… Each scene cut, each step, each phoneme of dialogue, each hand movement, bite, explosion, laugh, was meticulously timed to the twenty-fourth of a second, each of five thousand drawings accounted for, each piece of action carefully planned and timed. The director is the composer.
V. ANIMATION ANIMATE: [Webster’s] From Latin, animatus—to invoke life, to make alive, to give life to, bring to life, to stimulate to action or creative effort.
ANIMATION: “Animation is not the art of drawings that move, but the art of movements that are drawn.”
—NORMAN MC LAREN
Animation could therefore apply to all spoken drama, from Lysistrata through King Lear, Waiting for Godot, to Chaplin, Keaton, and us.
What we did at Warner Bros, is often called “character animation,” but if one considers Webster, this is redundant. Indeed, there are many other forms of movement done under a flatbed camera, called, wisely, “film graphics.”
The surprising and largely unnoticed thing about animation is that it does not require a camera. It exists in the finished scene. The sheaf of drawings can be held in your hand and flipped for a very small audience—as many as can look over your shoulder, the way it had been done by children for years before the advent of the motion-picture camera.
It is not known how far back in history flipping goes—perhaps back to the first book, so it seems obvious that the first time an inquisitive child got hold of a book, flipping or animation was invented.
Animation is acting and an animator must respond to the same exacting disciplines as an actor does.
The animator must, in short, be able to perform on a bare stage, without words, without settings, without music, and be understood, and that is precisely what we did at Warners. Upon completion of animation, and without any of the aforesaid elements, we ran the pencil or line test, silent, to see if it worked on that bare stage. This was as true of a verbose character like Pepé Le Pew or Bugs Bunny as it was of mute characters like the Coyote and Road Runner. You can prove the vitality of this kind of animation to yourself: on Saturday morning, turn off the sound of the Bugs Bunny show and note that you can tell pretty much what is happening.
Full animation is acting. Just as the actor demonstrates a part not by what he looks like but by how he moves, so the animator takes simple graphics and brings them to life in the way they move and by the intricate timing necessary to achieve that life.
Storyboard:
HOW TO MAKE AN ANIMATED CARTOON
Starring Daffy (Alistair) Duck
Harris, Levitow, Thompson, Washam, Monroe & Vaughan
Not a law firm, but artists who firmly believed in the pleasure of their craft and the joy of animation.
Ken Harris, who could equally well animate the most outrageous Father’s Day celebration ever in A Bear for Punishment or the results of a coyote overdosed on earthquake pills in Hopalong Casualty or the ballet sequence in What’s Opera, Doc?
Junyer Bear: A BEAR FOR PUNISHMENT (1951)
Michael Maltese, coach … and the indomitable volleyball team from Pimento University: Monroe, Washam, Levitow, Thompson, and Harris
Abe Levitow, who animated the wonderfully hilarious laughing scene in Robin Hood Daffy, with Porky Pig as Friar Tuck, and who also found no difficulty in transforming the fearsome Nasty Canasta in Barbary Coast Bunny into a sort of human steamroller who could also have cast the gigantic shadows in the Night-on-Bald-Mountain sequence in What’s Opera, Doc?
Richard Thompson, whose specialty, among many others, was Sam Sheepdog, in A Sheep in the Deep and others, as well as Daffy’s fight sequence with the Shropshire Slasher in Deduce, You Say.
Ben Washam, master of animation, sensitive delineator of Ralph Phillips, the daydreaming little boy in From A to Z-Z-Z-Z, and master, too, of Pepé Le Pew in For Scent-imental Reasons and the flying kitten in Go Fly a Kit.
Phil Monroe, who worked so hard in my early years to make me a decent director. His Bugs Bunny in Super-Rabbit, Case of the Missing Hare, Frigid Hare, and Long-Haired Hare helped me at last to understand the inner workings of Bugs’s brain.
Lloyd Vaughan, whose interest and artistry in everything in animation from a wayward flame to a mysterious Mynah Bird, from a lightning strike to an eighteen-foot Elmer in Beanstalk Bunny were both a wonder and a life-ring to me.
I am grateful beyond words to have had these wonderful men to guide my stumbling footsteps along the road to a reasonable competence.
Yes, Mahatma Gandhi wasn’t kidding when he said: “There they go. I must run and catch up with them, because I am their leader!” So I ran to catch up with my animators, and maybe I grew up a little under their unconscious tutelage.
If, as Ed Wynn said, a comedian is not a person who opens a funny door but a person who opens a door funny, then these men were comedians through the art form we call animation.
VI. ASSISTANT ANIMATION (OR IN-BETWEENS) The animator does the key drawings, working over a light board, from the director’s character layouts and the exposure sheets. Unlike other forms of graphic arts, the individual drawing has little meaning. We are dealing here with a flurry of drawings flipped before your eyes. Each drawing is on the screen 1/24 of a second, far too fast for the human eye, whose visual receptivity
