My Weblog: Cartoons Are Complicated

by Leigh Perry / Toni L.P. Kelner

You remember when you were in [insert name of subject or teacher you were bored by] class in school, and you'd stay awake by doodling stick figures on the corners of your notebook, them flip through them to show movement? You were, no doubt, secure in the knowledge that you understood how animation work.

You were wrong.

Well, the basic principle was right. If you flip a series of illustrations quickly enough, persistence of vision will fool the eye into thinking you've seen a continuous stream of motion. (That's how all films work, not just animation.) But the truth beyond that principal is so much more complicated.

I admit, I considered myself reasonably knowledgeable about animation. I'm a big fan of animation, whether on TV or at the movies or for games. I watch "behind the making" videos on our Disney and Pixar DVDs. Plus I've absorbed a certain amount of know-how via my daughter Maggie, who recently graduated from SCAD Atlanta with a degree in animation. So I figured, sure, I know how this works.

Nope. A couple of weeks ago the family attended the CTN Animation eXpo in Burbank, CA, and via panels and chatting with people in the field, I learned a whole lot about how little I actually know.

I knew an animated feature has a whole team of animators, but I didn't know that animators get typecast. One panelist says he specializes in people walking determinedly as they accept their fates, usually singing as they go. Think Elsa singing "Let It Go" in Frozen or Moana in Moana running down to the shore once she realizes she knows the way. Other animators have more specialized specialities: hair, walking, background characters, and so on. There's an incredible amount of teamwork to bring it all together. One animator for Coco admitted he was iffy when his boss kept telling him to add more wrinkles to the title character, Mama Coco. He was afraid she'd look ugly, but once the scenes were lit by other artists, her beauty and character shown.

I knew there were character designers, but I had no idea how many iterations a character goes through before reaching the final version. Looking at characters-in-progress also showed how much even the smallest of details--hair style, skin color, eye shape, age--changes the way a character is perceived. And I never imagined how long that character design process takes. One 30-minute TV cartoon series has been in production for two years, and they're still refining that protagonist. Even previously existing characters--Stretch Armstrong the toy and Unikitty from The LEGO Movie required some polishing before they were ready to star in their own series.

Of course I knew that voice actors add a tremendous amount to an animated character, and I knew the voices were recorded before the animation begin. But I didn't know how many takes they record with the actors saying the words a variety of different ways because the shape is still taking shape. Josh Gad, who voices Olaf in Frozen, does quite a bit of improvisation with his lines to get the funniest jokes he can. Hours of this material is never used.

I knew about story boarding, but I didn't know how those were different from beat boards, or how story boards are used to create a rough animation called an animatic. And story boarding and story animation are wildly different. (I would explain what all that means except I'm still not sure I've got it right, and my daughter might read this and laugh at me.) Then there's scripting, which is something different. We had a chance encounter with Alex Hirsch, the show runner for the animated series Gravity Falls, which showed me that animated series can have long-reaching story arcs. There were clues in the first episode to how the series ended with the third season.

One of the most pleasant discoveries was learning how animation continues to evolve. Obviously, the switch from classic 2D animation to 3D animation has been a quantum shift for the industry, but there's still plenty of great work in 2D animation and there are other techniques like stop-action animation still in use. But sometimes there's something totally different. Loving Vincent is a remarkable piece of work in which each frame of the full-length movie is a different oil painting, most of which are based on the works of the movie's subject: Vincent van Gogh. It's just as amazing a movie as it sounds, and best of all, the team responsible is looking into the possibility of creating a horror movie using the work of Goya. If it happens, I'll be first in line at the box office!

So I came out of CTNx a lot more knowledgeable about how ignorant I am of the process of creating even the shortest piece of animation. So next time you're watching Coco or Loving Vincent or Gravity Falls or Unikitty! -- and I recommend them all -- sit through the credits and give a little love to those story artists, set dressers, renderman developers, lighting artists, and other creatives whose work I don't understand in the least, but which I appreciate so much more now.