THE WRITING OF:

    This has been a hard book to write, even though its tone is light and the subject cartoons.  I often laughed out loud while writing the characters and guffawed as I worked on some of the escapades, but the underlying animation stuff was challenging and difficult to put into words.  Like Wile E. Coyote, just when I thought I’d got it, anvils and pianos came crashing down on the page. 
    The art of pencil animation has a million details and arcane rules to wrangle into a coherent, entertaining form.  Like a mosaic, selecting  the right bits to make a clear picture is crucial.  On one hand, too much technical information could glaze eyes and on the other, too little would prevent you from appreciating the hard work and wonders of the art; the protagonists could just as well be working in a shoe factory.  So, I’ve left some technical stuff in and, to spare you a terminological overdose, put a glossary of animation terms in the back of the book so you can look them up or just keep reading.  A few small sketches, worth thousands of words, have also been included.
    I crammed a lot into this book: how an animation studio works, how pencil animation is done, how a drawing is made, how artists interact and how dedicated we are to our art as well as a bit of the history of animation.  Not a how-to book but one that has the animation culture woven into the story so you can absorb it as you read about the opinionated young artist who discovers that fun can be had despite the deadlines, cut-throat co-workers and the industry's exacting standards.  Maybe you'll even feel some of her passion for the art.
    In this story, not only do the artists evolve, but drawings do too, as well as the heroine’s skills.  A drawing emerges under her fingers with a hesitant, trembling line at first, gradually becoming stronger and more confident, ending with the bold strokes that make it professional art.
    Getting the atmosphere of a studio right was also not a piece of cake.  Animation studios are far more subdued than you might imagine.  Some are relatively relaxed, but many are so regimented you can feel the tension as you walk the quiet corridors.   With it’s layers of hierarchy, politics and tradition, a studio is a living, breathing part of the animation process, a character, just like the artists.   
    People always exclaim "Oh, what fun!" whenever animation is mentioned, so I wanted to dispel the myth that animation is fun in a laughing-joking-colored-crayons-childish-art-form sort of way.  Bringing a character to life can be fun in a calculating, challenging, pressured-by-deadlines sort of way but, while the finished product is fun, the writing, research, design, story boarding, layout and animation required to get it to the screen is mostly a lot of hard work.  You laugh at a gag once, but it takes months to produce.  I know you’ve all seen the “making of” footage on TV: animators flipping drawings and making faces at mirrors, but that’s not all there is, you know.  Animation is a serious industry and a sophisticated art form involving big budgets, long hours, highly educated artists and, these days, even scientists.  But, although the business of animation isn’t fun, artists taking themselves seriously, is.  Pale creatures, deprived of sunlight during months of crunch time, animation artists are fiercely dedicated to their art and can get caught up in the artificial urgency of a deadline to the point of slapstick, often forgetting that it’s just a movie, after all.
    I hope this book makes you want to run out and animate something or rent something animated, or, at the very least, not think of animation as a frivolous medium exclusively for children’s films, but as a fully-fledged means of cinematic expression in its own right.  I also hope it makes you laugh.

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OUT-TAKE FROM “ANIMATED” - Animating

Animating with a pencil is a crazy joy. First of all, you can really draw. You can let rip with a free, loose, sketchy line, you can elongate and shorten and distort and generally exaggerate to your heart’s content.  Think Tex Avery, Chuck Jones.   The directors will rein you in later if it’s too much and if you're the director, well, just go bananas.  You feel like God when you give life to a character, make it walk and talk and stretch squash and jump and dance.  Like God and a parent.

    To be a good animator, you need to watch a lot of baseball, fencing, golf, ice skating, tennis, ballroom dancing and ballet so you know how a real human being squashes and stretches in motion.  Watching athletes and dancers in slow-motion is also essential.  Almost like special effects, are runners’ feet crushed with speed, dancers’ legs fantastically elongated, boxers’ faces horribly bent around a punch, tennis players’ entire bodies stretched mightily upwards, with their little feet, freed from gravity, curled inward toward each other, pigeon-toed. Who would guess that the human body could change shape so much when it moved?

