Ever notice when a cartoon character picks up something out of a pile, the object picked up is different colored? Why is this?
I don’t know why, but I’ve noticed it too. Kinda annoying when you can tell in advance which brick’s gonna fall out of the wall and hit Daffy on the head…
In Roger Ebert’s “Bigger Little Movie Glossary,” a very funny compendium of the worst cliches in film, this phenomenon is known as the “Fudd Flag.” I don’t have the book in front of me, but I think they do that so the animators won’t lose track of which item is to be picked up (or which stone, when pressed, will trigger the trap door, etc.).
WAG…
It’s a reference point. Often times different people draw different elements of a cartoon, and many times the inkers have little interaction with those who draw it. Having one object be a reference point makes the frame be set up right.
I’ve noticed that whenever a character moves a limb, that limb is also differently colored, especially in old Hanna Barbera cartoons.
I dunno why, though.
Snooooopy/Andygirl: That’s what I was thinking, I just didn’t remember it until after I’d posted. It helps the ‘toonist keep track of which piece moves, seein’ as how they hafta draw more than 20 a second…
The reason an object that is going to be animated sticks out from the background is that the animated object is painted on a clear animation cell, and the background is just painted on paper, or whatever it is they paint those backgrounds on. It is really obvious in those old Hanna/Barbera and Filmation cartoons fromt he 70’s. They’ve gotten better about making it look more seamless. I think the Simpsons does it pretty well.
I’m not the only one who noticed this. That means I haven’t been hallucinating while watching Scooby Doo.
I believe Maxwell Edison got it right… if you have a painting and you want to overlay a character on top of it with a clear sheet, the overlay is going to stand out even if you use the same inks. And this is most noticable with older cartoons - technology has gotten better, but people aren’t able to keep track of objects any better today than they were 20 years ago.
You can usually notice that any object that moves in a cartoon will have a different appearance than one that doesn’t.
I think that Mr2001, and Max Ed sort of got it right, but there’s more to it than they describe.
The soon-to-fall tree limb, or whatever, is painted on a sheet of “clear” acetate; the rest of the tree is painted on paper (or another sheet of acetate) under that.
Even though they use the same color ink for the limb and tree, the camera will capture the color of the limb unaltered; the color of the tree, however, will shift slightly because it is under the acetate. Acetate is not 100% transparent nor 100% colorless, so it slightly effects color and brightness of the images behind it.
It sometimes seems to me that there is a “standard” branch or whatever that is used from stock.
I’ve seen several things that are the same in differant cartoons, my guess is that they are from the same company.
It must be a lot cheaper to have a stock of elements that can be used across several differant stories rather than have to draw the whole thing from new every time.Maybe it helps give the studio a certain identifiable look as well, kind of like a trademark.