Ed's Newsletter - July 2002

DALLAS WAS A TOOT!
Wow! I teach a lot of classes, and I rarely encounter a more focused and determined group of animators than I saw in Dallas on the 29th of June. Vince Sidwell and J. Schuh deserve a prolonged round of applause for making it happen. These guys are determined to see Dallas become a major player in the animation world, and this kind of effort is for sure a good way to get the ball rolling. The enthusiasm in the room was tangible. Thanks to all of the folks that showed up on a sunny Dallas Saturday to kick acting theory around for eight hours and to think like shamans. You could have been sipping brew by the pool, but you opted to work, and I respect that. By the way, Vince and J. are considering other possible events for the animation community. If you aren't on their mailing list, get there. Vince's contact is vsidwell@flash.net.

CONGRATS to Michael Dudok de Wit! His wonderful short animation "Father and Daughter" which has already won just about every award possible, took the Grand Prize at Zagreb. Take a look

MUCHO THANKS TO EMILY CARR INSTITUTE IN VANCOUVER!
Elizabeth Edward did a yeoman's job in organizing the Acting for Animators workshop on June 22-23. I was particularly pleased to share the classroom podium with Leslie Bishko who has been doing serious work on the application of Laban Movement Theory to animation. I have long admired Leslie and have had an e-mail relationship with her, but this was the first time we got face-to-face. Thanks all!

BON VOYAGE TO TIEN YANG AND FAMILY
After two exciting years in the U.S. where he completed animation grad work at the Academy of Art College, Tien and his family have returned to their Singapore home and the Nanyang Polytechnic Institute. I send a warm cyber hug and many good wishes to him, his wife, Kee and their too-adoreable children Dingg and Iiyu.

UPCOMING AFA WORKSHOPS
June 12th -- Electronic Arts in Los Angeles. I'll be working with folks from the EA mo-cap team and am really looking forward to the experience! Thanks to Kyle McKisic for putting this one in motion.

Mid-August -- I'll be teaching at BioWare ("Baldur's Gate", "Neverwinter Nights") in Edmonton, Canada.

CRAFT NOTES
"What Creates Laughter"

Walt Disney wrote a now-famous letter to Don Graham in 1935, outlining the kind of training he wanted the Disney animators to have. Number three on the list, after good draftmanship and knowledge of character, was "Knowledge and appreciation of acting". Amplifying, Walt explained that the Disney animator "... should know what creates laughter (and) why do things appeal to people as being funny." I think that dictum is as important today as it was in 1935, and I'd like to take a quick run at it.

Stage actors learn that comedy is, basically, drama caffeinated. Drama Plus. You can't make good comedy by simply trying to be funny. If you think you're funny, there is a good chance the audience will disagree. A good comedy moment, if played with lowered stakes, ought to work on a dramatic level. The celebrated live action director Mike Nichols, said in an interview I read a while back that when he is directing a comedy, he let's the actors get all the laughing out of the way at the first read-through of the script. Then he instructs them to forget for a while that they are working on a comedy at all. He has them first discover what is true, and then the comedy will take care of itself.

Consider for a moment my personal favorite animated comedy character, Wile E. Coyote. This is a sick animal. He has one foot inside the institution if you get my drift. This guy gets up every morning and thinks about only one thing, namely getting the Roadrunner home for dinner. He has no moderation whatever about it, which is what makes him funny. On one level, a perpetually hungry coyote isn't funny at all, right? It makes you want to leave him a dish of Alpo or something. But when the animator ups the stakes and renders him so perpetually hungry that he becomes obsessive for the bird, we in the audience enter the realm of comedy!

Walter Kerr, the late New York Times drama critic, wrote a classic book (it's out of print and well worth searching for) on this subject entitled "Tragedy and Comedy". In it, he repeatedly correlates the fine line between tragedy and comedy, pleasure and pain. He cites, for example, the tragic figure Oedipus, who killed his own father and married his own mother. When he discovered what he had done, he put out his own eyes and banished himself from Thebes. Kerr observes that this is for sure tragedy. Oedipus makes his way blindly out of town, blood streaming down his cheeks, a miserable hulk of a human being. It's not funny. But, if on his way out the town gates, he were to pass another guy coming into town that has also killed his own father and married his own mother and had put out his own eyes -- it would become comedy! One Oedipus is tragic. Two Oedipus's are funny. The reason is that we laugh when we cannot tolerate any more pain. We simply can't integrate or accept the idea of two Oedipus's!

This is also why we tend to hear sick jokes so soon after a national tragedy. People can't integrate the pain, and so they laugh. I recall the day that John Kennedy was assassinated. I was in the Air Force at the time, stationed in Washington, D.C. When he was killed in Dallas, I was waiting at the Andrews AFB to catch a plane to Florida. All the air traffic was grounded on my end because Andrews is the presidential airport, and I was stuck there until they brought his body back from Texas. Between the time the Air Force One departed Dallas and the time it arrived in D.C., I heard the first "dead Kennedy" joke, right there at the presidential terminal. (Okay, because I know everybody will be asking me, I'll tell you the joke. Question: 'What's Jackie bringing back from Dallas?' Answer: 'A Jack in the Box'.) At the time, I was shocked at the bad taste of such humor but, after studying comedy for some years, I have come to see how that happened. The country was in shock, suffering with a pain so deep it could not be fathomed -- and so some people, overcome with grief and fear, resorted to jokes. I was standing there in that terminal with soldiers after all, and this was their commander in chief that had just been assassinated. In a sense, it was sadly understandable.

Empathy is the key to eliciting laughter from an audience. You want the audience to identify with what is funny on screen. This was Charlie Chaplin's great contribution to comedy. He first came to the U.S. as a Keystone Kop but, from the start, he was a lousy Kop. For the Kops, the humor was slapstick. They slipped on banana peels, crashed into trees, whatever, and that was the comedy. Chaplin slipped on the same banana peel and was embarrassed by it! The audience empathizes with the embarrassment. The humor is not in the slip; it is in the reaction. We humans love to see ourselves imitated. It is fundamental to the way we learn how to survive, and it has a name: mimesis. We take a particular pleasure in seeing ourselves reflected on stage or on the screen, and that is another key to comedy. Who among us has not slipped on the banana peel at one time or another? We all are embarrassed, and that is the point of empathy. And so we laugh.

Chuck Jones, in "Chuck Amuck", relays what he learned about comedy from Tex Avery. He said, "animation is the art of timing, a truth applicable as well to all comedy. And the most brilliant masters of timing were Keaton, Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, Landdon - and Fred (Tex) Avery." He was right of course that timing is an important aspect of comedy, but he over-simplified things by suggesting that timing alone might account for it. I've seen a lot of comedy with good timing but shallow depth, and it doesn't resonate. Heck, the Keystone Kops had good timing, but I just sit there and stare at the screen when they do their thing. On the other hand, when Wile E. Coyote runs out of ground when chasing the bird, discovering that there are about fifteen stories of air between him and the hard ground, he sits there in the air looking first this way, then that way, then at us. Then he rockets toward the ground. Cracks me up every time. Yes, the timing is awesome, but it wouldn't work if we didn't empathize with what it feels like to run out of ground under our feet.

This is a big and important subject for animators, and I'll revisit it from time to time. One thing for sure, though, that old guy Walt Disney could sure ask the right questions! I wish I could have been a fly on the wall at some of those Don Graham classes at the old Hyperion Studios. It must have been a heck of a good time.