A drawover by Genndy Tartakovsky from animation dailies*

Go to Rotten Tomatoes and you’ll see that the critics had little good to say about the film’s story, even among the critics who enjoyed the film. But audiences are digging the insanely cartoony style. As I write this the opening weekend numbers are incomplete, but it’s safe to say this is Sony Picture Animation’s best opening among six attempts (Monster House, Open Season, Surfs Up, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, and Smurfs). The current estimate is $43 million for the north American Box office by Monday, and while I wouldn’t be surprised if that estimate is slightly inflated, it’s a solid opening that projects out to a domestic total box office of $150-170 million. Not blockbuster status, but for a September release and a long-troubled project, it’s better than anyone dared hope. In fact, it sets a new record for the domestic opening weekend for September for all films, live action and animated.

For some comparison, Cloudy also opened in September and was SPA’s previous best opening weekend for a fully-animated film: $30.3 million. This is good news for Sony, for Genndy, and for a future filled with more extraordinarily cartoony CG films!

*It still amazes me how much we were allowed to blow these rigs up to match Genndy’s draw-overs. This still is a good example of what the rig allowed before all the tweaks were applied to match that drawing.

Hotel T Culver City animation crew

Yes, I’m the lucky one in the white shirt getting his ear tickled by the lovely Mavis. She’s really hot in person, despite the big head. That’s director Genndy Tartakovsky holding the shrunken head. This is just the Culver City gang – there were a bunch of talented animators in Vancouver, too. It was an amazing production in a lot of ways, and hopefully I’ll write a little about some of that here in the next few weeks. For now I’ll just say it was a great crew, and Genndy was a blast to work for. Somebody sign that guy up to direct some more features right now!

And if you want to get some sense of some of the animation ideas we tried to bring to Hotel T, check out the short film Maruined by Mr. Tartakovsky from a few years ago:

I know the voices in this annoy a lot of people, but the animation and design ideas are absolutely brilliant! It was a fantastic challenge bringing that sensibility to CG. Enjoy!

[The crew photo was orchestrated and taken by the talented Jason Behr. Thank you, Jason!]

The Annies are always a fun ceremony, and a good time to catch up with friends. It’s also a rare chance to honor some of the people behind the scenes in a business where we’re pretty anonymous to most of the folks who enjoy what we do. I’ll admit I’m a little ambivalent about these kinds of individual honors. On one hand, if ASIFA-Hollywood didn’t give such awards, no one else would. And lord knows that there are many people in the animation business who deserve some individual props. The cartoon above is by past Annie winner, and current nominee, Patrick Mate, a humble, quiet guy bursting with talent, yet someone most people have never heard of.

But I also know that some studios don’t even bother to submit their productions, and of those that do, which artists the producers submit for nomination depends a lot on studio politics. There also tends to be a lot of apples and oranges getting compared: productions with vastly different target audiences, different budgets and schedules, and so on, all compete head to head. There’s also been some controversy over who votes for the awards, though I think that was wildly overblown.

I find other animators vary widely in how seriously they take the Annies. Sometimes it’s directly proportional to whether or not their shows are in the running, and whether or not they know some of the nominees. Yeah, it’s a beauty contest. But it’s our beauty contest, and I’m glad we have it. I’ve known a fair number of nominees and award winners, and I know it’s been a terrific (and deserved) validation to get honored this way by peers and serious fans (i.e., the membership of ASIFA-Hollywood).

I’ll also give ASIFA-Hollywood props for being willing to keep playing with their formula. Year-to-year they try to make the awards more fair and valid, and the awards have definitely improved in how meaningful they are over the last decade. And the lifetime achievement award (the Windsor McCay Award) is a tremendous honor that really amounts to an Animation Hall of Fame.

Full disclosure: Four productions I animated on are nominated. Blue Sky’s Rio is up for Best Feature and a bunch of other awards. It’s a beautifully animated film, and I’ll be surprised if it doesn’t win a few golden zoetrops. Rhythm & Hues’ Hop got a nomination in an individual awards category. From ReelFX, Ice Age: A Mammoth Christmas is in the Best Animated Special Production category.

