French Connections

A little hotter on the heels than usual from the last podcast, Steve from Skwigly and I have put together an Annecy special, which focuses on said festival – a rather major one, which took place in June. Really all the material is down to Steve as I didn’t make it over there, I just put the podcast together and threw in some of my usual on-mic grumbling’n’mumbling. Our plan is to do more ‘special’ podcast editions that will be a separate stream from the normal episodes. This way we can focus more on specific themes, practitioners or events and play around with the structure a bit. As well as a bunch of general film discussion there are interviews with Matt O’Callaghan (director of the contemporary “Looney Tunes” theatrical shorts) John Kahrs and Kristina Reed (director and producer respectively of the highly anticipated new Disney short “Paperman”) as well as a rundown of the festival’s ‘unofficial’ component Annecy+, curated by Bill Plympton and Nancy Phelps who were awesome and gracious enough to include “The Naughty List” in last year’s edition. You can download the podcast directly or stream it below: Skwigly Podcast Special 01 - Annecy (02/07/2012) by Skwigly Animation Podcast

Don't do it, don't do it...

AH SHIT. They did it.
:(

So am I Huey Lewis or Ray Parker Jr.?

When ‘Ground Running’ was screened for the first time one of the evening’s fellow directors came over to our table to say some nice things, mentioning briefly that my film reminded him of a viral Xbox commercial he had seen. I told him I’d give it a look and, well, I did. Frankly, I’m a little freaked out as the commercial is staggeringly similar to the first few seconds of my film.

A woman in the agonising throes of childbirth shoots the baby out of her v’jay and it smashes through a hospital window. From there the similarities diminish, with the baby aging as it flies through the air and landing in a coffin (I guess somehow representing that…I dunno, ‘Life is short’, so waste it playing Xbox games?). As my film is primarily about being a postgraduate weighing up his options, the bulk of it is, in its own right, original. But watching this commercial is unsettling as it’s like looking at my idea done in live action and with a budget.
Here’s the kicker - they did it first. I am making absolutely no claim of being ripped off as this advert was made years ago (the youtube upload is from 2006) - but at the same time I am absolutely certain that I never saw this commercial. If I had, I probably would’ve sent it to everyone I know as, to be fair, it is pretty cool.
So, it’s a dark night of the creative soul for me. Is it really just a coincidence that my film’s opening is so similar?
I decided the only way to make peace with myself is to dissect the process. Looking back at a previous entry I remembered thinking about other funny birth scenes from film and TV. The ones that stick out in my head include the fantastic intro to Addams Family Values, the pacing of the birth scene being very cartooney in and of itself.

I think other inspiring elements came from Ren & Stimpy…
…As well as a lovely sequence from Big Fish where the baby is popped out and slides along the floor. Given that was a pretty high-profile flick, I’d imagine that said sequence could’ve also been a springboard for the Xbox ad. Elements such as the timing and the ‘bungee umbilical cord’ are unique to my film as far as I know, but as a visual it could easily have been done before.
The real pisser is the baby flying out the window. I can think of a number of sequences from cartoons and movies where things are hurtled out of windows comedically, Looney Tunes, Farrelly Bros. movies, again Ren & Stimpy most likely. Later on in the Addams Family film the baby gets hurled through a skylight...
With all this in mind I’m fairly confident that my idea was the product of my own independent bricolage process. Bricolage being, essentially, the deconstruction of pre-existing ideas and their subsequent reassembly to create something new. To be honest, all creativity could be seen as a type of bricolage, as nobody can really create something new without drawing upon the cultural and societal influences around them. I think it would take a particular brand of arrogance to dispute that.
I’m still not comfortable with it, though. I think it might be worth it to create new footage for ‘Ground Running’, maybe get the runtime up to at least two minutes and change the structure of the opening scene so that it doesn’t share the same similarities. Until then, I think I’ll put further festival submissions on hold.
Now I find myself asking that vital question every young man asks himself at one time or another - ‘how do I get that baby out of the vagina and into the street without accidentally plagiarising an Xbox viral?’
Why, it’s a question as old as time itself.

Case Study #2: Anthropermorfis...Anthrapomorphi...Anthro-pamerphis...Making Animals Act All Human-Like...