    The secret to life-like animation, is stretching and squashing.  First, draw the character all long and thin and vertical in one drawing, then all short and fat and squat in the next.  Way more stretched and squashed than you think possible. Then rough in the drawings in between, making sure that the *timing is nice and crisp and snappy. And there you are: a bouncy, squishy, life-like movement.         
    While you’re lost in creating all this, you’re thinking thoughts like this:  Must make this line really, really l-o-o-ong, oops shit––erase, erase–– really, really long.  There. 
Or: Should I put a joint break in here? 
Or: What’s the subtext to this dialogue?
Or: Keep it light, just kiss the paper with the pencil. 
Or: Stretch and squash is gravity, physics. 
Or: I wonder what they’re serving for lunch in the commssary.
    All this and endless people-watching and sketching are the artistic arsenal of the animator.  You should beware of animators; when you think they’re just staring blankly into space, they’re really storing up your every tic and gesture and one day you might recognize yourself on the screen.  Voice-over actors are always amazed and a bit perturbed when they see one of their gestures or facial features incorporated into a character. 
    Heh, heh.

* Note from the GLOSSARY: The illustration is a TIMING CHART, an indication of how fast or slow the animator wants the action to be.  Drawings numbers correspond to the frame number mentioned o the X-sheet.  Key drawings are circled, a breakdown drawing is underlined. Most animators call for drawings halfway between the extremes, then the halves are halved, down to the close-together drawings at the start and end of the action (slow-in-and-out). This chart is usually drawn on the upper right-hand side of the first key drawing, number one in this example:

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OUT-TAKE FROM “ANIMATED” - Charon

    On her little closed circuit TV screens, she watched the new artist park her car in the producer’s spot then run nervously across the parking garage as if pursued by monsters. Another crazy artist to keep track of at Classic Cartoons. 
    The studio was across the river from Warner Bros., next to the Forest Lawn cemetery.  When not watching her screens, she could stare out the window and see where she was going to end up.  Visitors often stared at her name tag and made jokes about the river Styx and death.  As if she hadn’t heard them all before.  Her mother hadn’t heard the jokes and thought she was being original when she’d named her daughter.
    In this glass-walled atrium with an echoing granite floor, a tinkling fountain and fairy bamboo growing as high as the animation department balcony on the second floor, she signed visitors in and out of the studio and answered the phones.
    She was the smiling face of Classic Cartoons.   
     Chip and Chuck, the twin security guards, sometimes hung out with her in the lobby like twin Jell-Os.  Fat and jolly, she couldn’t imagine them chasing crazed fans or terrorists or even a mouse out of the studio. They patrolled the parking garage and the studio wearing smart navy blazers, pink shirts, bow ties, gray pants and shiny black shoes so they don’t look like security guards.  Classic wanted to look like a fun place that didn’t really need security guards who might scare the visitors and the artists.
    Security was tight at animation studios because it was commonly believed that crazed fans wanted to crash in and demand that animators draw something for them.  Personally, she’d never seen that happen.  Also, studios thought they were prime Al Qaeda targets.  Personally, she thought Al Qaeda would look a bit silly blowing up a cartoon studio.
    “Yo, Charon, do you see dead people?”  Trevor strode past with a briefcase, a big grin and a loud Hawaiian shirt that could wake the dead.  One of the top animators and a nice man, really, despite the stupid remarks. 
    She smiled. 
    With him was his fiancée, Monisha, a pushy background painter.
    She smiled at her too.
    When they’d passed, she looked around at the cheerful posters of the studio’s latest films in glass cases on the walls and sighed.  It was a lovely work station.  All the artists envied her.  They worked upstairs in tiny cubicles barely big enough to hold their huge desk and a chair.  But she would rather have been at home with her daughter.
       Another artist appeared on her screen.  Tiffy.  Nobody would have guessed Tiffy was an artist, she looked like a prostitute.  In a plunging red sequined halter top and shorts, for heaven’s sake, with dangly earrings and heels so high she could hardly mince.  The artists dressed like gangsters, bums and sluts.  Some wore low-cut clothes with body parts hanging out (and not only the girls), then they complained about sexual harassment.  But most of them wore raggedy jeans and company T-shirts and looked homeless.   Producers and directors also wore jeans and T-shirts, except that theirs were clean and pressed and their shoes were Gucci and Louboutins.
      “Hey, Charon.  How’re you doing?”  Tiffy had a voice like a gerbil and eyes as flat as a linoleum floor.  Charon smiled at her.  The artists were mostly neurotic and self-absorbed.  Also quite childish.  The difference between them and her was that she had a life.  She went home to her family at six o’clock, she didn’t hang around working till midnight every night like they did.  She pitied them, really, for allowing themselves to be exploited for months on end and for valuing their jobs more than their families.
    Artists often told her how mature and dignified she was.  One animator said she looked like a contented cat.  She’d smiled and said nothing; she hated cats.  Generally, she kept her mouth shut.  And smiled.  That was the reason she’d kept her job for fifteen years.   Smiling and shutting up.  That was also why she knew everything about everybody who worked at Classic and they knew nothing about her.   
    The reason she was so tight-lipped at work was that artists loved to gossip.  Dirt got around the studio in minutes and she would hear five different versions of the same story before lunch.
    The new artist finally reached the top of the stairs and dashed past her desk puffing and panting and clutching a pencil.  She would have told her to move her car, but she was going too fast.  Part of Charon's job was to present a calm, dignified welcome for visitors, so running and loud noises in the lobby were discouraged.
    People thought this was a fun job.
    “Oh, what fun!” they said when Charon told them she worked in an animation studio.
    Not really.  Sitting behind a desk in the lobby smiling and signing visitors in and out of the studio was hardly an action-packed, fun job. 
   Sometimes movie stars came to sign a contract or to do voice-overs.  Amazing how unglamorous they were without movie makeup.  Even Oprah showed up once.  That was exciting.  She’d worn lots of makeup.  Journalists were never allowed in and nobody was allowed to photograph the inside of the studio.  Not even the artists.
     Occasionally, the studio got bomb threats. Personally, she couldn't imagine who’d want to bomb an animation studio.  There was a manual for what to do when a bomber called:  First, ask for his name and telephone number.  Then ask about the bomb.  Sometimes the whole studio had to be evacuated and the entire street closed down. 
    And, speaking of bombs, Charon’s daughter had just left for her third tour in Iraq yesterday.  This made Chip and Chuck’s incessant baseball talk, the tinkling fountain, the rustling bamboo and the gossiping artists seem incredibly trivial and annoying.  Most of the time she wanted to scream and tell them all to shut up.
    But she’d take a deep breath, get a hold of herself and turn the smile back on.
    The smiling face of Classic Cartoons.

