Animation and Influences

When it comes to classic animation most people are either a Disney or Loony Tunes fan. You either love Disney's animation for the high production values on their beautifully animated epics or you prefer the screwball comedy and the individuality Warner Brothers allowed the directors to have when directing the various Loony Tunes cartoons.

Mind you, I'm not putting down the artists at Disney who produced such great artists as Carl Barks and Walt Kelly. Both of which I would gladly polish their shoes.

But as far as my personal tastes go, I've always been a Loony Tunes fan and as for cartoons produced by Warner Brothers I've always enjoyed the ones created by Chuck Jones and Robert McKimson the most.

But it goes further than that. What made those cartoons so great for me was not only the directors but also Carl Stalling who had a knack of producing memorable scores and a talent for fitting music popular at that time. Writers like Michael Maltese who wrote the scripts. And finally the vocal talents of both Mel Blanc, June Foray and Arthur Q Bryan.

I don't know if most people realize that he and not Blanc did the voice of Elmer Fudd.

Influence is something I try to stress when I am teaching my animation class. Because I know quite a few of the students taking the class have been influenced by a cartoon. Either classic or current.

One of the thing I try to do while explaining the whole concept of influences is how it pertains to animation. I usually start with a current cartoon:

C. H. Greenblatt who created the series Chowder worked on the show SpongeBob SquarePants. The look and feel of SpongeBob has a great deal to owe (in my less than humble opinion) to the series Ren and Stimpy. John Kricfalusi, who created Ren and Stimpy, was very influenced by the look and the feel of the television cartoons of the 1950's and 1960's. He is also very influenced by animator Robert "Bob" Clampett. Both the cartoons he produced in the 1950's and 1960's and the work he did for Warner Brothers in the 1940's.

Bob Clampett's use of "stretch and squash" as well as overly exaggerating the emotions of the characters (i.e. jaw dropping and eyes bugging out) is owed to Tex Avery's cartoons.

So while I try not to discourage the students from drawing SpongeBob, I try to encourage them to find ways to use what has influenced them in the style of SpongeBob's cartoons and how they can use that in their own cartoons.