'Unless You Make Animation Real, You Can't Make It Funny'
Plus: animation news and Sergio Pablos on Dr. Doppler.
Welcome back! Another Sunday, another issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. This is the plan:
1 — putting reality into fiction.
2 — animation news, worldwide.
3 — Sergio Pablos on Dr. Doppler from Treasure Planet.
With that out of the way, let’s go!
1. Paying attention
Tissa David, one of the greatest animators in history, knew a thing or two about drawing.
Based in New York City, she gave life to some of the most intriguing animated motion to come out of America in the second half of the 20th century. You might not know her by name, but you’ve likely seen her work for shows like Sesame Street, or for classic films like Abel’s Island.
David moved characters in a way that defied many of the ideas about animation. It often wasn’t flashy, “smooth” or at all photorealistic, but it lived and breathed. She hinted at her secret in an ultra-rare 1970s documentary, as described by author John Canemaker:
She observes that “unless you make [animation] real, you can’t make [it] funny,” and explains how she concentrates on infusing a realistic feeling of weight into the characters to make their actions believable.
Unless you make animation real, you can’t make it funny. Put another way, animation needs some basis in life to have an impact. Tissa David’s art is so stylized that it’s hard to square her words with her work. Still, when we look closely, it does begin to make sense. And this rule of hers has been followed by many of the world’s top animators.
Animation Obsessive is a reader-supported newsletter. Both free and paid subscriptions are available. If you enjoy our work and want to support it, the best way is to take out a paid subscription.
Some of David’s best animation appears in the films of Faith and John Hubley — like Cockaboody (1974), which David animated solo. The Hubleys were sticklers for tying their cartoons to life. That didn’t mean photorealism, but a dedication to real humanity.
Reusing stock ideas from other animation wasn’t enough. John Hubley once lambasted the “cliches of action” that were filling up cartoons in the 1950s, including “stylized flutter-lip action — sandpiper-like leg motion for walks and runs, multiple image jitters for fright, and many others.” Almost all of these have been phased out of animation today, but they were typical at the time.
Why avoid the usual shorthand? John felt it deadened your work. Art was copying art in a closed circuit, and in the process losing its connection to “human characteristics” — to life as a whole. He wanted to see “fresh, personal expressions of human action” and “characters that are more profound and human.”
Again, this wasn’t about photorealism. Tissa David did films for the Hubleys as cartoonish as Cool Pool Fool. Bobe Cannon, another Hubley collaborator, found inspiration for his characters in things like the movement of train-crossing arms. But both were observing life, and its shapes and sensations, and taking it into their work.
In animation, this idea goes beyond just movement. You can extend it to every part of a production — the backgrounds, the writing, the world. Animator Toshiyuki Inoue did it to capture the look of snow in Miss Hokusai (2015). And it’s what Hayao Miyazaki has done for the majority of his career.
There’s a famous Miyazaki quote about it. Once, as he drew a character, he said, “If you don’t spend time watching real people, you can’t do this, because you’ve never seen it.” That wasn’t a stray remark — it’s tied into his wider philosophy. The core of Miyazaki’s art is the close observation of the world. He explained in 1997:
We just felt that human beings live in the midst of all sorts of things, including a certain relationship to production […] It wasn’t enough unless we included the relationship to nature, the environment where the characters lived. At times it may be the season, or the weather, or the type of light. We felt we wanted to be humble in the face of the entire world, the vegetation in nature, and all of it.1
Above all, Miyazaki is a master at observing life. It suffuses his films. You can see his attention to detail in a documentary made during Only Yesterday (1991). Miyazaki gently critiques a sketch drawn by a trainee — showing him that his characters are sitting too close to a table.
“You’re not drawing what you observe, you see?” says Miyazaki in the clip below. “You’ve just made an assumption.”
Even when we try to take from real life, it’s easy to make mistakes like these. And art that goes halfway, aiming at life while using assumptions or cliches, is doubly tricky. This can give shallow work the illusion of depth — not just in a single drawing, but in an entire story. Author Alan Moore has spent decades trashing his comic The Killing Joke, adapted into a poorly-reviewed animated film in 2016, for just this reason.
