Just Plain Bad.

I've formulated another paranoid theory: the "suits" in charge of the arts and entertainment industry are intentionally bombarding the cultural landscape with garbage in order to lower people's expectations. Once those expectations are lowered, they no longer have to pay creatives decent money for professionally-made content; any scribble or squawk will do. Case in point: at Starbucks the other day I saw a CD of "Peanuts Christmas Music" featuring all the Peanuts characters and, behind them, a tree that looked like it had been made in half a minute by someone who had never drawn or used a graphics program before that day. Why pay a graphic designer or illustrator, when the customers don't care what your product looks like?

Speaking of bad, I went and saw "Stranger Than Fiction" with the wife the other day. She liked it, I didn't. Will Farrell plays a man who finds out that he's a character in a novel. What bothered me was the fact that the novel was absolute crap. Which wouldn't have been so bad if they had treated it as crap; but no, the author, played by Emma Thompson, was supposed to be a highly-respected and beloved writer. At one point Will Ferrell's character tells Dustin Hoffman's English Lit Prof that he heard the author's voice say "little did he know". Hoffman's ears perk up immediately. I thought he would immediately explain that "little did he know" is a horribly cliche phrase that only a hack writer would use; but no, it turns out he considers it a highly significant literary device.

There is a longish scene in which Ferrell browses at a guitar shop while Thompson narrates what the guitars are "saying" to him. It's supposed to be very witty, but is actually eye-rollingly bad. Yes, the flying "V" shaped guitar is the kind played by heavy metal guys who wear lycra pants. Yes, the acoustic dreadnought is played by guys who don't really know how to play, but hope to impress girls. Those aren't interesting, original or funny observations, they're obvious. Having a good actress recite the lines with a classy English accent only underscores how bad they are.

The pity of it is, it could have worked if the badness of the book-within-the-movie had been made part of the plot. A man who finds out he's a character in a novel is funny; a man who finds out he's a character in a really BAD novel is funnier. He could have been smarter than the writer and her ensuing efforts to kill him off could have become a pretext for a battle of wits between them.

Or did Woody Allen already make that movie?

The Cat Beast Crouches

A pose I kind of like from the scene I'm working on.

Back Again.

Even if nobody is actually reading this blog, I feel obligated to explain that I was a bit busy for the past seven months with a new job. Fortunately I got laid off, so now I can get back to important things like writing a blog that nobody reads and working on an animated film that nobody is likely to see.

One insight on the craft of storytelling: I've been watching "Battlestar Galactica" on DVD lately, and I was scoffing in the beginning at all the contrived (as I thought of it) problems the characters brought with them. The conflicts between Apollo and his father, Tigh's alcoholism, everything seemed very obviously set up by the writers to produce drama in future episodes.

Then I compared it to the original Battlestar Galactica, where (if memory serves) each episode dealt with the characters responding to some outside force. They had no inner lives or multilayered relationships with each other (again, to the best of my memory), and so the writers had to keep coming up with some new cosmic threat or cylon attack to hold our interest.

I always knew in a general sort of way that good plots come out of characters and the relationships between them, but it was good to get this object lesson. The tension among the characters in this show is not thrown in there just for an excuse to have them occasionally yell at each other (which, in some shows, does pass for drama), but to move the plot along a trajectory. For me this is the main thing I can't get a handle on in my own attempts at writing.

"Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell"

This past year, in addition to other overly ambitious things, I've been writing a book. I've been working on it during my long train commute between Providence and Boston, one hour each way, and it has gotten pretty darn long. It's also set in a mythical world and largely written in the form of a folk tale, which puts it pretty much outside the mainstream of serious modern fiction.

Long books, from what I've read, are frowned on by publishers, especially when submitted by a first-time author. Because of this I've been feeling more and more hopeless as the thing expanded past 100,000 words (the maximum length for an acceptable novel). Not that I counted on getting it published, but it was nice to think that at least I had an outside chance.

Then, a few weeks ago, I picked up the best-selling "Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell" by first-timer Susanna Clarke. It's 800 pages long. It's also about magic and is written in the style of Jane Austen. Pure escapism, but not trashy and not aimed at the typical fantasy reader. Somehow, though, she got it published and it became a fantastic best-seller.

I feel a real affinity for this book, especially for its flaws. It doesn't have a barreling plot that keeps you turning pages – something I could never manage. Instead it keeps you interested with its details and embellishments. The characters and their machinations aren't terribly compelling, but they are a pleasure to read about. Towards the end of the book she tries to do that thing that modern novels do, which is to bring all the threads of the plot together into what is supposed to be an exciting climax, but here she fails because the threads weren't set up or followed all that well to begin with. No big deal, as far as I'm concerned.

I've grown up reading old-fashioned literature that starts slowly and meanders a lot. That stuff was meant for a public with a longer attention span and not much else, besides books, competing for their leisure time. It's good to know that some things haven't changed. While people in the publishing and entertainment worlds seem to firmly believe that you have to treat your audience like hyperactive six-year-olds, books like "Jonathan Strange" prove them wrong.

I wonder if this will make any difference to what kinds of books or movies get made.

