Thursday, January 31, 2008

WELL LAH DE DAH

This is an excerise I do where I'll watch a classic cartoon, pause it, and copy the poses. But instead of just copying the character, I'll use my own character and try to match the pose. Does this excersize actually do anything for your drawing abilities...? I dunno, I just like doing it.

It's from a Tom and Jerry cartoon, "Cat Fishing" the best Tom and Jerry I've ever seen, the only good Tom and Jerry I've ever seen. I hate tom and jerry's, they're super boring. But I saw this one and loved it, and then I found out one of the lead animators was Michael Lah, Tex Avery's right hand man, and my favorite animator of all times. He animated the bests scenes too.




So, not too many posts ago I proclaimed Tex Avery's MGM cartoons are the greatest cartoons ever made. Well I was wrong again, kind of. I recently saw a few cartoons Avery did for Walter Lantz, after leaving MGM. One of them in specific, a chilly willy cartoon entitled "The Legend of Rockabye point", is one of the single funniest cartoons I've ever seen.

The budget for the cartoon was lower than those he produced at MGM, and is evident with 1. More recycled BG's than usual (for a Tex cartoon) and 2. More holds than usual (for a Tex cartoon). But that's not a bad thing, in fact, this is how limited animation should look.


2 comments:

The Jerk said...

my single favorite scene in the rockabye point cartoon is when the dog opens his mouth so wide it looks like his head is about to go inside-out. that blew me away the first time i saw it. i had to pause and rewind and freeze frame it repeatedly.

The Jerk said...

it was at about 1:43 on the video here.