Ed's Newsletter - November 2005

CONGRATS TO CURTIS JOBLING
The BBC has commissioned Curtis (“Bob the Builder”) Jobling to create thirty episodes of his wonderful children’s book, “Frankenstein’s Cat”, for airing in 2008. Couldn’t happen to a nicer or more talented guy. Good going, Curtis!

EXCELLENT ARTICLE ON ACTING IN ANIMATION
My friend Martin Challis, who teaches at the Queensland University of Technology down under in Brisbane, Australia, published a fine article on acting in animation, entitled “Character Animation Not Just Technology”: http://www.scene4.com/html/challisoct05.html. If you want to discuss it with him, his contact is m.challis@qut.edu.au

JOHN CANEMAKER’S PERSPECTIVE ON DISNEY
As you may have heard, Disney is closing DisneyToon Studios in Sydney, Australia next year. This pretty much puts the last historic nail in the coffin of 2D at Disney. John Canemaker, Disney scholar and director of the animation program at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, wrote an insightful article about the imminent closing a couple of months ago for the Wall Street Journal. Here’s a link: http://www.cartoonresearch.com/joegrant.html

AFTER I LECTURED AT LOYOLA MARYMOUNT UNIVERSITY IN LA , I received a thank you gift that blew my mind, and I want to share it with you. The gift was a box of large homemade cookies, each of which was elaborately and colorfully decorated as one of the animated characters that I mentioned during my lecture. There was Kronk from “Emperor’s New Groove”, Ariel from “Little Mermaid” and even Charlie Chaplin! It turns out that making these kinds of character-cookies is a side business for two of the animation students at LMU, Catherine and Monica MacGillivray. Their business is named, appropriately enough, “Two Cute Cookies … and More”, which actually has a double meaning because Catherine and Monica are lovely identical twins. If you have an animated person you want to really surprise this holiday season, get in touch with the girls and have them make up a batch of cookies for you. You name the animated character, and they’ll do it for you personally. Contact them at: twocutecookies_andmore@yahoo.com.

ADAM PHILLIPS IS A FLASH GENIUS
If you have never seen what Adam, an animator from Sydney Australia, can do with Flash, do yourself a favor. Here’s a link: http://www.biteycastle.com/content/animation.php

ED HOOKS'S UPCOMING SCHEDULE
Oct 22 College of Creative Studies, Detroit
Nov 21-26 Swansea Animation Days, South Wales
Feb. 6-10 Animex Int’l Festival of Animation and Computer Games, Teesside England

CRAFT NOTES

“CORPSE BRIDE”

Tim Burton’s “Corpse Bride” does for stop-motion animation what “The Incredibles” did for 3D. It takes existing technology and cranks it up a notch or two. Brad Bird and his Pixar team managed the hat trick of endowing 3D with some of the best qualities of 2D, including squash and stretch. Tim Burton and his co-director, Mike Johnson, caused stop motion to look more like 3D. In fact, at the screening I attended of “Corpse Bride”, I often found myself squinting at the images on-screen in disbelief. There was none of that slight jerkiness that you usually see in stop motion, and the puppets have remarkably expressive faces. It sort of made me wonder why they didn’t just do it in 3D in the first place. Seems like it would have been easier.

In my Acting for Animators workshops, I talk a lot about how to use power centers in characters animation. “Corpse Bride” is Exhibit “A” if you want to study power centers. In this movie, they are extremely distinct, and each character has a different one. Also, you will see many examples of the Psychological Gesture. Watch Victoria Everglot’s gestures in the sequence where she learns that she must marry Barkis Bittern.

Even though I like this movie a whole lot, but I have minor quibbles with it. The music, for instance, often gets in the way rather than advancing the story. The songs are show-stopping opportunities for the animators to show what they can do, but they really are just set pieces. You could remove them altogether and the movie wouldn’t really suffer. “Corpse Bride” isn’t alone with its misuse of music in animation, of course, and composer Danny Elfman is certainly talented enough. I simply think that musical numbers are best when they are scene-like and tied into the plot, as in the musical “West Side Story”. Songs, too, need action, objective and obstacle. The most important number in “Corpse Bride” is the title song because it provides background information about how the title character came to be a corpse, but I think it would have been a stronger story choice to expose the same information via the script.

As for the story, I am told it is based on a Russian folk tale. It works wonderfully, and I won’t create spoilers for you here. Scene by scene, the acting is marvelous, and the plot develops logically.

For my money, the best-acted sequence in the film is the final one in which the character of the Corpse Bride appears. She has to go through some extremely subtle, emotionally-driven character transitions. Burton and Johnson had all their eggs in one basket there. If that single scene did not work, I think the movie would have been overall unsatisfying. Actual live actors would have a challenge with the acting requirements here and, considering that we are talking about puppets and micro-adjustments to faces, the moment is a magnificent performance accomplishment.

The real joy of watching the film is the character development and design. One hundred percent of the cast is imaginatively designed, on a par with what Miyazaki does. Every single one of them, whether dead of alive, has a character arc and a singularity. Every single character has a distinct personality. And every single scene is well constructed from a performance point of view.

I’m predicting now that “Corpse Bride” will win Best Animated Film at the next Academy Awards. It doesn’t seem likely that anything will come out between now and January that can top it.