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OUT-TAKE FROM “ANIMATED” - Sexism in animation in 2006

    I'd heard there was a lot of sexism in animation.  A female animator, who'd come to talk to us at Art School, told us that, in the old days, women artists at Disney could only work in Ink & Paint, that Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera had alarming views on women in animation but that much more recently, a three foot high model of a penis had stood on the desk of a male animator she'd worked with until he was told by management to remove it.  Yikes.  
    Apparently animation was still very much an all boys club, even in 2006.  There were plenty of female producers for some reason and some female studio heads, but no female animated feature film directors and very few female animators.   
    This young, attractive and talented animator said she'd very nearly left animation when she was met with wolf whistles, howls and loud catcalls at her first interview, even though she hadn't been wearing high-cut hot pants, a low-cut spangly top or translucent platform shoes.  Heck, she said, her hair wasn't even blond that day.  She'd worn jeans and a baggy white T-shirt, the animator’s uniform and was proudly clutching in one hand her film (produced, written, designed and directed by her) and in the other, her art portfolio. 
    Her appointment was with the head of the studio, who'd heard all this ruckus when he came out to greet her, but he just smiled and winked at his unruly boys, smoothed his hair and showed her into his office.
   “What can I do for you, honey?” he'd asked her, his toothy smile unfolding above his splayed collar and gold necklace.  She'd felt as though she'd wandered into Huggy Bear’s neighborhood.
   When she told him she wanted to be a director, he'd laughed so much she thought he was having a heart attack.  After he pulled himself together, he tried to placate her.
    “There are so few directors, honey,” he said “And so many other jobs.  Why don’t you do cleanup?”
   At the end of the interview, Huggy ran his hand down her arm and looked at her chest, murmuring, “Mmmmm.”
   Had she taken a wrong turn down the career rabbit hole?
   She just wanted to animate, to make people laugh and cry with her pencil so, although she didn't accept that particular job, she did decide to continue in animation, thinking the interview had been an aberration.  Little did she know it was a harbinger of things to come and she would spend too much time being harassed and patronized.
   She warned us about prejudice against female artists, told us not to allow ourselves to be intimidated or harassed and not to think that sexual harassment and discrimination didn't still happen in animation in 2006.

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