Animators React to Bad & Great Cartoons

so this was the first animation ever look at this shot it's just stunningly animated wow look at all that detail work you know you can see some cheats here big thanks to puget systems for sponsoring today's episode all right guys welcome back just kidding this is the first of its kind it's animators react and we have eric koenig with us today he's a master he's been doing it since the 90s what have you worked on that people would know well i went to school at a great place called cal arts and then i got right in the animation industry worked with a guy named chuck jones a very famous warner brothers animator i worked on a movie called cats don't dance then went to disney dreamworks and then for the last 13 or 14 years i've been on the simpsons have you drawn yourself into the simpsons as a character i am in the simpsons movie really yes what do i do i don't know what to do because if i say i'm trapped if i leave i'm alone oh god in out in out i never saw venice we love anime we love you know old disney movies and everything and there's just so much to get into so let's jump right in you want to ride it tetsuo all right let's hit it katura otomo i'm going to ruin his name i apologize his drawings you know are just painfully good it inspires the matrix and cyberpunk and you know in a thousand things it's just stunningly animated the classic japanese animation you'll see a close-up of their face and just their mouths are moving but he brought in animating the characters on ones if you want it so bad then steal one yourself there's 24 drawings a second which adds that smoothness it's fully articulated when they talk there's a cheat an animation when you're working with animals you know we don't know how a cartoon elephant actually moves because there is no cartoon elephants but when you're animating a human being everybody knows how human beings move and so that fall lands and it bounces and scrapes and it hurts you know you feel the cloth scraping against the ground [Music] did he just clap that in his freaking muscle meet right you know let's talk about like slow motion okay it's almost like a a natural speed ramp anytime something complicated happens it's almost like time slows down just for that one moment even if it's all in within one shot which then you see them copying in matrix zack snyder comes to mind as well [Music] technically there's packed in more drawings to slow the time down sure it's been done what had been done before in animation but i'm gonna go out on the limb and say he came up with that idea you know you can see some cheats here if you look at the motorcycle motorcycle is one drawing or it's like two or three drawings and it's just doing a cycle so it's a loop it's a loop and when you're fred flintstone or scooby-doo anytime they're running they're using the exact same cycle but like we're not going anywhere they're a little bit frowned upon because it's a little bit of a cheat also the background is you know the background is simplified just lines streaking by and it loops absolutely well which also some of the master shots of those backgrounds are filled with so much detail that your eye doesn't really know where to go but when you simplify it down to speed lines like this it pushes everything away and all that they're concerned about is the screen direction part of animation is distracting your eye we're not looking at the motorcycle i'm looking at that guy in the foreground who's moving in beautiful perspective so how the heck are they getting that light bloom effect that's like overlaid on top of the motorcycle or is that like after the fact are they cutting through or not the trails but the bloom right yeah the bloom and the trail let's talk about both so back in the day when it was filmed on the camera the box where the drawings went on was also a light table those bloom effects are hand-drawn elements and then they're hand animating that trail then what they would do is they would paint it in reverse so it would just be a black image with the hole exposed they would shoot the light through the light table into the camera and it would over expose a little bit and it would create that glow effect so cool [Music] so this was the first animation ever yeah windsor mckay who was a newspaper comic artist he is tracing the background on each of the drawings the way animation works is it's on layers you know it's kind of like photoshop where there's a foreground element a middle ground a background and all of that and you draw them on separate layers because you want them moving at different times but he wasn't able to do that so with each one of these drawings he's going in and painstakingly tracing background oh my goodness how long do you think this would have taken him oh i'm sure we can find out but i'm gonna guess it's probably over a year to make this film that's pretty insane to think about yeah there's a lot of other things that you can really see the birth of there's some real fundamental principles of animation which are weight and gravity and follow-through and he's hitting him you know the dinosaur has a feel of weight when you get into animation the first assignments that you get are a bouncing ball a walk cycle and picking up a heavy object and it starts you on your fundamentals of how to animate a scene so here we've got our ball it's heading down so that would be my second drawing now in timing the closer the drawings are to each other the slower it moves the farther they apart the faster it moves so here our bar comes in it's heading towards the ground then it hits the ground and it squatches then it starts to bounce and stretch up and if you watch animation the whole character will stretch up and you get this feel then you know it's bouncing up then i reach the apex of the arc and then it starts to slow down and then speed up again and then bam hit again this is timing physics everything there obviously aren't dinosaurs to study so he's making this up but he's probably looked at footage of elephants the other early person that's credited at the beginning of animation is a photographer named edward mulbridge who created these still cameras and they would run animals in front of the still cameras and you get to see the motion of the horse or the person running so whether you're doing vfx or whether you're animating something reference always got to go back to that ref hey guys we just crossed 4 million subscribers what yes that's awesome thanks to all of you for subscribing so we're only 999 000 subscribers away from 5 million let's do it consider subscribing early on in my career i got the chance to work with chuck jones and maurice noble who were two of the warner brothers director and art director chuck jones took all of us young animators and he said let's watch the general together he talked about how when they were boarding the famous warner brothers shorts what's operdoc and duck rabbit duck what you're trying to get to is where you can tell the story completely visual and then the dialogue just acts as boosting up the character another principle in animation is a thing called silhouette value the idea is you could take your animation fill it in with black and all of the storytelling detail will actually read as a silhouette yeah you got like the silhouette of a dark cannon in the bright field behind it right so if you watch him he's playing off of the canon he's lighting it in a way where you can see exactly what's going on you know he's using the negative space behind there you have no confusion about what's about to happen to him the big thing with watching buster keaton and charlie chaplin is the visual storytelling animation is a visual medium something recent would be like the first 10 minutes of up which completely plays