Ask the guy who worked for an Animation Art Gallery for 10 years

[NAF1138]

Sorry for the crap title of the thread but I wanted to keep some truth in advertising. If anyone has a better suggestion I will edit that up so it's a bit snazzier.

There was the smallest little bit of interest when I said I knew a fair bit about American Animation and history, so I figured I would help this forum get started and maybe I can keep my knowledge sharp at the same time. (It's been a few years since I was actively involved in that community and some of the more esoteric stuff is starting to fade).

My credentials:

I grew up with parents who collected animation art, so I gained an appreciation for the artistry at a young age. I knew who the 9 old men where by the time I was 9 and got a book written by Frank and Ollie for my 14th birthday. When I got into high school and wanted to get a part time job I hit up one of the gallery owners I knew who was looking for a little bit of help. From their I worked my way up to sales and eventually ran their eBay store for a while. In the 10 years I worked there I met animators, directors, collectors and historians and spent a lot of time talking about animation with all of them. I learned a lot not only about the history of American Animation, but also the process and the buisness.

So while I won't call myself an expert, I will say that I have an unusually large wealth of knowledge on the subject, and what I can't remember specifically off the top of my head I can probably look up fairly easily. Ask about UPA, Terry Toons or Fleischer Studios and I will probably have something to say. I have opinions on introducing xerox copy technology into the art in the late 50s. I can tell you why Hanna Barbera cartoons look so crappy compared to Disney cartoons, how big the clutch cargo puppets were, and what it's like to hold a Gertie the Dinosaur drawing in your hands.

So ask me questions about american animation, animation collecting, or even what it is like to work for a small business that went through a boom time (the mid 90s) and a bust time (the early 2000s). I have to stick to american stuff though. I know almost nothing about European and even less about Asian animation.

[pepperlandgirl]

Hell, I want to know why Hanna Barbera cartoons look so crappy, please!

[Cluricaun]

What are the most collectible and rare things in the world of American Animation? Have you ever come across an original Bill Watterson? They say he's insanely reclusive and anti commercial and his stuff is nearly unknown.

[NAF1138]

Hell, I want to know why Hanna Barbera cartoons look so crappy, please!

Well, not surprisingly, the answer is because they were made on the cheep. But let's see if I can't turn that into a slightly more interesting answer.

Hanna and Barbera were two brilliant animators who made their mark on the world of animation primarily at MGM with the Tom an Jerry cartoons. These guys knew about animation inside and out, and they knew how to tell stories with pictures. So when they went off on their own to found Hanna Barbera and were placed on a shoestring budget they implemented 2 concepts (that I believe they pioneered but I could be wrong) which helped them keep costs low, but also messed up the look of their cartoons.

The first thing they did was change the number of frames per minute they filmed. See with animation you can get away with only having 12 frames per second of movement instead of 24. It doesn't look as smooth and you can't have fluid natural movement, but you can make it work. So they drew 12 frames for each second and filmed then twice so it would playback at 24 fps.

The second thing that they did was implementing the concept of the "held cel" for major chuncks of action. This isn't a concept they invented, but they really took it to another level. See, as many of you no doubt know, animation was made by painting pictures onto pieces of clear celluloid, and because these cels levels are clear you can have movement going on on one level and not have to change anything on the other levels. So what HB did was start doing things like paint a whole body without a head, then a head without a face then just change the eyes and the mouth while they move the whole thing across a very long background painting. Because this could be done very quickly it was much less expensive, but it also got you lots of shot of Yogi Bear from the waist up walking with Boo Boo from the shoulders up, neither of them looking at each other and just their mouths moving. The creators of Clutch Cargo took this a step further actually making puppets that never animated and superimposing live action mouths onto them. Very cheep, but very creepy when you watch it now. (If you don't know what it is you might remember Clutch Cargo as the show Bruce Willis is watching in the hotel room in Pulp Fiction.)

So, that's why HB cartoons looks so crappy.

What are the most collectible and rare things in the world of American Animation? Have you ever come across an original Bill Watterson? They say he's insanely reclusive and anti commercial and his stuff is nearly unknown.

I haven't ever seen any of Bill Wattersons stuff, but that isn't really out field. We did occasionally get some comic strip stuff, but there are mostly other people who specialize in that sort of thing.

What is most collectible and what is most rare are two different questions really since rarity doesn't always equal collectibility in animation. Part of what's cool about collecting animation is that ever cel setup is a totally unique piece of art. There may be hundreds of similar pieces, but what you have is the only one of its kind in the world.

The rarest thing I have ever seen was probably the drawings from Gertie the Dinosaur by Windsor McKay. Other rare things though, depend a lot on how stuff was stored. So stuff from Terry Toons is rare, because much of it was destroyed in a fire. Stuff from Thundar the Barbarian and other stuff that was animated in mexico is rare because most of it just disappeared when the show was done being made. In fact that's where a lot of the rarity comes from full stop. They used to just throw this stuff out. It was trash. I personally know two people who became multi millionaires because when they were kids they would go dumpster diving behind the Hanna Barbera studios for the boxes of old cels that had been thrown away. So rarity is relative.

The collecibibilty come from what you like. Animators generally like drawings, not cels. The real artistry is in the drawings, and some drawings are better than others. There are teams that work on drawing characters and the lead animator only draws the "key" drawings. The big poses that make up the sequence. Then they have a bunch of other animators do in betweening work that connects the dots and creates the fluid motion. (Well they used to, with computers I think a lot of in betweeners got put out of business since the computer generates the in between drawings.)

Other people really love the lavish hand painted backgrounds that are created to have the cels photographed in front of. There are a lot fewer of these than there are cels, because you usually only need 1 background for every few minutes of animation. Some of these background artists have become sought after modern painters in their own right. People like Eyvind Earle. Still other people look for concept art and storyboards. This is my favorite stuff personally. Studios like Disney used to hire some fantastic artists to lay out the beats of the story and come up with character design concepts. It isn't always easy to find these pieces, and when you do they are generally very expensive, but this is the stuff I dig. So it depends on what you are into.

Much of it is nostalgia driven. The rule of thumb was that 25 years after a cartoon had been off the air is when it would get it's first big bump, because all the people who remember it from being kids finally have the extra cash to blow on that piece of Thundercats memorabilia. And of course classic Disney stuff is always popular. It's more readily available then a lot of other stuff and it is more in the forefront of most people's minds. And a lot of their early stuff really was just better than anything anyone else was doing.

Um...wow, those got long.

I will try to keep it shorter from now on.

[Guest]

Who owns the Woody Woodpecker and Heckle & Jeckle cartoons now?

[NAF1138]

The last time I checked (and this was a few years ago so my information might be out of date) Universal still owned the distribution and licensing rights to all of the Walter Lantz material. I am not entierly sure who owns the distribution rights for the Terrytoons material but from the little bit of digging I did it looks like it is probably Viacom.