The Killing Joke has been praised for its gritty realism. For Moore, it was a misstep. He wrote it to gesture toward some kind of deep, dark truth, portraying Batman and the Joker as “psychopaths” in a grim world. But he came to see the book as grittiness in search of realism, with “no important human information being imparted.” He said in 2003:
It was just about a couple of licensed DC characters that didn’t really relate to the real world in any way [...] a couple of psychopaths, and unlikely psychopaths at that because, yeah, there are plenty of psychopaths in the real world but we don’t have any of that dress up as a circus clown or a bat. So, like I said, you’re not going to encounter those people on your next trip to the 7-11 or whatever, and knowing that their psychoses are a mirror image of each other is not really going to improve your life any.
Entering into a dialogue with reality in your animation, or art more generally, is tough. It’s hard work to see what’s really in front of us. Sometimes it’s darkness, and sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it’s joy. (As Moore put it, “Whoever said that all superheroes have to be grim, oppressive and dark?”) We may realize that our work really isn’t as tied to life as it first seemed.
Yet one thing’s clear: there’s no substitute for life. Copying the art of animators like Hayao Miyazaki and Tissa David can help, but it only takes us so far. They borrowed from art, but even more from life. They spent their careers paying attention. And that’s the secret to Tissa David’s stylized, funny animation. It’s not photorealistic — just real.
2. Global animation news
The Warner Bros. Discovery shakeup
If you know Warner, you know it’s notorious for chaos. It’s a messy, tangled knot that Business Insider recently called “a collection of fiefdoms” locked in “internal warring.” Miscommunication and unclear strategies were the norm way before the disastrous AT&T era. Warner’s buyout by AOL around the turn of the century “is still widely recognized as the worst deal in American corporate history,” per Variety.
In that light, Cartoon Brew’s big headline this week only made sense: “Confusion Reigns Over Future of Animation at Warner Bros. Discovery.”
The week’s main animation news story centered on Warner’s HBO Max. It’s getting folded, as previous reports indicated, into its sister service Discovery+. This has meant cuts, cancellations (Batgirl, the Scoob! sequel) and, as usual, chaos.
Still, the typical Warner chaos has been intensifying under David Zaslav, the head of Warner Bros. Discovery (formed in April). As an insider told Deadline last month, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone come in and look to just outright gut a company like this.”
Reportedly, Zaslav is trying to streamline the un-streamline-able Warner. What this means for animation, as Cartoon Brew explains, is still far from obvious. Zaslav said on a recent earnings call that the canned Scoob! sequel was among the animated projects out of step with Warner’s “new strategic approach.” But he seemed optimistic about the future of animation at the company:
… between DC, the animation group, together with the entire Warner library, our ambition is to bring Warner back and to produce great, high-quality films.
But we’ll have to wait and see. Until then, Cartoon Brew’s explainer on the state of animation at Warner Bros. Discovery is the best one you’ll find this week.
Best of the rest
We lost Pat Carroll (95), famous for her role as Ursula in The Little Mermaid.
In Japan, Studio Ghibli produced an animated commercial for its upcoming Ghibli Park. It’s a revised version of an ad for the Ghibli Museum from 2001.
An exciting American story — Dreamworks is making Moonray, its proprietary rendering software, open source.
With help from the global anime boom, Japan’s TV Tokyo had a record first quarter. Its anime rights sales are up 27% over last year, driven heavily by Chinese buyers and, in North America, Naruto merch.
In Taiwan, there’s a program underway to help rural elders in remote areas learn technology — by animating on tablets.
The director of the French studio Foliascope talked about working on Jim Capobianco’s film The Inventor and developing a stop-motion pipeline. “It’s really stop-motion 2.0,” he said.
In a bizarre turn of events, Russia’s largest theater chain announced an illegal plan to start showing Minions: The Rise of Gru in its theaters, only to cancel it a few hours later. The stunt was seemingly meant to focus attention on Russia’s theater crisis, brought about by sanctions amid the war.
The American series Lost Ollie, created by Shannon Tindle (Kubo and the Two Strings) and directed by Peter Ramsey (Spider-Verse), has a trailer.
