I was watching some very old Betty Boop cartoons over the weekend - man, they are so hard to watch! I get seasick watching these old cartoons because the characters bob up and down continuously! This is especially true of Fleischer studio cartoons (such as Betty Boop and Popeye) from the 1930s. Why did they do it? Was it a way of marking time to synchronize the sound, or did they do it because they thought if the characters stood still people would think they weren’t getting their money’s worth? Or did the animators have Palsey?
I’m not sure what you’re talking about. Often when there was music going on the characters would bob or move in time tio the music as a sort of dance. But it wasn’t invariably there. Popeye didn’t generally bounce around, nor did Koko the Clown in the very oldest cartoons.
They certainly didn’t have to bounce up and down to synchronize the sound – the sound is recorded *first[p/i], and then the animation is done to meet the soundtrack. In fact, the Fleischers invented an animated “metronome” to guide the orchestra in recording cartoon music. See Leslie Cabarga’s wonderful book The Fleischer Story.
If I remember correctly, it’s something along the lines of your second hypothesis - the continuous motion made the cartoons seem more lifelike. Unfortunately I don’t have any cites to back it up.
Or maybe the Fleischers just dug it.
No, it is constantly there. Take an old Popyeye cartoon - no music at the time, Popeye is just standing to one side - yet his knees are constantly flexing as he bobs up and down. Or this Betty Boop cartoon “Poor Cinderella” - the Fairy Godmother is talking to her, and she is also flexing her knees and bobbing up and down but NOT in time to the music OR the Fairy Godmothers poem - she’s just doing it to do it! In the same cartoon at the beginning there is a “proclamation” banner held up for 10 seconds and all 8 tassles on it are bobbing up and down - NOT swaying in the breeze, just bobbing up and down! Again NOT in time to the music.
I remember seeing that with Popeye as well. Most of the time the “dancing look” went in time with the music in the background, even with Popeye. At least that is my personal observation. I am not as familiar with Betty Boop, but I have a hankering that it is based on a similar premise.
I’ll have to look at my old cartoons again, because I don’t recall them bouncing “out-of-time” or without music. Cabarga certainly doesn’t mention it.
If they did do so, it was probably to remind the audience it was an animated cartoon, and to take advantafge of the medium. Windsor McKay certainly had his character Gertie the Dinosaur bouncing around when she wasn’t doing anything else in his classic cartoon of the same name.
It was also an easily repeatable action that could re-use drawings of moving knees/legs. Saves animation costs. Walt Disney used it in Steamboat Willie and other early Disney toons.
Bosda has it. It was a way of re-using the same drawings over and over, and hitting the audience over the head with the fact that they were watching drawings that–get this–MOVED!
That’s funny, I’m never bothered by bobbing in old Fleischer cartoons, but the stuff Walt Disney did, like Steamboat Willy, bugs the crap out of me in that regard. They even did a parody of his jerky style on The Simpsons (Steamboat Scratchy). Disney really was a pretty dismal animator, but he at least had the sense later on to relegate the actual drawing to others who could do it well.
Bosco and Honey cartoons do this all the time. It is part of the reason the Bosco cartoons suck, they spend so much time doing lame things showing off that it is an animated show that they don’t do any gags.
[nitpick]I believe it was Steamboat Itchy.[/nitpick]
This is unsurprising. The Fleischer Bros. were brilliant animators and approached the medium the right way. Walt Disney, on the other hand, was fumbling around in the dark. In the beginning, he did do the animation first and then work on a sound-track to suit it. This ass-backwards approach became known in the industry as “Mickey Mousing”, (particularly w/ regard to adding music to match actions,) the meaning of which has been broadened to refer to any thing that’s done in an inferior way.
Like all the ridiculously unnecessary balance shifting in early stereo recordings?
Hey!
Man!
Dig
this!
Or pretty much any scene in a 3D movie.
My god…that pie is coming right at us!
I love that about old cartoons. So much motion, wheeeee!
Kind of like how the not-so-well-done computer-generated characters of the modern day have a bunch of superfluous movement.
I agree. And as a sidetrack, while we’re sucking up to the Fleischers, how did they do that 3-D looking background effect you see in Betty Boop cartoons? That was amazing, and years ahead of their time.
Hilarious. I always wondered where that expression came from.
Why do I hear the Comic Book Guy voice when I read that?
It was a patented process of theirs (they patented the Rotoscope, too), in which a model was built on a large rotating turntable with a fixed camera, and I think there was a special frame to hold the animation cels – think of the Disney Multiplane camera turned horizontal, only with a rotating bed instead of a flat one. There are pictures and descriptions in Leslie Cabarga’s book, and I’ll bet there are plenty on the Internet, too.
Disney himself never did the animation for his cartoons after he left Kansas City for Hollywood. He had animator Ub Iwerks working for him from 1924 to 1930, and it’s Iweks’ style that you see in Steamboat Willie (1928).