Kali dragged me to this movie on the weekend and I'm glad she did.

This is an actual "no-filler" movie. It's funny from beginning to end! I didn't spot a single executive theory in it.

The writing is funny (both plot and dialogue), the acting is funny and the direction is funny. Even the music is funny. And it's really clever. It's absolutely full of inventive custom touches in the actions, editing, actors' expressions and gestures. I couldn't believe it.

Seriously, whoever wrote the dialogue is a genius. This is real writing with skill, observation and a point of view.

The lead actor, Michael Jai White is perfect. He plays it straight but in a very funny way and has lots of other talents besides acting - which the producers are smart enough to show off to us.

It's eerie. I got all nostalgic for the 70s - which I hated living through. This felt even more like the 70s than the actual 70s and made fun of all the right stuff.

It also bravely brought back ethnic humor - which has been banned by white liberals for decades. It gets away with stuff no one else could today, making fun of white people, blacks and Asians all - oh and it's sexist too. In short, it's honest and made for real life humans - not focus groups and pseudo-psychologists.

Violence, some grossness but not for the sake of making you sick. It even makes fun or orphans which I didn't think anyone could do. The most amazing thing is that it breaks open a pile of modern taboos, and does it in a completely upbeat happy way.

I'm so used to modern entertainment going straight for the ugliest feelings possible, but I have to say this really lifted my spirits. I hope it makes a pot of money and wakes up Hollywood. I wish cartoons were allowed to be this inventive and whimsical. I'm super jealous.
But it does have some funny animation by my friends at 6 Point Harness.

Not for kids, unfortunately. Go see it and tell me what you think. Support non-filler entertainment! We're gonna go see it again and bring all our curmudgeonly pals.

HERE'S 5 BUCKS WORTH OF PRODUCTION VALUE.


POOKIE WANTS TO KNOW IF YOU HAVE A HEART


Now watch super expensive puppet "acting" - at the end of the clip below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxbruOoXfOA

Even with hundreds of millions of production dollars at our disposal, we still have trouble making animated characters act convincingly.It looks like the animators and renderers are so busy trying to make the stuff look expensive that they have no time left to think about making it entertaining. It's shiny filler. (By the way, you should see Eddie act out this style of "animation-acting". Now that IS entertainment!)



So why not be funny instead? It's easier, more natural to what we do and a lot more fun.(And doesn't cost as much!)








BTW, I know a lot of those animators and have worked with them. They have huge talent, but I think this kind of stuff is not taking advantage of their capabilities and it's a doggone shame.

How the heck would you plan a story like this?



In this outline you can see the whole structure of the story. The way the outline is formatted is designed to help you easily follow the story and the main events in the structure.

Not only the structure of the overall story, but the sub structures within.

The setup has a structure

the body has a structure

The climax has a structure

and the end has a structure

Each of those major sequences has its own hierarchy of scenes happening that define the larger purpose of the sequence.

Each scene that describes the sequence in turn has gags and events that define the purpose of the scene.


The headings that are numbered with a number and dot "- 1." are the main sequences.

Each main sequence has a number and a title heading that describes quickly what the scene is about.

eg. 3. Stimpy Works Hard

You can read all the numbered headings without the text underneath and follow the structure of the story.

Having headings for everything is really handy. It lets you see at a glance where every main point in your story is headed and how it fits into the larger picture.

A script doesn't do that. You can't see the structure of a script at a glance (if it even has one!) It is unwieldy and hard to follow and can easily meander off course by getting lost in random details.

Scripts are a chore to read and really hard to work from.

Some of the sequence headings in an outline have more than one scene each helping define and adding details to the sequence. Each scene has its own heading.

Seq. 6. REN DOES NICE THINGS
1) Irons BVDs
2) Cleans Litterbox
3) Cleans Stimpy

All 3 of those scenes help describe the idea of Ren doing nice things.

Under each scene heading is a simple description of what happens in the scene.
After Stimpy's Invention I discovered that it's easier to read an outline in list form rather than in paragraphs.

One point at a time.

In this cartoon, I raced through the end, rather than to have a slow wind-down like most filmed stories do. I figured that I wanted to pack as much pure entertainment into the cartoon and not waste time with formula structure that usually includes formula filler. Why do movies and TV have filler? Because everyone in Hollywood is so used to seeing it in other movies and TV shows that they automatically assume it is needed. They even write books about it.

We absorb bad Hollywood habits into our system, unless we constantly question every rule to see if it has any real basis in pleasure.

Over time, without radical sceptics to shake things up and ask why there are formula ways of thinking, the bad habits build up and get larger and more prevalent until they become the sole elements of a story. Filler movies.

I figured Stimpy's Invention was over after the song; there was a big climax with Ren exploding so let's just STOP and leave everyone with their mouths hangin' open. I didn't want the audience to settle down to calmness. I wanted them to crave more.

I eliminated the filler. Jackie Gleason did that too in the Honeymooners. He tagged his pathos onto the end of his shows but got it over with quick. He just put it there so the women in the audience wouldn't hate Ralph for being such a bully. Happy endings should be fast.




Here's another version of the outline. We always have to do a million nitpicky changes in every TV or movie story to make the execs feel like they have a reason to exist.

Actually, the one exec that was really great was Vanessa Coffey. The rest of her team wanted to kill this cartoon, but I begged her to trust me and she did. The rest of the band of no-goods were so mad! Until the cartoon aired and was a hit. Then they all took credit for it and asked me to make more just like it and to stop coming up with new ideas.







Note that every story detail and gag of the cartoon isn't in the outline. That's left to the director and the storyboard artist.


http://www.animationarchive.org/2006/03/media-john-ks-storyboard-for-stimpys.html


The storyboard artist will use this idea of hierarchical gag structure as well. All his details, and dialogue must help define the scenes, characters and sequences in the structure of the story.

He can't just veer off on tangents that have nothing to do with the structure.

In my cartoons, every detail helps define some larger point which in turn defines an even larger one.

It's like a studio system.

Leon Schlesinger is the boss.

He has 3 teams that work under him.

Each team has a boss or director.

Each director has 6 animators who answer to the director.

Each animator has an assistant.

The assisted animation has to be inked and painted.

This is a hierarchy.
The painter follows the assistant animation that follows the animator who answers to the director who answers to Leon who answers to the audience.

The people underneath have to follow what the person next up on the ladder commands. Everyone can't just go off and be creative on their own and draw whatever they want. That would be anarchy.

Stories are like that too.

Every detail answers to a larger point or gag which describes the point of a scene which describes the sequence which fits in an order in the overall story.

Hierarchy is better than anarchy.

Everything wraps around something larger.

The word "composition" applies to both art and story....and to music. It's the control of the rest of the creative elements.


All this should apply to shorts, half hour shows and feature films. There is no need for filler if you are an artist with lots of interesting and fun ideas and understand what makes characters fun to watch.

Now when you go to an animated feature, there are a hundred characters, none of which have a shred of real personality who act and move like every other animated feature character. This crowd of fake characters travels in a pack from place to place and learns to share and cooperate. There's a fake death scene to milk the pathos, heterosexual love interest between blank characters with no personality, a contrived complication that keeps the lovers in an obvious misunderstanding, non-melodic songs about hetero love by gay bands,... and on and on into endless formula and filler while you writhe in your seat waiting for something fresh and interesting to happen.


This wasn't in the Stimpy's Invention outline, we made it up later:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2573824466354193807&q=%22stimpy%27s&hl=en

You know, all these great Honeymooners scenes I've been posting are all from the same episode. They didn't believe in much filler on this show. Every scene is entertaining. And they did this every week!

"Pardon My Glove" (1956)