Did you know that Canada produced both the world's greatest actor and the greatest supermarket?



I was molded by these commercials and there are even earlier and more thrilling Shatner/Loblaws commercials. Are there some Canadian commercial collectors out there? Help educate the world and share our cultural heritage. I'd also love to see the old Dominion commercials too. With the "Mainly because of the meat" song.

Despite the fact that the concept for this story is pretty embarrassing:
humans with dog noses,
Imitation 70s rock and roll still exists in the future,
and to be taken seriously it takes place in a dark post-nuclear holocaust world (like a million 70s and 80s movies),
there are moments of really good modern animation and even a character who has a unique design.





The poor Canadian animators were stuck with some bad decisions coming from the top but genuinely tried to do some real animation and and have some fun and show off along the way.


The most unique character design is this villain guy: MOK, obviously a caricature of Mick Jagger. I suppose they couldn't afford to get Mick Jagger to do the voice, so they used Lou Reed instead.

The design is so specific and complex that it would be pretty much impossible for anyone to animate it. It doesn't follow traditional animation construction; it's not made of easy-to-animate pears and spheres - unlike some of the other characters in the cartoon.
Just the lips themselves are hard to draw from any one angle, but Robin Budd completely controls it in full animation, and ignores all the stock mouth animation that had come down to us from Disney and invents his own.



I can't say for sure, but all the designs in the cartoon look compromised by the bad ideas coming from non-animators. For some reason, someone decided to animate human characters because human characters would be taken more "seriously" by the audience. Someone at the top wanted Nelvana to be noticed and respected by live action critics and players I guess. The whole thing has "Pleeeeease take me and my dog noses seriously" written all over it. So of course, no one did.BUT maybe during a committee meeting someone else said it would be easier to animate funny animals and so a bizarre compromise was struck.
The characters all had to be designed stiff and too tall (for seriousness) but then had dog noses pasted onto human faces, which just makes the characters even more unappealing than regular 70s Hanna Barbera human characters.

I'm just guessing, but I bet that Mok has been partially designed by committee. The dog nose especially looks weird on him, because he is so specifically Mick Jagger, the human, not Pluto the dog.

It also looks like The Nelvana signature (square eyes) has been grafted onto many of the characters.



The facial construction of this character is so complex that it's amazing that someone could have actually animated it without the typical problem of melting features that you see in so many modern Disney 2d movies.

Robin Budd was the lead animator on the character and he must be some kind of genius to have been able to pull off such a difficult animation problem. Even though I'm cringing all through the story about how evil can be cured by 70s rock and roll, I'm fascinated by the skill of execution of some of the animation.

This character didn't have a huge influence on Canadian animation later, just because the character is so hard to draw and animate. Only Robin could have done it (maybe he had some good people who followed him too)

The character did influence Disney animator Glen Keane who used some of the characteristics of Mok for his Ratigan character in The Great Mouse Detective.

Thanks to Jenny for letting me steal this off her blog.



Except for the square eyes and long legs, Mok wasn't and isn't typical of the Canadian style , but was a pretty interesting experiment and departure from what was thought of as "animation style" in 1980.

The more typical and recognizable Canadian style traits are all over the rest of the film though.


This is ultra Canadian style.
I'll describe the general traits to look for in these and other Canadian models in the next post. Maybe you can already see them.


Thanks to Brad Goodchild for keeping some Canadian history together for us!

Is this the same bear? Believe it or not, it isn't. It's 2 different characters. It's the Canadian bear that appears in countless Canadian model sheet packs on sundry ultra boring shows meant to punish Canadian children who are too unique or lively.
Where did the Canadian Bear come from? Let us trace its roots...

Well first of all, probably 90% of animated cartoons around the world can be traced back to Disney. Disney cartoons had more influence on the world than any other more creative cartoons from the same period and earlier. It's gotten to the point where most animators can not even imagine straying from what they think the Disney rules of design and motion are (after 7 generations of copying and forgetting what the reasons for the style were in the first place).

Even Anime is a direct descendent of Disney design style. But the funniest imitation of Disney's blandness is Canada's. It's like a caricature in reverse. Canada has taken the weakest aspects of Disney and emphasized them, while leaving out all the useful and appealing parts.

Disney invented a particular style of cuteness in the late 30s and early 40s. Its pinnacle is the 1942 film Bambi.

This style serves 2 purposes:
1) Functional for animation

The characters are made of simplified forms that rotate well in space. They are very solid and at the same time organic. Two seemingly contradictory concepts perfectly combined into one design style.

