Max Fleischer

Henry Bernstein

Max Fleischer

At his core, Max Fleischer was an innovator more than anything. He was a tremendous artist obviously. His first job was as an illustrator for a catalog company in 1905. His next job was as the Art Editor of Popular Science Magazine in 1912. But his greatest accomplishments in art were only made possible by his innovations in the art world. He invented the Rotoscope, which was a device that introduced a new process of animating movement by tracing frames of live action film. This allowed animators to create more lifelike movements. Using this device he and his brother created their first big animation work- the Out of the Inkwell series starring Koko the Clown and Fitz the dog.

            His next big contribution to the animation field was the introduction of music-synced animation. He invented the bouncing ball concept that was made popular by sing-a-long videos and then karaoke.

            He then experienced considerable success with his characters. His most famous creation was the half dog/half girl character who would eventually evolve into the flapper Betty Boop. She started out as a secondary character but her popularity quickly turned her into the “Queen of the Animated Screen”.

            Fleischer’s career took a path that intertwined directly with the cartoon boom of the early 20^th century. This means that his work took off at the same time as Walt Disney. The two were the main up-and-coming artists of the time. However Fleischer worked for Paramount Studios, and they were very restrictive on his career growth. While Disney’s employers and eventually his own success allowed him to invest in the newest technology of the day including Technicolor process, Fleischer’s employers were late to the party on almost every technological innovation available. However he did find short-lived success over Disney with his creation of Popeye the Sailor Man. Popeye was another side character who actually debuted as a newspaper comic and then later appeared in some Betty Boop shorts. His popularity in the early 1930s brought him to the point of surpassing Mickey Mouse briefly as the king of the cartoon market. However Mickey Mouse’s international success was more than Fleischer could have ever hoped for any of his creations. This was partly because of his technological setbacks but also because of the content of his animations. The design of his shows were usually squalid, base, and urban, with sexual, violent, and drug-related themes. Disney’s were more family friendly.

Genndy Tartakovsky

http://www.cartoonbrew.com/tag/genndy-tartakovsky

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genndy_Tartakovsky

http://www.awn.com/articles/article/genndy-tartakovsky-takes-giant-robots

http://www.animationinsider.net/article.php?articleID=838

Genndy Tartakovsky is a very highly regarded animator who I found when I came across cartoonbrew.com, a great website that features all kinds of animated works by students and professionals alike. Tartakovsky has been the creator, lead animator, director and producer on some very well known TV series including Dexter’s Laboratory, Samurai Jack, and Star Wars: Clone Wars.

                  Tartakovsky was born in Soviet Russia in 1970. He was originally not into art at all, and wasn’t a good drawer. His family moved to the United States when he was 7 due to his parents’ concern about how anti-Semitism in Europe would affect their children’s lives. They eventually settled in Chicago. After his father died, he began working. His family wanted him to take advertising classes in college so that he could eventually become a businessman, but since he signed up late for classes fate landed him in an animation class. This led him to study film at Columbia College Chicago and in turn he moved in Los Angeles to study animation at California Institute of the Arts. At CalArts, Tartakovsky created two student films which would be the basis for his first and probably most famous work, Dexter’s Laboratory. After two years at CalArts, he got a job in Spain working on Batman: The Animated Series and The Critic.

                  Shortly after, Tartakovsky was recommended by a colleague of his named Craig McCracken for an art director job at Hanna-Barbera, a top animation studio. It was here that his career finally took off and he created his best known works, including the full-length series of Dexter’s Lab and Samurai Jack, and had a hand in producing the Powerpuff Girls television show and movie.

                  Finding Tartakovsky during my research was eye opening to me because up until now most of the animators that I have been reading about do a lot of thankless work, work painstaking hours and don’t have much to show for it, it seems. Most of the people I have been researching embody the archetypal “starving artist”. This is a guy who is incredibly talented and hardworking and has also seen the fruits of his efforts take him to the top of his field. He obviously makes a substantial living working for multi-million dollar studios, and in the same token he has a vehicle through which to share his ideas and works with thousands, maybe millions of people. Most of the art I create will only be seen by a few eyes. When I read about someone like this, who has a similar background in that he is Jewish and comes from a similar family situation and has accomplished what he has, it gives me a picture of what is possible for someone to accomplish as an artist/animator, and is almost a motivator because I see that this is actually attainable and not just a reverie.

