Bob Clampett used to do quick sketches for his animators when he handed out scenes to them. They didn't have all the detail in them, but described the extremities of the actions and expressions. This is partly what makes his cartoons look so different from everyone else's. You see those same animators working on other directors' cartoons and their drawings and animation are nothing like their Clampett animation.

Milt Gray asked him what to call these sketches-were they "layouts"? or anything typical? Bob didn't have a name for them, so Milt came up with "energy sketches" which I thought was perfect.

Correct me if I'm wrong Milt.

One of my crazy beliefs is that character merchandise should be as fun as cartoons themselves.
Kevin Kolde hired Spumco to design packages for paint projects in the mid 90s and we took what Palmer Paints were already selling with generic names and titles and rethought their products.

What was once "poster Paint" became "TV Cartoon Paint". If you were a kid, which would you rather have?

Not only do we try to make the packages look fun, we write jokes all over them too. My philosophy is to be nice to kids (and kid-like adults!). Richard Pursel and Elinor Blake and I wrote lotsa fun stuff on the packages and each one featured a message from a Hollywood cartoonist to the kids.
We made a whole bunch more paint sets. You probably don't want to see the rest though.

Spumco made toys too and so I worked with cool designers to do the packaging. The Jimmy Of The Future box was designed by the brilliant Dave Sheldon-who designed many of the retro fake-commercials in the original Ren and Stimpy cartoons.
I designed The George Liquor Talking Man box and worked with Craig Kelly who was our graphic designer.
Craig and I designed these cell painting kits, and we used to stay up all night long having laughing fits on the floor coming up with the gags that we put all over the boxes.
Craig and I almost died laughing at 4 in the morning as we tried to figure out how kids could wear a mask of a 3/4 angle of Cartoon legend Joe Barbera. Finally I said, let's clone his left ear and attach it on the right side of his head!" Then Craig said but then the eyes won't be in the middle..." He solved that quickly by adding the tab between Joe's face and his ear.

Joe loved this box when I presented it to him. He said "John, this is craaaaaazy!!" and grabbed me and dragged me into his office and showed me his shower room and his secret treasure- a poster signed to him by Michael Jackson that he kept hidden in the closet and would only show to open-minded soul mates like me.

We even wrote funny instruction booklets for the cel painting kits and they made Linda Jones really mad.

Here is the box for the Lost Episodes of Ren and Stimpy coming soon from Paramount. The famous innovator, Annmarie Ashkar designed it.
Go ahead and strain your eyes to see if you can read all the crap all over the box.

We also are working on the "Ultimate Set" which is more graphic in the design. Wanna see it?

OK, maybe I'll write more stories about these boxes later, but I have to go meet Eddie Fitzgerald for pizza and theories.
http://newwilorder.blogspot.com/
He's the guy who made the funniest short cartoon for TV in the last 10 years, I think. Starring the "Worm". TALES of WORM PARANOIA

This particular comic story was very hard to structure. I had this idea to tell 2 stories at once:

1) A mood piece about the wonders of getting a barber haircut for the first time. This was to be done visually, almost in pantomime-completely through the drawings and focusing on Jimmy's POV.

2) A social statement about the pre and post Beatles world. Many smart people who lived through the 60s noticed that the whole western world reversed its basic philosophy. We went from the lofty western ideals of progress, logic and common sense to a world bathed and blinded by eastern mysticism - which is why everything sucks so bad now.

This story is told allegorically and is represented by George's and Harvey's complaints about the modern generation and what makes a decent haircut.

I knew that the world was ruined by 1970 but wasn't exactly sure what caused it. 25 years later it was explained perfectly to me by Spumco's producer, Kevin Kolde. He said it so plainly and it all fell into place for me: "It's the Beatles fault. They ruined the world." And I knew in an instant that he was right. Even though I love the Beatles' music, I have to admit they sure as Hell ruined the world. You hear that, Dad? (He predicted it the day he first saw men with girl hair on Ed Sullivan in 1964.)

Here comes the setup for story 2 about how the world has changed. Setup 1 about Jimmy getting a haircut misleads the audience into thinking that it's the main story, but this next page prepares us to think about larger issues.

I'm a firm believer in clear storytelling and you need "structure" as a tool to guide the audience through the emotions and thoughts you want them to experience. All of my writers will tell you horror stories of me rewriting their material to make the ideas clearer and more to the point.

I don't believe in that crap they teach you in highschool that every story has a hidden significance and that the writers themselves don't know what it is.
To me, everything has a purpose.

You know who is a great stickler for story structure? Tex Avery. People think of him as being wild and out of control, but he is completely in control of his material.
He is actually very conservative in his approach.

In almost every cartoon, he spends the first 2 minutes blatantly setting the audience up for what the cartoon is about.
In Deputy Droopy for example, the first couple of minutes is almost pure exposition with the sherrif explaining to Droopy to guard the jailhouse and if any trouble happens, just "make a sound, any sound, and I'll come a runnin'!"
And then the rest of the cartoon is just about 2 outlaws causing trouble and Droopy making louder and louder noises to wake the sherrif.

Tex uses this same structure for almost every one of his cartoons.
His main objective once he's sure the audience knows what the cartoon is about, is to build the gags and make them bigger and crazier and faster.
Uncontrolled random craziness wouldn't be as funny if he wasn't so careful in setting up his premise in the first place.
This is also a formula well executed by Monty Python-think of the "I'd like to register a complaint." bit.

The other important point in story structure is to have the purpose build as the story develops.

In The Barber shop, since there are 2 stories happening simultaneously, this task was really daunting. Ask Richard Pursel (who co-wrote it) and Mike (who drew it)!!
The haircutting jokes had to get funnier and George's and Harvey's conclusions about how vile young people are today had to get angrier and more preposterous.
It was a monstrous logistical problem to have both these stories build at the same time without tripping over each other and I did it just to see if it was possible and whether my artists would live through it. They did, but flinch whenever they see me in the hallway now.

I produced a cartoon that really suffered from poor structure: Black Hole. The premise of the story was simple. Ren and Stimpy get sucked through a black hole into another dimension where the physical laws are different than ours. Thus, they begin to mutate into weirder and weirder forms. Or...they should have. Instead they morph randomly and not in a building progression. The funniest morphs are early on, and then later they are less weird, so I considered that cartoon quite a failure. I've made other crap too, but my goal is always to have good solid structure and momentum.

This comic, I think achieved it while making a funny and sad social statement but maybe you'll disagree-especially if you are manually holding up your pants right now and reading your horoscope.