Philo

It's been forever that I have posted to this site, and the last thing was about my personal short animated piece called Philo.  It was a cathartic experience that let me recapture the joy of animation and find the things that attracted me to the art form originally.

Since childhood I watched cartoons and was moved emotionally by the imagery and the music.  I  saw the potential to touch people in a way that live action movies could not.  Animation seemed then, and now to be the culmination of all the arts: Cinema, music, dance, painting, writing, etc.

As I was making Philo I tried to pay homage to the studios and individuals who influenced me.  I am an admirer of Walt Disney of course, but also the renegades, who broke away from the emulation toward realism, that birthed the stylized look of UPA.  Artists like Art Babbitt, Jim Tyer, Chuck Jones, and writer Michael Maltese, along with John and Faith Hubley, Ward Kimball, Bobe Cannon, were and still are reasons why I became an animator.  Another early influence for these people as well as myself were the works of the early silent comedians like Charlie Chaplin and the great Buster Keaton.

If you are familiar with any of these, you will immediate see the influence.   

Philo from Joel Brinkerhoff on Vimeo.

Tom Terrific

Speaking of Gene Deitch,(see last post), look what I found on YouTube. I love Mighty Manfred the Wonder Dog. The lip smacking is still funny and says volumes about who Manfred is. I don't know for certain but the animation of Tom watching TV may be Jim Tyers. It's got his 'shrink take' style and he did work on the series.

Gene Deitch

Tom Teriffic


I stumbled across the name Gene Deitch on an information sharing site and wondered if it was the director/animator who turned Terrytoons into the modern style of UPA type animation during the fifties. This is what I wrote and the response I received:

Hello,

Are you the animation director Gene Deitch? If so, I loved "Tom Teriffic" as a kid and hope it's made available again one day. I thought Jim Tyer was a great fit for that show and his animation seemed well suited for an amorphous character.

Hope you are well,

Joel

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yes,Joel,it's me. Thanks for your good words! I'm on an iPhone out in the countryside,so can only reply with a few words. Thanks for remembering Tom Terrific! Gene

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Cool huh! What makes this particularly interesting to me is that since 1961, Deitch has resided with his wife, Zdenka, in Prague.

Now I see Gene Deitch will be the Guest of Honor at the 3rd annual San Francisco International Animation Festival (SFIAF), a four-day event from November 13th through 16th at Landmark’s Embarcadero Center Cinema.

Go see him if you can.

Jim Tyer Smear

Thad K. has posted a break down of some Jim Tyer animation done at Terrytoons. Many have held Tyers’ work in high esteem but I personally find a large majority of it annoying. What set Tyer apart from other animators was his variation on the ‘smear’: a technique used to bridge large distances in fast moving objects or appendages. The smear was used to simulate the blurring found in live action motion pictures caused by fast movement and slow film speeds. Tyer used it in almost a reversed fashion where a part of the body, say a nose, would stretch out in a direction before anything else. Then the rest would stretch to catch up with it. Tyer also had the habit of doing ‘shrink takes’ where the character would actually shrink in size and then pop back out again. He also blinked the pupil of an eye without blinking the lids over the eyeball, very strange stuff.

See Thad’s study of Tyer work slowed down for full effect here: http://classicanimation.blogspot.com/

Jim Tyer

I thought I would show more Jim Tyer work. Here’s some screen grabs by CLARKE (CSNYDE) from the Mighty Mouse cartoon A Cat's Tale (1951.) These images are sequential and show the wild distortion of the characters anatomy.

Many people including John Kricfalusi hold him in high regard. I still haven’t reconciled my feelings about his work. Sometime it has a unique sparkle to it. Other times it’s just totally jarring and not in keeping with the rest of the cartoon. Sometimes it’s totally appropriate as when Gene Deitch used him on Tom Terrific and other works tailored to his style. Jim was a very good draftsman as his comic book art shows but he was an iconoclast animator.

You can see more stills here: http://inspiration-grab-bag.blogspot.com/2006/05/jim-tyer-animation-cats-tale.html

And actual clips here: http://www.strangetoons.com/strangetoons%20root%20folder/shows/Jim%20Tyer/jimtyer.html

Going Off Model

It’s nice to see so much interest on the internet in animation. It’s also nice that others are doing the ranting for me about why today’s animation is so poor. But one thing I’ve run up against time and again is people who don’t know or care that much about the media controlling a project. They inevitably demand a retake because they have single framed through and see a squash or stretch as the character being off model. Played at speed, the scene works, but they insist you stay true to the design and have those offending frames removed. Of course things can be pushed to crazy extremes such as what Jim Tyer was doing in the examples from Heckle and Jeckle. But even his stuff has a charm to it. Thanks Kevin Langley for the great screen captures.