visually and you know makes you bawl your brains out you know so what happens in animation is kind of two schools of animation start to get born right at the beginning one that observes and emulates real life and that would be the disney school where he was studying animals and studying you know human beings and he had his artist really getting in there and trying to figure this out then max fleischer who kind of came from more of a surreal point of view he was less interested in real life and kind of had the idea well we're working in animation and in animation you can do anything so it's like there are no limits yeah he's not walking like a real human being he's kind of moving to the music you know his lips are kind of got this beautiful kind of lyrical whistle going on that bridge between reality-based animation and surreal carries out for the rest of the history of animation this is something that like always blows my mind like with any medium when somebody makes something like this where it's really without any precursor the look of these animals the way their eyes are drawn the goofy physics and noodly arms and now this is one of like the defining styles of animation that stuck with us for a century maybe you know the answer to this but why do the characters wear those white gloves well there is an element to these caricatures that are minstrel show where they're caricaturing black people you can see the black face and the white gloves there's a whole history with jazz and these cartoons are very jazz influenced again these are guys from new york jazz was very subversive music at the time it was born originally from slave music and then it was a way for repressed black people to create their own art the subtext to the cartoon is do you want to join the kkk i know it sounds really intense but it is do you want to be a member do you want to be a member oh jeez and bimbo is no no i won't i won't it's a subversive way to fight against racism with an early medium it's really interesting wow that's fascinating like all that historical context just gets lost when you're watching this as a kid and she's like it's cartoon animals right yeah if there's ever time to like talk about that stuff and bring it up it's kind of now you know it's fascinating to know the history of it and you know what's influencing these designs that in a way i think a lot of people just take for granted it's shameful but it is there wouldn't be modern animation without these influences to draw from you know you have to you have to go through these things yeah i mean entertainment and art's going to reflect the society and the times that it's created in both the good and the bad it's also dark you know i love children's book authors like raul dahl or dr seuss there's a darkness to their stories what they're doing is they're scaring kids into remembering a lesson do you guys have any examples of bad animation because i'd personally love to see it leave a comment down below letting us know and we'll break it down on the show [Music] been a long time since i've seen this film i definitely remember the pink elephant scene that's like a dumbo [Music] dumbo nevermind see it's been a long time come on let's go and poke somebody in the nose why not just for the fun of it okay [Music] wow look at all that detail work remember for a long time when i was young i couldn't figure out why the backgrounds were always painted so nicely but the parts that would move would always be flat colored right yeah so the backgrounds are painted in watercolor the native american is painting and then the arms are animated elements the artistry at disney studios at this point had become so masterful that they were really able to use the gravity to tell the story of a wooden boy in cartoon form and if you watch the top of his hair when he moves the hair is following through and it gives you a context to these characters they feel solid in that world that they're they're real and they have come to life what's going on i imagine it's very hard to communicate that inertia through hand-drawn animation because not only are you looking backwards at the motion but you're kind of also looking forward to the motion and drawing almost like different things in different stages of motion absolutely there is a lot of physics and math involved in animation there's a science element to animation which is exactly what you're talking about it's thinking ahead to an action and a reaction is going to happen the boys they're all donkeys oh you too so is the gravity in the motion what you're checking when you're like flipping between your current drawing and the previous drawing so back in the day when we'd work on paper it was actually you were able to look at five drawings when you start a scene you're doing the key poses of the scenes and i'm going to rough out those four drawings once i've got those four drawings working then i'm going to start figuring out the drawings that go in between those drawings and that's again your math there's another term in animation it's called an s-curve all organic things flow in an organic way the physical element of animation is artistically figuring out where to put those in between to create that snap and that weight that's great insight that's so cool hey guys it's me jake i've traveled across the space time continuum to arrive at a new couch in a new location for those of you who don't know corridor digital is a video content company that has been making videos for 10 years on the internet how do we do that with puget systems computers and that's why today's sponsor is very near and dear to our heart they are a small team based out of puget sound washington they build custom workhorses for professional creators or people who are looking to break into the professional game this is not your average dude you're getting a dell okay this is high-end high quality stuff we're talking and the way that they ensure that process is not only by making sure that they have top parts for everything they put into a machine but also the best thing about puget and the thing that we love about them the most as creators you call them up you tell them what it is you do and they will build one to spec at the cost that you need kit it out with all the bells and whistles all the bio settings all the tweaking that's necessary to do that job we have peace of mind in knowing that they have the best customer service they know exactly our machines and if any time something goes wrong with them we've got them right there to help but anyways if you guys are serious about breaking into a professional creative career or you're already in a professional creative career consider puget systems just head on over to pugetsystems.com that's p-u-g-e-t systems.com tell them corridor digital senior or just click the link in the description of this video so huge thanks to them once again and uh back to the video i'm gonna teleport now again thank you guys so much for watching this was really fun breaking this down for the first time thank you eric for coming out we have a ton of things to break down that we didn't get to on this episode and i know you guys have some really fun ideas as well so please leave a comment down below letting us know what cool animation scenes we need to break down so we can get eric back and do another one of these episodes if you guys like eric and you want to follow his work then you can go over to his youtube channel and check him out the link is down below

Channel: Corridor Crew

Views: 1,857,824

Rating: 4.9572921 out of 5

Keywords: vfx artists react, visual effects, animation, animator, breakdown, cartoons, Akira, Anime, Pinocchio, Disney, The Simpsons

Id: zBYX6JjOCuc

Length: 15min 57sec (957 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 25 2020