One of the greatest freedoms inherent in my aforementioned first love, Ren & Stimpy, was Kricfalusi's ability to caricature and anthropomorphise beyond identifiability. If you didn't know that Ren was a dog (or, more specifically, an 'Asthma-Hound' chihuahua) and Stimpy was a cat - an obvious pairing of species that goes back centuries - it would take an extremely lateral-thinking mind to guess it from their appearance.
Ren's long, distinctly un-chihuahuaian ears might have one lean toward assuming he's some type of emaciated rabbit, or his signature 'W'-shaped mouth at times resembled a proboscis (the show itself referred to him as resembling a mosquito on several occasions). Stimpy, well, Jesus wept, if you honestly thought 'cat' when you saw him for the first time, you should seek psychiatric care. Interestingly, most other animals in the show aren't as disproportionately exaggerated. The deadpan Mr. Horse, though humanistic, was very obviously a horse, even without the name there was no ambiguity there.

Bob Clampett's 1946 Daffy, alongside Chuck Jones's 1953 Daffy...

A more logical case study to pursue would be the greatest animated duck in creation, Daffy (to hell with Donald, the hoarse, lisping bitch). My logic being that, well, my antagonist is also a duck. Ah, my deep and multi-faceted mind.
When you look at the evolution of Daffy (and we're stopping with the late 50s, if anyone brings up the horror of Loonatics Unleashed I will piss-slap them) there is a tremendous change, not just to his design but his character as well. On a DVD commentary for Bob Clampett's 1946 short 'The Great Piggy-Bank Robbery', John K. in his capacity as cartoon historian acknowledges the character was initially 'daffy' as the moniker suggests, evolving into a far more subdued, crankier, 'jerk' character. Where Mr. K and I differ is our preferred variation - while he prefers the abrasive, off-the-wall Daffy of the earlier 1930s and 40s shorts, I'm more a fan of the calmer, calculating one of the 50s, if for no other reason than that's the one I was exposed to more often as a young'un. Obviously of the two of us, John K. knows his shit more than I do given age and experience (in fact, why are you even reading this? Go read his blog right now!) and his taste is doubtless attributed to the freedom the loonier Daffy allows in terms of just how crazy the animation gets.

Stills from Clampett's 'The Great Piggy-Bank Robbery' (1946) - a decidedly daffier Daffy

He alludes to on the commentary (and points out in a blog entry) Clampett's propensity for throwing in dirty jokes, such as having Daffy's beak morph into a sideways pudenda for occasional frames that, within the deluge of the consistently wild drawings, the naked eye is unable to register. The character design is not limited to a strict model sheet, with proportions constantly altering - this is perhaps the most notable derivation in Kricfalusi's own work, and to me one of the most endearing.
By going to the other extreme, we can observe the later 'grown-up' Daffy in the 1953 masterpiece (in no uncertain terms) 'Duck Amuck'. This cartoon is a character study in itself, with Daffy the only actor to appear until the oft-plagiarised ending. Growing increasingly frustrated as the cartoon's animator headfucks him constantly, we see the full gamut of emotion and acting in Chuck Jones's incarnation of Daffy. It is a very different beast to Bob Clampett's - even when he loses his rag completely it is with a kind of disciplined lunacy, (comparitively) conforming to a proportioned design.

Stills from Jones's 'Duck Amuck' (1953) - a not-so-'looney' toon, but brilliant in its subtlety

While some may consider this restricting, it has always struck me that by reigning in the levels of visual absurdity a notch there is less of a likelihood that the audience will be lost. Unless you're an animation devotee like John K. - or if you have a short, infantile attention span like myself - too many convoluted, rapid-fire visual gags can get overwhelming.
To me, the genius of Chuck Jones's take on the Looney Tunes ensemble is the subtlety of the acting. Tiny eye expressions, little sniffs, grimaces, twitches, gesticulations and so on - all done so brilliantly and naturalistically that they are almost subliminal. The look on Daffy's face when he reaches his breaking point is so reserved, yet completely expresses that oh-so-relatable, end-of-one's-tether, borderline psychosis. You know in that look that you're in the eye of the storm, and that very soon the shit will hit the fan. Who here hasn't had a coworker who just fuckin' lost it one day? I imagine it happens with some frequency in the animation industry.
But we don't just see Daffy as an illogical psycho. At several points toward the start of the film he's in good spirits, and these more jovial moments are just as superbly portrayed with the same degree of subtlety. It's the constant poking, prodding and general antagonising on the part of the faceless pencil/paintbrush wielder that incrementally drives him to the edge.
So how is this relatable to my film? Well, apart from the duck connection (I have gleaned an awful lot of research in regards to lip-synching a beak, although I'll try not to throw in those Clampett-esque mouth vaginas) I think that by having two extremes represented by a single character may help with working out what my own visual approach may be. My lack of strict artistic knowledge would see me veer toward the free, unrestricted, loose style, while my amateur status as an animator may automatically restrict what I can do in the time provided, so my character acting may simply wind up as subtle by proxy. We shall see...