the action that you’re going to create, and then once they have been planned and laid out, you would go though and add the frames in between these poses to give the action a smooth flowing motion. This is considered the most effective method of animation for characters says Alan Becker, a popular YouTube self made animator. He created a video explaining the principles of animation where he says how the flowing motion of animation is achieved (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8quCbt4C-c). Pose to pose he says is the best for understanding where your animation is going and having the most control. There is another style of animating called “straight ahead” which Alan Becker says is used for unpredictable motion that wouldn’t make sense to animate without key frames. This includes thing such as fire.
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If you look at the GIF above, you will notice there is a lot of morphing and spontaneous movement. This kind of smooth motion would be strange and difficult to achieve with pose to pose because the key poses of the objects in this are so different and fluid that it wouldn’t be fluid through pose to pose.
In relation to rubber hose, what would make sense out of these two methods of animation, would be to animate pose to pose for simple movement such as walking characters and making facial expressions, but If I decide to include unpredictable assets such as fire, maybe wind or something similar, then it would make sense to use the straight ahead method. There is a method that combines the two, such as with Oswald and his ears, if he were to jump, they might animate his body movements first and then go back and straight ahead his ears to give them the most fluid and gravity relevant ears.
One thing with 1930′s animation, they relied heavily on the fluidity of the visual gags, these gags were very emotive and held no subtly in the animation. This means all your motions are going to stand out and be important, therefore you cant be lazy and animate it without fluidity. These means you pretty much HAVE to animate in 1′s. They animated in 1′s in the 1930s and that was part of the reason they looked so appealing and fun to watch. Its possible to get away with 2s which is what I might have to do to meet time constraints. I will try to create some test animations to see if its possible to animate quick enough and reach the same aesthetic of the 1930s I would like to recreate.