When animated by experts like Frank and Ollie, Milt and the rest of the great Disney animators, it makes for a beautiful and almost magic visual experience.

When people copy Disney, they miss this aspect of Disney's design. - that it has construction and flow.

This is not the only way to design solid flowing characters, but it's the one that worked for Disney, and Disney convinced the world that they were the only animators who had any reason to exist.
2) To make Moms go "oooooooooooH!"

Besides being well designed for movement, they are also emotionally designed to be ultra cute.
Almost every character is the exact same character design. It is a generic but perfectly balanced set of huge cute eyes perfectly mapped onto a perfectly solid egg shaped head. A huge head compared to body size with a huge cranium relative to muzzle size.


Baby proportions, and thus cuteness to Moms.

The only real variance in design from character to character is the length of the muzzle and what kind of ears it has.

It's the same face on different types of animals. They all have rounded triangular eyes, that are mirrored by a light shape around them. Big-ass pupils that take up about half the space of the eye itself.


Here is the Disney formula character design and construction at its apex. This is where Cal Arts eyes degenerated from. The textbook animation design is right here and obvious for all to copy. More modern copies of these characters do not quite get it.


Here it is again. Exact same design; different beast.

As the decades wore on, the characters got less and less construction, and less cuteness - even drawing the same characters.
They added angles to the same designs in the 1950s and the pupils started to shrink.


By the 60s, the heads got much smaller, the proportions got blander, eyes got smaller, they lost the framing rings around the eyes and the construction started to melt as the animators got older and shakier. The angular style was still there, but a much milder, less daring version of it.


This eventually led to the tiny head Bluth style as the cartoons got less and less cute. You still see the same Disney construction formula. They are still the same designs they used in the 1940s - just way toned down.



Father and farther away from the source; still copying, but copying the previous copy, instead of trying to understand the original.



same same same same same....





ENTER WINNIE...

In the 60s, Disney took Winnie The Pooh and animated it
They combined their own cute style and construction with E.H. Shepard's quaint and charming style.

This eventually did serious damage to Disney's style in the 80s. It ushered in blander small-eyed bears by the hundreds.

THEN CAME THE 80S


By the 1980s, the drawing skills were gone and so was the cute appeal. We had a super bland even more generic version of Disney with none of the good things about the studio left. Now you think this is ugly?

Here is the Canadian copy of the bland 80s Disney.

No construction, no line of action, no silhouette, no animation functionality and really tiny unappealing eyes - yet this was sold on its "cuteness". And there's nothing remotely cute about it, except that it sort of reminds you of Disney from long ago. We've been trained to think even crummy 7th generation imitations of what was actually cute once, is still cute now.

Here's the same design in another show, only even lousier.


My gosh, aren't these adorable?




A great irony is that the success of these fake Disney shows in turn influenced Disney to steal from us Canadians.When characters are this generic and faceless it's impossible to sue those who steal from you.

So now you know how we got from here:





To here:
Imitators think that by imitating the superficial aspects of a 10th generation of other imitations, they will somehow absorb instantly the quality and appeal of the original.



That means this:



equals this:



This is the basic Canadian entertainment thinking. Whatever America does (or did 60 years ago) we will copy the copy of the copy of the copy of the copy, until there is nothing left. - Instead of actually trying to entertain with skill, knowledge, varied individual influences and experiences from our own lives and personalities.

Here is the modern insincere animation look. Just as we've seen the Disney character design style copied and mangled for decades, now we have spent almost 2 more decades copying (without knowing why) the Nickelodeon/ Cartoon Network "style".

Who do they make this look for? Each other? Certainly not a regular audience of humans.
I don't even know what these are, but it's obvious where they came from.

Postscript: I don't want other Canadians to thinking I am bashing them. I'm proud to be Canadian and there are many unique and wonderful things in Canada.

I also realize (as most Canadians do) that we copy American culture. And don't do it very well. And do it too late.

I'll do another post about this in more detail, but I find it ironic that Canada wants so bad to distinguish itself as having its own culture, but in the process destroys any chance of letting it happen.

The government has crazy complicated bureaucratic rules that stifle creative competition, skill and originality in entertainment and art, while thinking it is encouraging it.

I can say from lots of direct experience in both countries that if say anyone with money in Canada actually wanted to seriously compete with American animation, we would kill all competition. Not in a year, but easily within 5. The talent is there. We could be known as the leaders in quality creative money making cartoons all over the world and force everyone else to imitate us. Instead the whole business is set up to stay way behind America's own backwards business model and to badly imitate its every mistake and awful trend.

More on this later...