I bet a lot of Cats sinned this week, and it being Sunday I thought I'd introduce them to someone to confess to and pray for forgiveness.Stimpy just wants an explanation for why there is pain and suffering and nerve endings in the world.
Cat Jesus answers that he had to create something for his own amusement.

Nick Cross, genius

After a long day of proving to Stimpy that life is full of misery, Stimpy has had enough of reality. Ren is on him like a blood-starved leech.Stimpy steels himself to talk back to the bug-eyed polyp that is Ren.
"Ok, maybe life DOES suck outside the window, but at least here on my TVland box everything is happy! I'm gonna sit down and watch my favorite program, Floyd of Mayberry!"

Stimpy plops himself down in front of his happy box to watch his show. Every time Floyd mumbles anything or snips another lock of Andy's hair, he giggles and guffaws, rocking back and forth holding his tickly toes. Floyd makes him forget the ugly realities of life. The joy of Floyd wipes his befouled brain clean.Ren waits for the program to end, so he can torment his best friend again. "You believe all that crap, Steempy? Dere's no place like Mayberry. Dat's all seely make-believe poopoo stuffs!"
During the commercial, Ren tries to lecture Stimpy and points his finger at him. Stimpy eats.
CRUNCH!!! "Take that, Ren! How do you like when life sucks?"
After the show is finished, Stimpy turns off the set and wipes his teary eyes from laughing so hard. He gets up and tells Ren, "I don't care if some of life does suck! At least the world has Floyd!!"

Ren approaches Stimpy slowly, with pity in his eyes. He grasps a couple fist fulls of cat fur and leans towards him...

Stimpy clutches his one rapidly pulsing nerve ending.
"No! No! No! You're lying! Liar Liar!!" says Stimpy! Ren tells him. "Eediot! Dun't you know what reruns are??! Dees show is from 1962!""Face up to eet Stimpy....Heeeee's........

Stimpy may be convinced that life outside the window sucks, but "At least there's Floyd!" he yells, referring to TV's funniest barber.

some energy sketches coming...

I'm curious but does anyone do pure cartoon gags anymore? Mighty B maybe?
I know there are still a couple cartoony designed shows, but are they allowed to do some ridiculous impossible stuff just for visual fun?
This is a scene drawn by me and Nick Cross for Life Sucks.
It's from the beginning of the cartoon. Stimpy is in his garden enjoying the beauty of nature and life forms, when Ren wakes up with a hangover and comes over to see what kind of idiocy he is up to.
I can't remember exactly why Stimpy blows his nose up here- maybe it's just a sign of extreme happiness.
Anyway, I like when cartoons are cartoons. Almost all early cartoons did this sort of thing as a matter of course. Why? Because you could. What other reason is needed?
Disney and later generations of animators frowned on this type of cartoon silliness for silliness sake, as if it was beneath them to use the medium in a way that no other medium could imitate.
Personally, I have never been able to follow this logic. My favorite cartoons are probably from the mid 1940s - but even then, outside of Clampett and Avery, most animated cartoons had abandoned pure visual nuttiness.
The 20s and early 30s cartoons might be cruder in execution than the 1940s, but they are full of pure cartoon gags and that makes them rare treasures.It gives them an appeal that you can't get anywhere else. They celebrate the fact that they are cartoons and anything is possible. They took advantage of the creativity of the cartoonists themselves, instead of squashing their natural instincts as has become standard practice.
I wish that there could be cartoons that retain the best elements of all the eras, rather than constantly abandoning good traditions just because something legitimately new or merely trendy has come about. Why not do everything that's fun if you can?

What do directors do in cartoons, again?
Well, one thing they do is draw energy sketches for the artists they hand out scenes to. That's how we get some of our own style into the pictures.
These are some "energy sketches" - coined by Milt Gray for the kind of quick sketches directors give to their artists. These are from a sequence of Life Sucks called "Ren Cuts Stimpy". Ren is trying to make Stimpy realize that life is full of ugly, not happy, so he keeps flinging hurt words from his evil sharp lips at him. Each time he tosses a word like "famine" or "genocide" at Stimpy, it slices a little piece of blessed innocence out of him.



The better the artist I'm handing out to, the rougher my sketches can be. Below is a Nick Cross drawing more finished after he and I would talk out a scene and each do rough energy sketches. Then he would take them and do tighter versions like this.
I'm gonna put up more of Nick's drawing from this sequence later.

This is the section as written in the premise from "Life Sucks":
Later at home, Stimpy prays to Cat Jesus (a cat crucifix on the bedroom wall). “Dear Cat Jesus, I don’t understand. I thought all the life you created was happy and wonderful, but underneath it all, there’s nothing but pain and suffering!” Cat Jesus speaks: “Well, at least I don’t feel any of it!”