Israel is rolling out animation incentives for foreign companies — “up to 10% of the allocated budget will be reimbursed, and a further 10% of the post-production budget,” reports Variety. Interested parties must apply by August 22.
Hungarian animator Zoltan Maros is getting a documentary. He worked on series like Gustav in his home country, but later became a Disney artist on Tarzan and more.
Lastly, we spoke with composer and sound designer David Kamp, who told us all about the art of making audio for animation.
Thanks for checking out today’s issue! We hope you’re enjoying it so far.
Normally, the last section of our newsletter is for paying subscribers (members) — but we’re unlocking it this time. Below, we point you toward an amazing animation breakdown by Sergio Pablos, the director of Klaus.
As for memberships, they really are the key to keeping Animation Obsessive alive. This project is an expensive one for us — both in time and money. Over the last year and a half, we’ve pushed it forward at lightning speed in hopes of reaching the point where it sustains itself. It’s grown a lot, but things are still precarious.
We were reminded of that precariousness over the weekend, when Twitter’s bots auto-suspended our account for sharing a clip of Kid’s Castle by Koji Yamamura, mislabeling it as “intimate media.” We were able to appeal, but the point was made. Twitter is the main driver of our growth — and it only took a second for us to lose it.
That’s the precarious part. Where we find stability, and a sense that this can work even when Twitter doesn’t, is in our community of members. They make it possible for us to spend so much time on the newsletter, and to invest in the rare books and magazines, imported DVDs and other key materials that make our research happen.
If you’re able to join, we’d love to have you with us.
3. Sergio Pablos on animating Dr. Doppler
For the past two years, Spain’s SPA Studios has been publishing insightful and engaging animation advice — for free. On its YouTube channel, its 36-episode “Pearls of Wisdom” series sees animators James Baxter and Sergio Pablos breaking down the logic of animation in all its forms.
These are bite-sized, bingeable videos, and we encourage you to check out the entire playlist. This time, though, we’re singling out Pablos’s comments on the animation of Dr. Doppler, his character in Disney’s Treasure Planet.
Pablos is among the best 2D animators of his generation — Dr. Doppler is a high-water mark for character animation in Disney’s modern era. But what made his motion so good, it turns out, wasn’t just the abundant technical flash. It was how Pablos thought about animating him, and how he understood the character’s psychology.
As Pablos says, Dr. Doppler is “a character who’s missing confidence.” Someone who wants to be an adventurer, but who isn’t cut out for it. And Pablos made these traits visible to us through Doppler’s mannerisms. According to Pablos:
If you look at his performance, you’ll see he tends to keep his hands close to his body. There’s a lot of people who are shy who do this without really knowing. Arms become shields, essentially, right? ... He will lick his lips before talking. He’s got a dry mouth. Throughout the film, maybe four or five times, he’ll lick his lips just a bit. Just a tiny bit. And his eyes don’t fixate on anything. Like, he kind of looks around, not really settling down on anything, because he’s not the kind of guy who’s gonna stare you down … and [he] blinks under pressure. Like, an unnecessary number of blinks.
Pablos also speaks on Doppler’s habit of “canceling gestures” — a human behavior that’s “super hard to do in animation.” Doppler’s poses don’t quite resolve. His hands are in constant motion, never quite relaxing. Pablos mentions one shot, under two seconds in length, where Doppler uses “half gestures” to get another character’s attention. It takes no time to watch, but it was incredibly time-consuming to make.
“It was so subtle, the difference between it being a readable gesture and being nothing, with one frame,” Pablos says.
You’ll find all that and more in this video and the one below. Pablos tends to use his body to demonstrate what he means, and his comments are intercut with clips from the scenes he’s describing — so there’s a lot to gain by watching rather than reading. It’s worth the time:
See you again soon!
From Turning Point 1997–2008 (“You Cannot Depict the Wild Without Showing Its Brutality and Cruelty”).
I love the first section of this newsletter, which feels on point for every creative endeavor. The greatest in any field see and seek truth rather than try to emulate others (in writing, music...science, etc). It is absolutely “hard work to see what’s really in front of us.”
I’m trying to track down the air date for Tissa David short “Truth Ruth” shown on the Electric Company.
Episode guides are practically nonexistent online. Any ideas??