I may have a misunderstanding of how animation works, but I know that the fundamental principle is that people draw images that are shown in succession in order to give the appearance of motion. I also know that huge teams of animators work on animated movies and even TV shows.
How is it that an animated character looks the same throughout an entire TV show or movie? I’d imagine that no matter how talented the artist is, if you get 10 different people to draw Buggs Bunny, you’re going to get 10 different images.
I’m trying to think of a way to articulate this quesiton sot hat it makes more sense - if 10 (or 50) different animators are working on Aladdin, why doesn’t Aladdin look different in two different scenes done by different individual animation artists? Is one person assigned to always draw Aladdin, another person assigned to always draw Jasmine, and so on?
By extension, how is it that Buggs Bunny always looks the same in every cartoon, even though he may have been drawn by hundreds of different artists?
There are things called model sheets (muy importante), which show the character in various positions, stances, and with various facial expressions. They show ratios and proportions of the characters, and often compare heights with other characters. The character’s head is used as a measurement for his height. For instance, if Bugs Bunny were 6 heads tall, (pulling that number out of my ass here) you can envision six of his heads stacked on top of each other.
Principal animators draw key frames – the defining frames that delineate actions.
Lesser animators draw “tweens.” (And tweens of tweens.) Say there are key frames 1, 7, and 12 for one cell. Maybe a full character, maybe just an arm or something, depending on the project. One tweener will draw frames 4 and 10, and another tweener will work behind and do frames 2, 3, 5, and 6… Maybe someone else will do 8, 9, and 11.
After the keyframes and tweens are done, colourists do their thing.
Part of the consistency is because the tweeners are consciously averaging between two other frames.
There are also character sheets that rigidly define the geometry and proportions of the characters, and everybody works to those.
I think this is the explanation I was looking for - you basically have a a “Principal Animator” that’s drawing the most important things, and then lesser animators are just sort of filling in the gaps in between those most important frames, and everybody’s working to a standardized model.
Only partially. Don’t underestimate the importance of the other things shared up there. The idea of a guiding set of Character Sheets is what permits skilled illustrators all over the world to match the look and “feel” of animated characters.
There are times when 3-d models are wrought in Plasticene or somesuch, so that an animator can feel and turn and move the character as they draw the illustrations that become the pencil set of images for cel animation. Similarly today, with some films created 100% in computer, not in camera, the folks sitting at tablets are basically illustrating pixels onto a computer “sheet” and making sure the characterizations are consistent. These 3-d clay models are called maquettes and this site gives some excellent and recognizable examples of them.
While on vacation, we turned on some very old Warner Bros. cartoons. Bugs Bunny was slightly different-looking. No doubt some old cartoon afficionados can tell us when and why Bugs was altered. He was interacting with Elmer Fudd- who was 100% different than the Elmer we all know and love. ( or detest. whatever ). There was a balding guy, so I guess it’s 95% different. If not for the Mel Blanc-delivered voice of Elmer that was identical to the voice of later cartoons, nobody would have associated the man I saw in the cartoon with Elmer Fudd. Long time since I’ve seen such a glaring example of a shift in a character’s look.
Even with model sheets, differences show up. If you watch the old Betty Boop cartoon “The Old Man of the Mountain”, the titular Old Man takes on at least three different appearances, depending on who’s drawing him. There are pix of all three in the seciond edition of Leslie Cabarga’s book “The Fleischer Story”.
What a good question. I was going to ask a variation of it very soon myself.
Can I add a related question?
Who determines what the characters should do and how they should move on a detailed level? For instance, in a fight scene, who decides that character A should have his sword right here while his opponent is reaching for a gun in a certain way?
In a human movie, a director can just give actors general direction and they can do their thing. Animated movies cannot do that. Who determines their exact movements? How is that conveyed to the animators?
I think Warner Bros. did the best animation. Plus the animations had a plot line and a lot of allowed input.
What’s that “new” animation Hanna-Barbera started?
Hanna-Barbera is usually “credited” with popularizing the technique of limited animation, where characters are broken up into individual elements on separate cels, with minimal animation of the barest sort done to convey motion. (Eg; Instead of redrawing the head every time, the mouth is animated seperately, or the legs are animated and the body remains static, etc.)
This was an “advance” from the viewpoint of producers who wanted to keep production costs down, but of course it looks cheesy as hell.
This wasn’t a pioneering move in the sense that nobody had thought of it first – but they really embraced it.
I shall pounce on this before anyone else gets a chance to and point out that Elmer Fudd is one of the few Warner Brothers characters not voiced by Mel Blanc, but by Arthur Q. Bryant. (And I’m a bit surprised that someone who calls himself Cartooniverse wouldn’t know this.)
Blanc (and others) did voice Elmer after Quimby died, though. See the Wikipedia article. The article also says that Quimby did not receive an on screen credit for doing Elmer’s voice; only Blanc had a contract requiring this.
I son’t have much else to add to this thread, though I am currently studying animation in Japan.
But I did want to mention that animation isn’t free-hand drawing. After drawing for years and years, certainly a skilled animator would be able to do a couple quick copies of a character and then go off and start drawing it without needing to do much else. Starting out though, you start off by breaking the characters into simple shapes (mostly circles and elongated circles) and determining the various proportions (how many heads tall, size and placement of the eyes, etc.) After this, you can set up a perspective field, and drop the circles and everything in all lined up with the perspective. Then you semi-trace this onto onto another sheet looking at the model sheet to change the simple geometric shapes into the character, proper.
The hard part is much less getting the look and feel of the original artist (if the original designer was even drawing in his own style) and more of one of envisioning what the simple shapes will look like in 3D from every angle.
Though the lead animator of the character does make decisions like this, the Director(s) of the movie also decides those kinds of things, especially if it’s something that is necessary for the plot to advance.