Here's a still from one of my Scrat shots. They were brief, but much fun to do.

And, in the Best Animated Television Commercial, a Psyop commercial called Stuff, for Norton Symantec:

Regardless of whether anything I worked on wins or not, it’s an honor to be involved with productions that get nominated. And I’m especially happy for some friends and collegues who got individual mentions. Hats off to everyone for some well-deserved recognition. You earned it!

*Sarcasm alert! As I wrote before, who cares.

The history of any award, be it the NYFCC Awards or the Oscars, is guaranteed to be rife with embarrassing choices. Let’s take a look at the NYFCC Awards in particular, and see if this is something we should take seriously. They’ve given their awards since 1935, and from then though 1998 they only honored a single animated feature once (see below). One animated film in 64 years. When they instituted the ‘Best Animated Feature’ in 1999, they gave the first award to . . . Southpark: Bigger, Longer, Uncut.

That was a pretty cool film to get a little drunk and go see with friends who like to hoot at the screen, but was it the best animated film that year? Perhaps you’ll recall that 1999 also saw the release of The Iron Giant, Tarzan, Princess Mononoke, Toy Story 2, and Fantasia 2000, among others.

In 2001 they awarded Waking Life best animated feature, over Monsters, Inc., Shrek, Metropolis, Millennium Actress, and Jimmy Neutron.  Perhaps they could have chosen a film that was actually animated, and one that didn’t induce comas?

Other winners were Chicken Run, Spirited Away, The Triplets of Belleville, The Incredibles, Howl’s Moving Castle, Happy Feet, Persepolis, WALL-E, Fantastic Mr. Fox, and The Illusionist. There are a few perfectly great choices in there, but the list also betrays a certain bias.

The NYFCC mostly seem to like any film that looks as different from the mainstream DreamWorks/Disney/Blue Sky-style as possible (as if there’s a single style in there).  The list of animated films the NYFCC didn’t bother to honor includes How to Train your Dragon, Toy Story 1, 2, and 3, all the Ice Ages as well as Horton, Robots, and Rio, both Kung Fu Pandas, all the Shreks and their spin off Puss in Boots, Up, Finding Nemo, Ratatouille, Bolt, Coraline, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, and everything else produced by Sony.

In 1940 they did give a special award to Walt Disney for Fantasia, but otherwise they’ve also ignored every other hand-drawn Disney film, from Snow White, Pinocchio, Bambi, and Dumbo though Sleeping Beauty and 101 Dalmatians, right on through The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, Mulan, Lilo and Stitch, and up to this year’s Winnie the Pooh. They previously ignored awesome films like Grave of the Fireflies, Akira, Ghost in the Shell, My Neighbor Totoro, and Nightmare Before Christmas.

Ultimately, awards are given out as much to honor the awards givers as anything else. By turning up their nose at the kinds of animated films that actually connect with wide audiences, the NYFCC complements itself as a serious, artsy, high-brow, and exclusive bunch. This is a group that takes itself a little too seriously, and they seem to think that animation isn’t really a serious medium. They’ve spent most of 77 years ignoring what we do, so the fact that they’re doing it again merits a shoulder shrug and not much else.

I’ve been teaching the Animation Mentor Animals & Creatures Class 2 this term, and in particular we’re focused on animating flight (and flying dragons!).  Of course, if you’re going to animate a believable fantasy creature, you need to understand real flying animals, like birds and bats, and I’m going to summarize some ideas and then some great resources below the fold.

The tough thing about animal flight is that much of it is not intuitive.  We tend to assume flight is kind of like swimming through the air, and that the wings work by pushing against the air.  But that’s wrong.  The key to understanding comes from our old friend, physics, via Bernoulli’s principle.  Simply put, Bernoulli found that air pressure drops when air is moving, and the faster it moves, the more the pressure drops.

This is not intuitive at all, but is easy to demonstrate:

[See post to watch QuickTime movie]

Here we see a piece of paper hanging downwards under the effect of gravity. I’m blowing straight out, just across the top of the paper. The paper magically rises, towards the air stream!  How cool is that?

