Yesterday's Sketchbook

[tealin]

Page One - On Sunday I listened to 'Fat Man on a Bicycle' (a segment I'd recorded off Saturday Night Fry when it was on BBC7) and felt a lot better. What follows are bits and pieces for a Statement.
Page Two - More bits.

Seeing V again tonight, this time with a friend from school. How many times will I need to refresh my memory, I wonder, before enough of it sticks?

Comments

[twirlynoodle.livejournal.com]

Writers started taking over cartoons in the 50s and 60s with limited animation (Hanna-Barbera type stuff) because it was faster and cheaper to do minmal animation to illustrate what was essentially a radio play (to pay the actors for one afternoon rather than the animators for several weeks). While excessive wordiness is never a good thing (unless done for effect, in moderation, like Mojojojo's rambling redundancies in Powerpuff Girls), what's really making cartoons hard to watch now isn't their reliance on writing so much as the writing being really, really bad. You could never have as much and as varied animation on TV as you do now if it weren't for the 'illustrated radio play' way of doing things, but the dependence on writers means that unless you find good ones, no amount of artistic genius will make up for their weakness. Add to that the seeming alien abduction of all talented writers and you get boring, hackneyed cartoons, or animated sitcoms – what's the point of them being animated? It's cheaper and faster to do them live-action.

I only know the TV side of things... DisneyBoy? Any thoughts on Features?

[thefordmustang.livejournal.com]

THANK YOU! THANK YOU! THANK YOU! for that explanation! I think you summed up very well what I think has been the big problem with animation (both TV and feature). There are a lot of very, very talented artists out there but they have to work with difficult writing. Granted, I am not an animator so maybe I see things the wrong way... but so much focus seems to be on animation styles being better than other animated styles when one of the biggest factors really is having a good fit between the animation and a well-written script.

[tannhaeuser.livejournal.com]

What’s really making cartoons hard to watch now isn’t their reliance on writing so much as the writing being really, really bad.

[disneyboy.livejournal.com]

There's a LOT I could say about this, but given that I'm a slow thinker and a much, much slower typist, would you forgive me if I attend to other things (the movers are coming tomorrow morning with a new desk - I still have to clean out the old one!) until I can give this the time it deserves? (And you know I will!) Is there something brief but significant I can say in the meantime, without opening the floodgates? Basically:
-Because a lot of movies were performimg poorly under the old system (boarding without a script), and/or being drastically re-written or cancelled well into production, and a lot of live-action people were taking over Disney animation, it was decided that every movie should start with an approved script, and be assigned at least one full-time writer
-This generally didn't help much, because:
--The best writers were either busy, too expensive for Disney, or not interested in animation (there have been a few exceptions)
--The writers who came our way generally had little or no experience writing for animation - were live-action wanna-be's - and as such were poor collaborators, possesive of their material, tired of the endless revisions, didn't think as visually, or were primarily "polishers" - reworking dialogue, coming up with funny one-liners rather than generating new content - and we've gone through them like toilet paper, after spending a LOT of money on unusable material
--the people in charge who approved the scripts that would move into production were morons

--even the better-written scripts still needed extensive reworking because what read well on the page often did not translate when storyboarded visually(apparently Pixar has gone through this, and now relies strongly on the director {and his/her story crew} to generate the content from beginning to end)

Luckily, it appears, at least at Disney, that this is all about to change. More later...