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Part Three

I hope everyone is having a lovely holiday break. My favourite thing from the holidays, nay perhaps from the entire year, was this headline:

and subsequent quote:

I laugh every time I read it without fail.

We continue our journey of hand drawn images with the animation side of things.

My first introduction to animation cels was the scene in the Simpsons when Bart pays a cool $350 for an Itchy and Scratchy animation cell and is deeply disappointed when he receives this:

When I look back at moments from my childhood that made me want to become an animator, this scene was one of them - I had no idea animation was made this way.

The next time I encountered an animation cel (or sorts) it was in college, animating pencil on paper, also mostly just hands floating in the abyss (although sometimes to be economical, the hands would share the space with a floating head from a different scene):

All my animations since have been pencil drawn on paper. From the rough:

A straight ahead animation with no in-betweening

To the slightly less rough:

A fully scanned and levelled out animation coloured on paper

To the fully rendered:

Which means they all come with the own stacks of hand drawn animation frames (Bart Simpson has never tried to buy a single one).

On Summer Camp Island a lot of the story boarders initial thumbnails were hand drawn on posit its and paper.

Here are some of the thumbs by Tom Herpich for Midnight Quittance which he kindly gifted to me at the end of the show:

And Graham Falk for Hedgehog Werewolf:

So imagine my raw unfiltered glee when I found out that Rough Draft, the studio in South Korea that animated Summer Camp Island also hand drew all their animation frames on paper. AND BETTER YET - they also animated the Simpsons. Here are some of those absolutely gorg frames from Summer Camp Island. They range from rough:

to slightly less rough:

to fully rendered:

Frames from Monster Visit

Frames from Feeling Spacey

Frames from Fuzzy Pink Time Babies

This all brings up a point I’ve been thinking about a lot - ever since the news came out that Warner would not be releasing ‘Coyote Vs Acme’ the much anticipated new movie based on a New Yorker article, opting instead to use it for a tax write-off of $30 million. The same old bullshit which has somehow become the norm this year, even though this film was getting rave reviews from early audiences.

Following outrage from the director Dave Green, the crew, composer Stephen Price who shared a snippet of the score on twitter and subsequently many people on the internet, Warner agreed to let the film be shopped to other networks, opting to sell a Looney Tunes property - a Warner legacy - to another network rather than just bloody releasing it.

There are so many animations from my childhood that led me becoming an animator myself - Sally Cruikshanks animations on Sesame Street

The opening title sequence of the Rugrats

The Snowman

and that moment in the Simpsons.

Stephen Price’s composition for Acme Vs Coyote might be the reason someone becomes a composer one day, but not if companies keep opting to hide art away in favour of a juicy tax break. It’s so short sighted to think that art purely exists to be profitable in the exact moment that it is released into the world. It’s profitable for countless reasons over many decades and generations.

AI is already making it harder for artists to find a space in film and television, without CEO’s gatekeeping the films that might inspire the next generation.

Thank you for listening to me rant at the end of the year. See you in 2024 and have a lovely rest of your holiday break!