But there’s no magic – the movement of the air above the paper causes the air pressure in that region to drop. The air pressure below the paper is unchanged.  The result is an air pressure differential, and the higher pressure below literally lifts the paper upwards.

How do creatures get flight out of this?  Through the use of airfoils.  An airplane wing and a bird’s wing (and even individual feathers) are all airfoils. An airfoil is a structure designed so that as air moves across it, the air passing over the top surface moves faster than the air passing below, and the resulting difference in air pressure creates an upward force known as lift.

The Bernoulli principle doesn’t just operate in the vertical direction.  An airplane propeller is also an airfoil, and when rotated creates a low pressure area at it’s leading edge, generating a forward force known as thrust.  Remarkably, the outer portions of a bird’s wing will move in such a way that they also generate thrust, propelling the bird forwards.  Pretty amazing, huh?

What I find fascinating is the staggering variety of solutions that nature has found for these birds and bats to generate lift and thrust.  Despite that variety, there are important commonalities to the way every large animal achieves flight (I say large animals because I want to avoid the extra complexity of insect flight). We need to understand and apply these ideas when we’re animating a bird, or a flying dragon, if it is to look authentic.

Just as Muybridge was commissioned to begin creating his remarkable photographic series of animal locomotion to settle questions about how horses actually move (to the eternal benefit of animators everywhere), we need to study high-speed photography and understand a little physics if we want to understand how flying creatures move.  Fortunately for us, some dedicated folks have put together some great tutorials online, and rather than copy or replicate their good work, I offer a set of superb links.

First is Brendan Body’s fantastic flight tutorial. Brendan was a lead animator on Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole, which features fantastic flight animation, and this tutorial is one of the most impressive pieces of internet animation teaching I’ve seen. The rest of Brendan’s fine blog is also worth perusing, and here’s a shortcut to his tutorials.

Next is the Dragon Flight School video from last year’s CTN Expo. It features structure, function, and theory from Dr. Stuart Sumida, and animation application from Simon Otto, Head of Character Animation on the amazing How to Train Your Dragon.

Simon Otto was the lead animator on the eagle in the hand drawn Spirit: Stallion of the Cimmaron, so he came into HtTYD with knowledge of how birds fly. He then spent a couple of years (!) studying flight more deeply, helping develop the characters and their personalities, how each dragon would fly, and so on. The video above is also full of gems about character design, work flow, approaching a shot, and using reference. I only wish it were a two-hour video!

Next is a meaty series of on-line study guides for a college Ornithology course given by Gary Ritchisong at Eastern Kentucky University. This being a college course, it isn’t necessarily light reading, but I think you’ll find it worthwhile.  Plus these links are copiously illustrated with great diagrams and embedded videos.

Introduction to Birds goes into detail on the evolution of birds, and while some of this is peripheral to animating flight, it’s still fascinating, and has several great videos embedded throughout. I particularly think that understanding the skeletal and muscular structure of your flying creature is important, and those subjects are nicely covered here, too.

Bird Flight 1 is pure gold and features great stuff on the origins of animal flight (very useful for thinking about flying/gliding dinosaurs as well as ideas about how an actual dragon might fly).

Bird Flight 2 extends the information about flight, and includes bonus material on bird head movements, climbing, swimming, and diving. The full curriculum of Professor Ritchisong’s course is here.

If you’ve gone though these videos and tutorials and want more, especially a discussion of some of the ways insect flight differs from birds/bats, you can check out this page from the University of Cambridge. Impress your friends with your casual discussion of leading-edge vortices and wake recapture!

I encourage you to return to these tutorials as you animate your flying creatures. It’s too much information to absorb in one sitting (or even several), and the further you go with your animation, the more this information will continue to reveal its usefulness.

Enjoy, and if you know of any other great flight tutorials on the web, or you find some of this difficult to understand, let me know in the comments.

Reflect on your present blessings, on which every man has many, not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.