Stimpy mopes around the house, depressed. Ren follows him, talking about history and war, pestilence, famine, genocide and disease. Stimpy refuses to listen any more. He shoves Ren aside and plops down in front of the TV to watch his favorite show: Andy Griffith. He whistles the theme song and starts to cheer up. He especially loves Floyd the Barber and rocks back and forth with glee during all the Floyd scenes.


Stimpy gets Ren back by telling him what his favorite cartoon is, and the word slices his nipple in 2. The detail at the right is where I try to figure out how to draw a convincing nipple split.

You won't find "energy sketches" in the Filmation work flow chart.

This is a storyboard reel (animatic) from an epic Ren and Stimpy story called "Life Sucks". Many of the folks who worked on it figured it was the best R and S story we had ever written. Unfortunately it was never produced.


LS2
Uploaded by chuckchillout8

Life Sucks explores the difference between Ren and Stimpy's outlook on life. They each look at the world and see the same evidence yet judge it in opposite ways. Stimpy is an optimist and Ren is a pessimist. In Life Sucks, Ren realizes it's his duty to cure Stimpy of his naivety and he takes him on a journey through biology, religion, history and evolution in an attempt to make him wake up and smell the coffee.

This is just one sequence from the cartoon. Ren tells Stimpy a story from the history of his religion, a story of people's devotion to the divine Cat-Jesus. Richard Pursel and I concocted this warm little Ren and Stimpy scene.

This is the story of the Children's Crusade, which many history books say actually happened.




I asked the great Nick Cross to draw the sequence and he did an amazing thing. He drew Ren and Stimpy in one style and the Children's Crusade in the style of Mary Blair's Golden Books.

Nick Cross' Plog

Working with Nick is great. I get to scribble out some ideas for the compositions I want and he takes them and turns them into beautiful finished illustrations in his own style.

I can't tell you how fun it is to work with rare stars like Nick or Katie or Helder and a small handful of stylists, who give me back better than what I give them and then let me add my name to the work. How unusual it is today to find artists whose drawings have a point of view! I imagine the old days when Clampett and Avery were surrounded by nothing but top talents, each with their own styles, already trained and all they had to do was direct them. No bland scenes, no on-model crap. Heaven!

The multi-talented Eric Bauza edited and did the sound fx and music for the animatic.

Take a look at this and tell me if you'd like to see the whole of Life Sucks produced as a straight to DVD release.

Later this week I'll put up another clip from Life Sucks. Keep your eyes peeled!

Here's an earlier sequence from Life Sucks. This is where Ren first approaches Stimpy in his garden. Stimpy thinks nature is proof that the world is full of beauty and joy and Ren begins to burst his bubble by explaining how much torture goes on in his lawn every minute of every day.




These two still drawings are Nick's cleanups of my scribbly roughs. This animatic is mostly drawn by me in my "bus doodle" style.

I have a few different drawing styles and I use them for different thought processes. When I am writing ideas, I draw them, but I draw really fast, with no regard to construction, perspective, line quality or any finished techniques. I am purely drawing feeling. I am trying to draw in real time as the events play out. I look like a complete spaz when I'm doing it and people make fun of me and imitate it.

The drawings are very scribbly but have the germs of all the visual ideas in continuity. Once these scribbles are complete, then I switch my brain to style mode and draw bigger versions of the same drawings that use more solid principles. This step (layout) requires slower, more carefully choreographed drawings and uses a completely different part of the brain to do. If I was trying to storyboard a scene in this finished style, it wouldn't work. I would be thinking of pretty drawings rather than story and emotion and continuity.

This is a major flaw with TV studio systems today. They expect their storyboard artists to draw finished clean drawings "on-model" so they can send them overseas and then have the animators just xerox them up. This is an extremely inefficient way to use storyboards.

Storyboards are called "story"boards because the story artists are supposed to be writing the stories, not doing the animation and layouts. The more time they waste doing clean stiff on-model drawings, the less time they have to spend on making the story work.

Executives do not understand storyboards anyway, let alone rough drawings. They are easily impressed by a clean inked line, and even if the story isn't working they will quickly sign off on a fancily rendered finished looking storyboard.

Stupid.

You should look up some of Mike Maltese's storyboards for Chuck Jones to see how writers used to work.


Eddie has a great storyboard drawing style. It's simple but full of amazing life, fantastic strong clear poses and staging and composition. I used to shudder when layout artists would get his boards and then instantly tone down all the poses when they added the details and put them "on-model". I loved doing layouts from Eddie's boards because all the thought and life was there, and I got to add my own creativity in the finished design details and adding a few poses.