(For anyone who has read and enjoyed "Jonathan Strange", John Crowley's "Little, Big" is a great book in the same vein.) http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0060937939/qid=1137985724/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/102-2180774-3810513?s=books&v=glance&n=283155

Acting, Over-acting and Under-acting.

During my last job as a storyboard artist I discovered that I had a tendency (compared to the other storyboarders) to make my characters act in a subdued, understated way. After a while I figured out that I was subconsciously taking my inspiration from "Peanuts". The script and the actors' readings of their lines suggested this approach to me and I couldn't really break out of it, even though I saw that this was making my scenes look somewhat different from the rest of the show.

Which brings me to the general subject of acting in modern animation. At some point it seems like animators stopped "acting" out their characters and instead fell back on a suite of standard expressions. The "one eyebrow down, one eyebrow up" expression, the "hand rubbing the back of the neck to indicate discomfort" expression, the "sly rogue" expression with the eyelds at half-mast and the lopsided smile. Often these expressions seem to be employed without any regard for what the characters are actually supposed to be feeling at the moment.

Looking back at the "Golden Age" of Disney, I would have to say that the acting in, say, Pinocchio, while definiely far better than the modern style, is still somewhat annoying if you think about it. The way the characters keep bobbing their heads up and down on every syllable, for example. My theory is that the animators of that time were raised on vaudeville and other kinds of theatre in which the acting has to be extremely broad for expressions and gestures to be read by the people in the back rows.

I'm starting to think that limited animation is a better choice for dialogue scenes and that full animation should be reserved for action scenes. There must be a way to keep the characters in motion (so that they don't look dead) without making them go spastic. I've begun to notice recently that the most compelling animated characters I've seen have been done using a minimum of drawings (Miyazake's children are a great example. This is another one: http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/bunny.php)

Disney's "Alice"

I gave my wife the perfect Christmas present this year – the complete "New Yorker" on DVD. In return, she gave me a DVD called "The Complete WEIRD Cartoons". These are actually treasures of early animation, but obviously they're being marketed towards people with no taste or sense of history.

I've only watched the first one, an early Disney "Alice" short. I had heard that they were not that great, but I never realized just how far from good they were. Julius, Alice's cat, isn't simply based on Felix – he's an example of shameless plagiarism. His personality, the way he's animated, his predilection for using his tail as all sorts of things (in this case a whip) is stolen wholesale from Messmer's work. And it's done with less style and animation savvy. Hard to believe W.E.D. started out as a hack.

This particular cartoon was "Alice's Egg Plant" and is notable for showcasing Disney's conservative politics and also a weird foreshadowing of the Disney animators' strike of the '40s (Alice's hens go on strike thanks to the efforts of a communist agitator sent by Moscow). You can also see the difference between the midwestern farm-boy Walt and the more cosmopolitan Messmer. The latter's Felix is a jazz age playboy and Messmer's imagination is also more European somehow (then again, so is Winsor McCay's). Meanwhile, Disney set "Plane Crazy" and "The Band Concert" on farms. Maybe I'm reading too much into this.

Free Toons

Found these curious antiques for download: http://www.ramshock.com/free_download.htm

I never realized before just how much cartoons of that period relied on endless cycles. I meant to do the same thing with Bobbie Binks in order to save time, but it hasn't worked out that way for some reason.

I was surprised to see that the cartoon "Pencilmania" features a walking artist's easel, just like a recent scene I did in B.B. Don't know if that's a good thing or not.

My Next Novel

Yesterday, just as I was waking up, an idea popped into my head for a novel (or possible screenplay); in the years before WWII Hitler decides to start an animation studio in Germany to rival Disney's. The story would be told from the point of view of a young artist who, like most young artists, is anxious to establish himself in his career and completely oblivious to the fact that he is in service to something evil. Kind of like many artists working in studios have to stifle their own creativity in order to serve the needs of their employer.

Of course, this is a lot more difficult to stomach when the studio is turning out dreck, or when the show itself is great (eg. the Simpsons), but is based on the work of a non-artist (like Matt Groening). It was always kind of painful to me, during my short stint at Film Roman, to watch really talented artists having to draw those poorly designed characters. Even worse for "Beavis and Butthead" or "South Park", which lack even Groening's instinctive drawing skills. Fortunately, the top-tier artists usually find their way into jobs where their talents can really be put to use; still, it illustrates the screwed-up way our culture is more receptive to dreck than to quality stuff.

Getting back to the Nazi Disney idea, it seems probable that such a studio would start by producing an animated version of Wagner's "Ring" cycle. I can imagine Party bureaucrats insisting on an eight-hour film (just the way the clients at my last job demanded work of Disney quality on a sub-Flintstones budget). The self-infatuated head of the studio turns the film into a horrible mess, with Siegfried's horse offering wisecracks and Brunhilde's death being mourned by little birds and squirrels, a la "Snow White". Hitler is furious at the insult to his beloved Wagner and the whole enterprise grinds to a halt. Many years later, our protagonist, having emigrated to the U.S. after the war, has a heart attack and dies laughing while watching Chuck Jones' "What's Opera Doc".

Any Hollywood agents can contact me for the film rights at my email address. Nothing under six figures, please.