There do appear to exist benefits to regularly focusing on one’s blessings. The advantages are most pronounced when compared with a focus on hassles or complaints…

The first quote is from Charles Dickens, and reflects a common sentiment.  The second is from a scientific study, Counting Blessings Versus Burdens: An Experimental Investigation of Gratitude and Subjective Well-Being in Daily Life (J. Personality and Soc. Psychology) by Robert A. Emmons and Michael E. McCullough, which actually proves that the popular sentiment is empirically true.

I saw this paper highlighted at Marginal Revolution (an interesting libertarian economics blog), and it dovetailed with some things I’ve been thinking about recently. The referenced study (full version here) demonstrates that regularly focusing on, and writing down, things we’re grateful for leads to positive affect (expressed emotion), and focusing on burdens and hassles leads to negative affect. Reflecting on your blessings makes you lead a happier life, and vice versa.

Those of us working in the animation industry are usually doing something we love, and are surrounded by talented people who also love it.  And yet, somehow, we often baste in snark, jealousy, and resentment.  It’s easy to fall into step with people who, talented as they are, exude entitlement and arrogance.  We’re in our dream jobs, and yet we’re often miserable.

Negative and ungenerous attitudes are contagious.  We sit at a fine bar and look at the glasses set before us, full of delicious drinks, and we moan that they’re only half full.  Grievance collecting becomes a toxic habit.  But there is a solution.  Consciously focus on the positive.  Don’t do this casually, but do as the subjects did in the study above — reflect on it and write it down on a regular basis.  Regularly writing down both your specific goals and what you’re grateful for will probably do more for your careen than regularly sketching in a sketchbook.  But hey, those things aren’t incompatible! Keep a Gratitudes-and-Goals journal and a sketchbook! (I suggest keeping them separate because most people like to share their sketchbooks, but a Gratitudes-and-Goals book would be far more personal).

Count your blessings, leave the negative behind, and make every day of the year a happy Thanksgiving!

Carlos rallies the chicks in a still from one of my scenes

But the more important thing in these films is character.  I sent a Hop poster to my 7 year old niece, and she can’t wait to see the film. She’s seen enough of the advertising to be excited about the characters.  Not the character arcs, which hopefully she’ll be satisfied by in retrospect, but the characters.  She’s bought an EB bunny that she carries around and wants a Carlos plushie, and she’s excited to experience these characters on the big screen.  This is the other thing critics and pundits don’t usually get: we love animated movies for the characters and the funny things they say and the funny ways they move.  A good story if a nice plus, but frankly, the typical film story is a rehash, especially in animation.  The Jungle Book is a revered film, but it’s nothing more than a series of superb character moments.  The story is simply a vehicle for those moments.

Maybe I’m just justifying what I do.  I animate, and I enjoyed animating on Hop, and I think the character animation came out well.  I would definitely pay to see a sequel that featured the Carlos character, just as I’d love to animate that character again (Hank Azaria does a wonderful voice for Carlos, though his Phil voice is a little close to Chief Wiggums).  Another cool thing about Hop is for the first time Rhythm & Hues has done a hybrid film with several completely CG animated sequences.  For me, these sequences are the strongest parts of the film.  And I think Hop is a good example of the way cartoony, hand-keyed animation can work great with live-action.

So grab some kids and check it out.  I’ll wager you’ll have a pretty good time, even if it doesn’t change your life.

Here are a couple of his recent posts I especially like from an animator’s point of view. First, one on the role and nature of conflict in story: Conflict Resolution.

One of the key lessons I try to impart at Animation Mentor is the importance of conflict in animation. Every shot in an animated film should be essential — something vital needs to be happening, and it often involves a character in conflict. Every shot tells it’s own tiny story, and there is no story without conflict.

But, as McDonald notes, when you say the word conflict, people often think you mean arguing. So students starting a dialog shot pick dialog of actors angrily yelling at each other. Or they’re confused when I ask them what internal conflict their character is experiencing at any given moment. The key point is that conflict doesn’t need to be obvious, overt, or loud to be powerful. It doesn’t even need to be between two people. And it can operate on multiple levels, so that two characters can be in conflict with each other, and each of those characters can be experiencing internal conflict.

