jon lewis | design blog

The Wilderness Must be Explored!

What makes a cartoon funny?

I’ve spent the last two weeks studying classic cartoons to better help me develop a richer experience for our future users. Of all the cartoons that I’ve been dissecting and picking apart, the 1950s and 60s Hanna Barbara cartoons are the ones that have attracted my attention the most, particularly our good friend Yogi Bear.

In my search to answer my question of what makes a cartoon funny, I’ve slipped into the even deeper search to find what makes a cartoon memorable, and more importantly in my case, functional. By functional I mean designing and developing a character’s personality and form to create something that not only functions well in a cartoon setting, but also appeals to the audience and lends itself to the story.

Function + Appeal

A great example of this type of balance in function would be Tom and Jerry. There is no question whether the character designs of both Tom and Jerry are appealing to audiences. The more important and driving force of character design lies beneath the drawings. It’s all about the personalities and quirks. That’s what makes us like them and that’s why they’re such timeless classics.

The simple “cat and mouse” chemistry is certainly not hard to write gags for, but because Tom and Jerry have such distinct characteristics it almost seems like the stories can write themselves. The visual appeal of the character design is only half of what makes us laugh, the other half is the character’s soul shining thru. Of course a character’s soul is hardly worth anything unless you have a solid story to throw them into and a creative solution for breaking the tedium of previous adventures.

I think this is one reason why we have so many terrible cartoons today. It’s very difficult to come up with a character that is appealing and memorable, and it’s even harder to present something new to the world without any ground to stand on. It may be difficult to dream up the next Bugs Bunny, but difficulty is no excuse for creating bad cartoons like the ones we see today. Now I’m not going to get into the downfall of animation and cartoons. I could fill a book with my opinions on Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon’s “intellectual property” but that’s not the point.

Okay, what’s your point then?

My point is that it doesn’t take a billion dollars to create magic, it just takes proper planning and genuinely creative artists that aren’t interested in ripping off other people’s ideas. Which brings me back to Yogi Bear. I heard a few days ago that Hanna Barbara only had around $3000 to produce each episode of Yogi Bear, which was pennies in comparison to the $15,000 and $20,000 episodes of today’s cartoons (even with 1960s inflation.)

I also heard that many of the early Yogi shorts were produced with only ONE animator, who was also the layout artist. How is this possible?

In today’s cartoon production world an American designs the characters, writes a script, storyboards everything, and draws a few keyframes, and then the rest of the work gets shipped off to our friendly brothers and sisters in Korea. Now I understand how outsourcing lesser creative roles can help trim the cost of production, but if a Korean animator does not understand the art direction, or the characters soul, we lose any of the appeal that creators had when they wrote the script and roughed the storyboards in the first place.

Animating out if context is the same as doing almost anything out of context, which means that your guessing half the time, and following very limited directions the other half. Not only does this silly process break the production cycle into unnecessary pieces, it also yields the most hideous cartoons ever produced, ever. And by hideous I mean flat, unexpressive, uniform, and most importantly : not funny.

On the upside, all of the money being “saved” by outsourcing allows studios to hire over-priced name brand celebrities to do horrendous voice acting, and gives them more time to design and manufacture doubly horrendous toys and merchandising to be sold to all those kids that don’t know any better.

By keeping all of the production in house in the 60s, Hanna Barbara was able to create funny and appealing stories and characters without having to sacrifice the look and feel of their studio, or waste money on the trial and error of handing work off to a stranger in another department (or country.) Granted they did this through the use of limited animation techniques that they invented, but damn near every cartoon produced today is created using adobe flash and limited animation techniques anyway.

How is it that modern studios have found a way to add more steps to the creative and animation processes, spending more money and time on production, yet the final products are nowhere near comparable to cartoons made in the 1960s by a handful of people for a fraction of the cost? I have no answer to this, but I’m sure there are some studio executives out there that have asked themselves the very same question.

Too many cooks, ruins the soup.

Good cartoons are funny because they are surprising and memorable. Just like good food makes you want to come back to your favorite restaurant, the characters in an awesome cartoon make you want to see more wacky adventures. The problem with these new animation kitchens is that there may only be a few real cooks working on the soup, all the other “cooks” are just douche-bags with cheese-graters (making cheesy cartoons.)

Which brings me back to why I’m studying classic cartoons in first place. When we got cracking on putting together our new start-up, Waffle Forge, we made a conscious decision early on, to make sure that we do everything to the fullest of our potential. The apps and work we will be producing are very visual heavy, and as the lead artist, I’m working very hard to separate our look from the cookie cutter cartoon network style. I plan to take the animation and character design principles from when things were actually fun and entertaining and apply those techniques to every visual corner of Waffle Forge.

Because at the end of the day, cartoons aren’t the only things that have gone downhill in recent memory, I’m sure you can apply this rant to the TV, film, music, or gaming industries and draw the same conclusions.

Real raw talent is exists, it doesn’t matter if it’s 1958 or 2011, talented artists just want to make work that people can enjoy.

I hope you guys like where I’m going with this.

- Jon