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posts from my old blog, or even parts of stories or ad copy. I hope you enjoy reading them
as much as I enjoyed writing them.

Tuesday, April 25th :

Execution and Idea, How They Relate.

This post is about cartoons. This could apply to most entertainment media, but seeing
as how I'm an animation freak, that's the medium I choose to explore. Animation
has its own rules, cliches, and conventions. What makes for a good cartoon does not
necessarily make for good live action, and vice versa. Now, I've pontificated often
about what constitutes quality art, but I wanted to explore the interplay of the idea
and execution of an art form, specifically the animated cartoon. There are four categories
I will be exploring: Bad Execution/Bad Idea, Bad Execution/Good Idea, Good
Execution/Good Idea, and Good Execution/Bad Idea.

These are, for the most part intuitive.

We've all seen cartoons that fail on every level, with low quality animation and
writing that makes Plan Nine From Outer Space seem like Citizen Kane. We're familiar
with poor executions of great ideas, as well. How many of us have that favorite book
that became a subpar movie? Good execution of a good idea is self explanitory. Every
part works on every level. Quality. But what about the good execution of a bad idea?
Well, I have bent the definition of the word "bad" a little. I mean ideas that are in and
of themselves unengaging and unsatisfying, but once expounded upon by a talented
artist, becomes satisfying entertainment. For example, the following sentence isn't
funny: "The wolf's eyes bugged out of his head." There's not much about that sentence
that's engaging, and if it's given to an inferior artist or animator, it becomes nothing.
But, in the hands of, say, a Preston Blair or Ken Muse, we get this:

Ah, that's more like it. This is from the excellent Tex Avery toon "Northwest Hounded
Police." I borrowed the image from John Kricfalusi's excellent blog, "All Kinds of Stuff."

It's a very gut kind of funny that takes lots of raw talent and training to execute. We
tend to think of the cartoons in the Good Execution/Bad Idea category as being "low
art," slapstick, whatever you want to call it. But this takes lots of skill, and Tex Avery
would not be the legend he is if he weren't extremely talented at entertaining.

Let's get into the categories a little deeper.

Poor Execution/Poor Idea: Scooby Doo.

Watching a Scooby Doo cartoon is an exercise in patience. The framing and camera
angles are never inventive or interesting, the backgrounds are drab and uninspired,
the animation (such as it is) is of the lowest quality, and the stories/dialogue are at best
frustrating. I squarely blame Scooby Doo for the downfall of the animated cartoon.
At least Yogi Bear, Ruff and Reddy, Huckleberry Hound, and other early Hanna-Barbera
television cartoons had interesting character design, backgrounds, voice acting, and
storylines. But, the demands of budgets and schedules forced the Hanna Barbera studio
to adopt an assembly line process that was perfect at elminating fun from reaching the
screen.

Poor Execution/Good Idea: Joe Oriolo's Felix the Cat cartoon.

I hate listing this one because I adore Felix the Cat. But the made for television series
headed by Joe Oriolo was extraordinarily difficult to watch. It wasn't a complete disaster,
after all, the character designs were decent, if a little cliched. Felix's character model
was the best, but then he had decades of refinement by geniuses like Bill Nolan and, of
course, Otto Messmer. The voice of Felix, provided by the great Jack Mercer, was
very annoying and unpleasant. Felix worked much better in the silent era. The animation
was the standard limited animation one would expect from a late fifties TV cartoon,
but it didn't have the delightful design and color sense of the Hanna Barbera cartoons
of the same period. The series could have been tremendous, the idea behind it was fun
and original. Felix the Cat, who can change himself into just about anything, has a "bag
of tricks" out of which he can pull all manner of Deus Ex Machinas to delight the
cartoon fan. He was pursued by the evil Professor, a small mustachioed man bent on
stealing Felix's bag in any number of psychedelic ways. The Professor's nephew,
Poindexter, wants to help Felix, and often thwarts his uncle's plots. The stories of the
cartoons looked good on paper, with Felix growing giant man-eating plants and traveling
to other worlds through his bag, but the whole is less than the sum of its parts.

Good Execution/Good Idea: Chuck Jones's What's Opera, Doc?

Often voted the greatest animated short ever made, Jones's What's Opera Doc is
a seven minute condensed version of one of the longest operas ever made, Wagner's
18 hour "Ring Cycle." The standard chase formula of Elmer Fudd trying to hunt down
and kill Bugs Bunny got a shot in the arm with clever renditions of the classic melodies
from Wagner's opera with new lyrics, such as "Kill the Wabbit" sung to the tune of "Die
Walkure." The backgrounds were some of Phil DeGuard's best, taking elements of
classic Greek architecture and mixing it with a modern design and color sense. The
animation was up to the usually high standard of the Chuck Jones unit, which featured
animation from masters of the form such as Ken Harris, Richard Thompson, and Abe
Levitow. Everything about the cartoon is right.

Good Execution/"Poor" Idea: Tex Avery's Northwest Hounded Police.

Notice the word, "poor" in quotes. I'm bending the definition slightly to help make my
point. If one were to read the "script" for Northwest Hounded police and listen to the
direction, it would be fairly boring, repetitive, and difficult to visualize. One would get
the sense that Tex Avery really liked "takes," and that's about it. The premise of the
cartoon is that Droopy, Avery's deadpan protagonist, is a Mountie out to "get his man."
The fugitive is the standard unnamed wolf that keeps trying to escape Droopy, but the
little dog/Mountie keeps turning up everywhere. The only things keeping this seven
minute short from being tedious are the increasingly extreme takes the wolf performs
whenever Droopy shows up to arrest him. The brilliant animators in Tex's unit took
his direction, "the wolf's eyes bug out," to heights rarely seen before. As you can see
in the picture above, they wanted to have the wolf go well beyond what's possible in
real life, and well beyond what the Disney imitators were willing to do. Ironic since some
of Tex's best animators, such as Preston Blair and Ray Patterson, were ex-Disney men.
Good Execution/"Poor" Idea makes for some of the best cartoons. Unfettered with
"deep" meaning and requirements of narrative, these cartoons simply entertain, which
is what cartoons are about in the first place.

What we need are more people willing to hone their craft so that their ideas can be
properly expressed. I don't care how good an idea someone has for a show, a comic,
a piece of art, or whatever, if the artist can't render that idea in an interesting way,
it's boring and unpleasant. Spongebob Squarepants, a cartoon I do like, often falls into
the same writing/acting/animating cliches that made the worst cartoons of the late
seventies and early eighties so unbearable. There are many ideas that I think the
Spongebob animators want to get across that aren't reaching the viewer (at least
me anyway). We're too distracted by every character, every character, acting the
exact same way: stand still, say a line, lift head on important word, hold out hand
with broken wrist, stop talking, lower head and hand, blink as other person talks.
This happens in every conversation! If one were to act out a Spongebob scene, it
would seem very unnatural. I still like the cartoon, but it's hard to look at. We
need more Irv Spences, Rod Scribners, Ken Harris's, and Otto Messmers. Please!