Effective conflict does require is that your characters be real, and that they have distinct needs and goals. Needs and goals are not the same thing.  Goals tend to be overt, while needs tend to be covert.  Put another way, goals usually relate to plot, while needs relate to subplot.

Your characters also should have a tangible, idiosyncratic psychology and personality, independent of whatever exposition they’re given.  In other words, from the first time the audience sees a character, you the animator must know who they are, why they’re doing what they’re doing, where they’re coming from, and where they’re going.  You may not get the chance to overtly show any of that to the audience, but all of that should be implicit in your character’s behavior and actions.

The film The Remains of the Day is a sterling example of a film full of intense, fascinating conflict without showy fireworks.

This is a powerful film, without an explosion or screaming match in sight. Now, showy conflict, with lots of screaming and arguing can be a ball.  If you’re in doubt, go watch Glengarry Glen Ross again (warning — not for those offended by strong language).

But even in such a showy piece of acting, notice how much of the conflict is covert and submerged. You find more great examples of conflict in the post I linked to above, including some great animation examples that McDonald cites.

Another great McDonald post is his most recent, Uh…Did I mention that this was hard?

Having animated professionally for 14 years, I will say that some of it has gotten easier. But not the important parts. Creating a believable, authentic characters from digital puppets is extraordinarily difficult. Doing it with drawings is tough.  If anything, doing it with computers is even tougher.  And doing it as part of a team, and making those characters consistent and believable and entertaining over the course of 80-90 minute films is even harder. We learn work-flow techniques and go-to ideas that help us, we learn certain mistakes to avoid, but it remains a difficult, elusive process.

I’ve seen very talented, experienced animators work when they were distracted by personal issues, and the results aren’t pretty. I’ve seen good animators work within lousy, unsupportive systems, with terrible results. This is not an easy job, and it’s not easy on a daily basis, and it doesn’t take much for the whole process to go to hell. That’s why veteran animators are usually much less willing to crap on the work of their peers at other studios (unfortunately, animation fans and critics rarely have much hesitation to do just that).

Hopefully, the explicit acknowledgment that this is a difficult process will be reassuring for those just entering the profession.  A lot of us, when we were starting out, assumed that something was wrong when we continued to find animating a struggle.  When you see elegant, natural animation from someone else, you are prone to imagine that they have an elegant, effortless working method. But, like making a good sausage, all the ugly parts are hidden from the viewer.  That’s part of our job — to hide the difficult process, and deliver spontaneous-looking performances.  In trying to fool the audience, we shouldn’t fool ourselves.  Accept that it’s hard work, and enjoy the struggle, and you’ll be a happier animator.

I’ve only read about a dozen of McDonald’s Invisible Ink Blog posts, but so far every one has held useful insights for animators, and he’s very quick to use real examples from both animation and live action. I especially love his ‘Movies I Like’ series, especially since it appears we have similar film tastes. Check his blog out, and see what you discover.

What astonishes me about this scene is how utterly clear Peter Pan’s attitude is throughout, despite the scene requiring the character to be down on his hands and knees, rummaging around in a loaded chest inches from his face, with the camera above and beside him.  Not only is the acting clear and entertaining, the physical mechanics are dead on.  It would have been easy to make the character feel broken, especially in the pose I’ve highlighted above, and for the action to feel contrived (especially the way he keeps his right arm from obscuring what he’s doing).

Notice how Peter’s facial expression reads, even though he’s practically buried in the chest for much of the scene, and even though he turns his face completely away from us twice.  My AM students should also note the way the hips are alive and involved in the action, even though it’s his arms and head that are doing the major movements. Also note the rhythm between the two arms and the head — one of the three is always quiet when the other two are moving, and it never becomes a chaos of competing movement.

Michael Sporn’s Splog is one of the few websites I visit virtually every day, and I don’t know how he has time to put up so many fantastic, informative posts on a daily basis. Here’s another recent Sporn post, featuring the drawings of great cartoonist Lyonel Feininger.  I can’t explain why, but I find this art profound and unique, and keep coming back to look at it again.