Link from AICN (includes still picture)
If there are any FFFB fans out there, you know how cool this is. I have no idea how this is being made but the still shot looks great and I can’t wait for this.
Fat Freddy has slimmed down some. 
And where’s his cat?
So, they’re finally making Gone With the Weed
The cat must be in it, I see his cat dish on the floor.
Where? Behind the hookah? I think that’s an ashtray.
On the floor at the left end of the coffee table. There’s a red pet dish with catfood spilling out of it. It’s easier to see if you enlarge the picture.
Kick ass! (They look like they’ve been out of drugs for about five days.*)
The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb is one of my favourite movies. Freaking trippy little picture.
FFFB is quite a different thing, but I have no doubt it’ll be a blast, so long as they stick to the source. The characters and set dressing are right on.
I’m confused about whether it’s being set in modern times or not. That’s Nixon on the door. Who’s on the door behind Freddy, though? Is it GWB?
*A brownie for anyone who knows what the hell I’m talking about, there.
Wow, this sure brought back some flashbacks …er, some memories. Maybe there is even a smidgen of a chance that they’ll revive Wonder Wart-Hog someday.
If I were making a stop-motion animation movie involving the FFFB, I would hope to get permission to have a cameo by Wallace & Gromit. Seems that Gromit has a new occupation as a drug-sniffing dog, and…
You’re referring to the time they ran out of drugs and they and their environment gradually began to turn “real.”
Now what kind of brownies are we talking about?
I hope you still enjoy 'em after I sweat all over 'em taking them through US customs.
Thanks for sharing this, Diogenes.
Wow, that certainly does bring back the good ol’ daze for me.
They’ve got to have Fat Freddy’s cat; the red dish does indeed look like cat food.
One of my few momentos from the day, A FFFB tee shirt. It’s been autographed by Buck Dharma at a BOC concert.
Thanks for the link, Dio, brings back a few memories I think I had.
What’s behind the stop-motion choice?
I’m a purist. I think if you’re going to base a movie on a comic book, and it’s not live action, then it should be ordinary flatscreen animation – which keeps it closer to the original artist’s vision and style.
I think the animation technique is probably the least important factor when it comes to preserving the original vision and style. Plenty of cell-animated adaptations of ink-and-paper strip artists’ works have been astonishingly wide of the mark when it comes to the original spirit of the work. Think Fritz the Cat or Little Nemo. Sin City has live action elements, of course, but it also contains so much CGI and image processing that it’s something else again. Still, it’s probably the mark to aim for when it comes to translating the essence of a comic strip into a motion picture format. It would have been quite simple to process the images in such a way that the “black-and-white” parts where properly duochrome, with crosshatch shading closely matching the original artwork. It wouldn’t have been any closer to what’s important about Sin City, though, and it certainly wouldn’t have had the same visual appeal – it would have looked like crap.
An adaptation of a comic strip shouldn’t aspire to simply be a moving version of the comic, because a comic page and a movie screen are two different things. They have different requirements for composition. Shelton’s style wouldn’t be that interesting if you simply made it 24 frames per second. It’s difficult to translate to film in a way that would look interesting, because his compositions have sharply abbreviated depth-of-field, and are mostly tight arrangements around his characters’ faces, with one or two background features crammed into the frame. He uses false perspective almost entirely, so if you wanted to keep everything looking like a panel from the comic book, you’d need to use static backgrounds and would be unable to simulate a moving POV.
Also, his drawing style can’t be translated directly to animation in a way that would look good, because of the shading technique that he uses. To do the Freak Brothers as cell animation, you’d have to simplify the characters quite a bit, giving them clean outlines with soft shading, so they wouldn’t really look like Shelton’s scratchy drawings, anyway.
So there are technical reasons why you can’t make cell animation that closely matches the look-and-feel of Gilbert Shelton’s drawings, and the differences between the page and the screen would require you to wander quite far from them, anyway.
What of the Freak Brothers style can be translated to the screen? Character design. The overall feeling of the grubby, cluttered universe they inhabit. The outrageous, anarchic humour. These are the important things, and could be realized with any number of techniques.
Stop motion is a good choice for the Freak Brothers world because it’s a messy world. It’s one thing to draw a pig-sty in a single panel. It’s another thing to animate one. If you’ve got crap lying everywhere, and you want to pan through it (while animating your characters!) cell animation would require you to redraw every individual item of clutter hundreds of times, unless you went for a limited animation deal, with crappy static backgrounds.
If you want to present a stimulating, visually rich world for them to inhabit, you’re going to want CGI or stop motion. CGI might be doable, but it presents its own problems. It would certainly be easier. Stop motion (especially Borthwick’s style) is much better suited for presenting a grungy, organic world, though.
That’s not to say that a good Freak Brothers movie using cell animation is impossible – just that if it was going to be a good animated film it would really have to depart from Shelton’s style a lot anyway, and some of the most defining things about The Freak Brothers are much easier to realize in stop motion animation.
Plus, it’s going to look wicked cool
Superb post, Larry; very insightful.
Clang! Honk! Tweet!
Why?
This is the SDMB at it’s finest. Nowhere else would you find such a meticulous analysis of the art style of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers.
I agree that this looks very interesting. I just hope it doesn’t fall through like so many other attempts.
On a side note: This is the first time I’ve ever seen AICN. A couple of jokes from Penny Arcade and Something Awful now make sense. “Fellatio” was certainly one of the first things to come to mind.
I think the stop motion figures are infinitely more capable of capturing the style than any hand drawn or computer developed project could capture.
Oh, and everything Larry said.
Thanks for the kind words, guys.
Take a look at the way that Shelton’s characters are drawn and shaded.
Notice how the outlines aren’t completely defined? See how the shading is done with cross-hatching or, (as in the case of Franklin’s bulbous nose,) with “squiggles”?
This works fine for a sketchy, static panel. You can’t shade that way in animation, though – it would look terrible. We wouldn’t accept that as a bulbous nose. It’d be a 2D shape with a dancing, hyperkinetic squiggle on it. The underside of his hat is shaded with four discrete lines – shade it the same way in the next frame, and we don’t see shading anymore, we see four lines with shifting positions. If you animated this scene by redrawing it over and over with the same technique, it would become a busy mess of lines and squiggles crawling all over everything, which would be ugly and distracting.
A shaded animated drawing has to use soft shading, if we’re going to accept it as shading. Even much more careful crosshatching would end up looking really strange. Think of that video for a-ha’s Take On Me. That’s shaded based on film, so it corresponds directly to real moving shadows – but it still looks really strange and distracting. Shelton’s shading doesn’t correspond very closely to realistic shading at all – it would just look like 2D squiggles covering a 2D outline. You don’t want to look at that for an hour-and-a-half.
Similarly, Shelton’s style is very sketchy. The outlines of limbs, fingers, and clothes are often more suggested than defined. There are a lot of lines that just peter out. In animated drawing, you have to be more draftsmanlike, or you get distracting effects. A “sketchy” line is going to look like it’s dancing around as you animate it – getting longer and shorter, etc. You see the line rather than what it is supposed to define.
To do the Freak Brothers as decent-looking animated drawings, you’d have to tighten them up a lot, give them solid, consistent details, and shade them nice and soft to give them a solid feel. You couldn’t just render them like Shelton did, only at 24fps, and expect the result to be acceptable.