I cycle from painting to drawing to animating, as I get burned out on each one. I have been trying to push forward with a short film idea. I completed the storyboards during the spring, but wasn't sure how to proceed to the animation itself. Working on the monthly challenges for the
11 Second Club helped clarify the workflow a bit more.
Animating is about organization. First you have to define certain structures for timing, staging, pacing and what you want the "feel" to be like. You have to build this scaffold first, or else it's very difficult to animate successfully. There are hundreds and hundreds of drawings to be made, and without clear guideposts, it's overwhelming and paralyzing.
A few years ago, I was very excited to purchase the new book
The Animator's Survival Kit, by Richard Williams. I paid top dollar for this book, as it was touted as sort of a secret Bible for successful animation. It became an instant classic, and is the first thing anyone recommends to people who are studying animation. This book made me miserable. I no longer refer to it, except in rare cases. Here are some of the reasons:
- The characters are stiff and unappealing. They are mannequins and lack any vitality. To me, animation is about giving a graceful flow to characters who lend themselves to motion. I understand that Williams is trying to simplify things for the beginner, but he actually makes it harder. When your character's arms are two lines which join at an angle, there is no solidity. There is no organic quality, and I can't understand how you can have anima (soul) without bios (life). It's not animation, it's just motion.
- On the other side, when Williams gives examples of his own characters (from The Thief & the Cobbler, for example), the characters are so complex, and the animation sequences printed so eye-bleedingly small, that it's impossible to see exactly what is changing from frame to frame. Didn't this guy actually LOOK at the book he produced?
- Third, this guy's process seems tailored specifically to himself. He does separate runs of straight-ahead animation on each individual body part. What?! That's his method. I certainly have to respect that, considering his output, but I have trouble imagining that this process could make sense to anyone else.
I think Williams must be sort of a savant. Everything makes sense to him, but to him only. What's more, while he is a master technician, I don't find any of his work particularly emotionally compelling. Even his magnum opus,
The Thief & The Cobbler, is rather oppressive. Disney rather blatantly ripped off the more interesting parts of
Thief for
Aladdin, a movie which lacks its source material's impressive "shimmer", and is arguably not as well animated. But
Aladdin remains one of my favorite movies, and I could only stand to watch
Thief once or twice. It's exhausting and soulless. I feel the same way about
Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, a movie whose shrill, unsympathetic title character reminds me of the sort of scary clown who upsets children.
It makes sense, then, that the more recent book,
Character Animation Crash Course, by Eric Goldberg, should be everything that
The Animator's Survival Kit isn't. Eric Goldberg (who worked for Williams, as well as for Disney and Warner Brothers) was lead animator for the Genie in
Aladdin, for Phil the satyr in
Hercules, for Daffy Duck in one of the disappointing attempts at reviving the Looney Tunes, and whose most personal project was the Rhapsody in Blue sequence of
Fantasia 2000 (pretty much the only thing worth watching in that film). Everything the guy does has soul. It's what he's really interested in. As result, he takes twice as much time to discuss character development as he does pure technique. You can't animate the characters until they live.