                  Tartakovsky’s actual drawing style is very distinct and recognizable. Everyone in my generation remembers growing up watching Dexter’s Lab and even the Powerpuff Girls, and to a lesser extent Samurai Jack which wasn’t as popular because it was a little more complicated of a show, but was still a part of the public consciousness and ended up winning multiple awards for its ingenuity. He has also delved into different drawing styles on other projects such as Star Wars: Clone Wars and Sym-Bionic Titan, two shows that employ more of a “mecha-style” of anime as he calls it in an interview with Animation World Network. This shows not only his versatility but also his ability to create work that connects with different viewing audiences.

Bill Plympton

http://www.plymptoons.com/gallery/gallery.html

http://www.plymptoons.com/index_main.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/movies/30ande.html

Bill Plympton is an animator that I came across on the web. He works 100% by hand, drawing every frame of his animations, and piecing them together in stop-motion style. His 2008 feature “Idiots & Angels” took 25,000 drawings to complete. He says when he’s working on a project he’ll do 100 drawings a day, which is around 10 an hour.

                Plympton grew up in Portland in the 50s and 60s, and in ’68 he transferred from Portland State College to the School of Visual Arts in New York City. He’s done numerous comic strips that have been printed in nationally syndicated publications including the New York Times, Vanity Fair, and Rolling Stone among others. Since then he’s been commissioned to do multiple shows, music videos, and has done feature length films of his own.

                Plympton relates to my own work because of his medium of hand drawn, stop motion animation. I really like his drawing style as well, and in some places I do think that it mirrors my own. Right now I can’t even imagine doing the amount of work that he does, but hopefully one day I’ll be able to master an animation technique that works for me and I will be able to sit down for long periods of time and concentrate like he does and still produce high quality and highly stylized work.

                With both his drawing style and his stop motion method Plympton is afforded the luxury of surrealism which goes well with the stories that he creates. “Idiots & Angels” is a full length film with no dialogue, but it is still able to captivate the viewer through a trippy series of surrealist experiences that his style is tailor made to produce.

Tinman Creative (Brett Jubinville)

http://www.tinman.tv/

http://www.cartoonbrew.com/

http://www.thebrett.com/

I discovered this group after a ridiculous amount of fruitless web surfing in search of an animator who is doing the same things that I’m interested in. At first I landed on a lot of big animation companies with teams of professional animators but couldn’t find much or anything about the artists themselves. The Tinman Creative is a company run by Morghan Fortier, who is the executive producer, and Brett Jubinville, who is the creative director. The first thing that caught my eye was the style of the art. It came across to me as very soft and inviting but with an underlying sense of unease, almost like a false peace. The cartoonish quality enables for less of an eerie, foreboding feeling than if it were a more realistic style, and instead produces a dry and deadpan mood with a hint of a joking smile. A lot of their work reminds me of some 90s and early 2000s Nickelodeon cartoons such as Aaahh!!! Real Monsters, Ren & Stimpy, and Samurai Jack, the latter two of which Jubinville actually alludes to on his blog http://brettjubinville.blogspot.com/ as being influences.

                Jubinville, as it turns out, is a very highly regarded artist in the animation field. He has worked in animation for the past 10 years, and some of his jobs include: lead character designer for the television miniseries The Future is Wild, animation director for Canadian and Australian children’s series Dirtgirlworld, and technical director for Comedy Central’s Ugly Americans, among many others.

                Jubinville is a very talented artist and has the ability to work in multiple different styles based on the disposition of the show. Some of his characters are more kid friendly, with less details, brighter colors and more forgiving features. Some are geared towards an older crowd, with darker colors, more details and a more grim or realistic appearance. Still he can also construct his characters in the fashion of extreme exaggeration, embellishing and amplifying their features in order to portray a trait more obviously.

                Jubinville’s work definitely relates to mine, especially his work with the Tinman Creative. They animate in a number of different ways, including traditional 2D, Flash, stop-motion, CG, and live-action. I’m very interested in learning how to use different programs to animate, which I have already started doing and is the main reason I took this class. I also really like the art style that appears on their homepage, and could see doing something like that for a future project.

First Post

Well, this is my first post of the 2012 blog for the Digital and Time Based art class. This is where everything will go. Everything. Unlike last semester, when my digital sketchbook kind of lost steam in about the third week of class. . . So we'll see how it goes this time. All in all, I think this is a pretty good start. As for my project I was thinking of doing an animation.I'm interested in the concept of politics and celebrity because of the election that is coming up and how every candidate seems to have a mask and a man behind it, so I was going to do some type of animation regarding that.