Animated cats!

Monty Python it ain't, but these crude animations of mine, my very first attempt, are perhaps inspired by the Edwardian cutouts of Terry Gilliam. A dear friend of mine gave me a book called A Catland Companion, years and years ago, and it sat on the shelf for ages. THEN came the power blackout on New Years Day that killed our internet connection for over a week (which, by the way, is the sole reason I haven't been posting).

So.

No TV.

No internet.

No nothing.

I started looking for something to do, and rediscovered Catland. Hmmmm.

Could I - maybe - make something out of this?

I've been using a gif program to make little slide shows to post here (maybe you've noticed) - and I noticed they kept using the word "animated". Animated!  Animation is what I've wanted to do all my life! But having absolutely no talent in visual art - drawing or painting or anything else - I was sort of stuck.

But not TOO stuck, because I rediscovered Catland and its oddball denizens. I discovered they could be moved around and photoshopped in all sorts of interesting ways. I could not put them through the gif program, of course, so I was going on faith that they would look like anything. But these cats just jump off the page, don't they? And I hardly had to do anything with this little row of dancers, just bounce them up and down and reverse the image. In fact, it's the best one I did, and I did practically nothing.

Is it the Gilliam effect, I wonder, that caused me to make these cats do such violence to each other? Cartoon violence, of course, with no bloodshed, just a few mashed heads. These guys kind of jump around a lot. I was experimenting here, and ended up with considerable jerkiness. Gilliam's stuff doesn't move smoothly at all (does it?), yet he makes it work. Damn.

These two adorable kittens started out so promising, but ended up looking so strange, as if they're weightless or something. To compensate for the floatiness, I made the animation go a bit too fast, so they jump around each other. I wanted a hopping effect - almost a leapfrogging, and got two highly caffeinated kittens. I think this was the first serious one I did. I learned from this that I cannot do the required 24 frames per second that Disney required when animating Snow White. The main technical problem with these is that when I was making the frames, I had no way at all of knowing whether the animation was working or would look right or convey motion without jarring jerkiness. 

I did try.

This is a Louis Wain cat, and it shows. I suppose he'd turn over in his grave if he knew about this, but if people can animate Hieronymus Bosch, then I can make a Wain cat leer like a fiend from hell. It's a short step. Actually, this is one of my favorites, along with the kick-line of kittens. I may play with this one some more and make more expressions, repetitions or whatever. It seems too short.

I held out the most hope for this one, and was partially successful. It took me the longest. The original drawing looked like this, and it was all I had to work with:

This is a nice example of anthro - anthropo - whatever, making the cat look human, but not TOO human. Those ain't ballerina legs and feet, folks - they're animal, but in a weirdly human position. So what can I do here? I had to detach arms and legs and twist them around and try to get them back on again. It was hard. It was also necessary to remove the shadows on the floor so I wouldn't have to keep reproducing them consistently. I just don't have the equipment to do that. But it sort of came out all right. I kept tweaking the frames, and I guess I could tweak them some more.

But I'm waiting for the next blackout.

"It moves!" Vintage automobile ads with animated bling

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Muybridge dancer

Cats (and more cats) in motion

I've done this sort of experimentation before, with the Muybridge images. But today I got a little more creative. I wanted to see if I could achieve fluid motion in just a few frames, as Muybridge was able to do. The idea is, your eye sees where things are going and just fills in the missing action.

So this was the first step. I found this drawing of a guy walking, then cut the image up into three frames and put it through my photo-to-gif program. Et voila - 

In two speeds! I will admit it's not the smoothest, but for three images it ain't bad. For some reason, Makeagif won't allow you to remove the watermark for photo-to-gif, which mars the thing pretty badly, especially with the white background. I am not sure why this is, as you always have the option of removing it on gifs, so long as you are signed in. But never mind, try not to look at it. The miracle is that it's WORKING today, at least so far!

Now this is my masterpiece, or at least so far. I took this, divided it into twelve images (there was a thirteenth image thrown in for "bad luck" that had to be removed, because it made the motion jerky), photoshopped them onto white squares, and did the photo-to-gif thing. First I want to post those images (because damn, I worked hard on them!)

Well, sort of. I may have left out a frame. But the result, except for the damned watermark, looked pretty good:

I especially like the action of the hind end, how it kind of flexes and stretches, and the tail which has a natural sort of flapping motion. The head isn't up to much, and is too big for the body and has a silly cartoonish expression - why, I do not know, because the rest of it is fairly realistic. Try covering the cat's head with your thumb, and the whole thing will look a whole lot better. Go on, now - try it.

I'm going to go lie down now.

Auto eroticism, part 2: the Popeye connection

As a kid, I am sure I saw this Popeye cartoon (called Service with a Guile, a title no kid would ever understand) repeatedly. I remember thinking the car in it looked a little strange. It wasn't contemporary, not for 1963 anyway. More like 1943. (Today, this is the kind of car I have a major Jones for.)

I don't know what the animators were thinking here. Even as a kid, this cartoon made me a little uneasy. Something decidedly tumescent was happening to this tire as it slowly overinflated while Olive kept - hmmm. Rubbing it and rubbing it. And - 

This is a wartime Popeye, and one of the ways you can tell is that they've glammed Olive up a little bit. She has nicer shoes, for one thing, with high heels, and a more shapely ass. She ain't no pinup girl, she won't give Betty Grable a run for her money, but hey, this is for the kiddies. And that turban! Hubba-hubba.

(Pre-War Olive. Compare and contrast.)

Not only is the car's scrotum about to explode, the fender now has an erection. Can't help it, that's just what I see. Popeye is in a state of panic through all this.

Now HERE is where it gets interesting.  There are these two gigantic red globular "things" that keep expanding and expanding, with this horn-like thing in the middle, and then there are more red bulges coming up behind them with sort of fleshlike creases in them, and then the whole thing stretches and stretches (with a sort of weirdly sensual, tonguelike effect not unlike the Rolling Stones emblem) until you can SEE through it - and there's even a sort of creaking noise for hard-core rubber fetishists - and - 

OMG. The explosion blows them all backwards through a wall, so that they land in different sets of clothing on a clothesline: Popeye is a baby, Bluto is wearing an enticing bustier, and Olive - what the hell does Olive have on, anyway? It sure isn't very sexy. At least she still has her fetish heels on. All these things, now that I look at it, are designed to be humiliating in one way or another. Long red underwear on a woman trying desperately to be a World War II pin-up girl. Bluto, the essence of manhood, in a corset and a bra. And Popeye. . . the Spinachmeister, reduced to helpless infancy.

I can see now why this cartoon disturbed me: it's plain weird, is what it is, and the more I look at that tire blowing up the more uncomfortable I get.

Is it plagiarism if you steal from yourself?

I could (and do) watch old cartoons all day long. Now that I have YouTube, I am in fact good for nothing else. But it's an interesting thing to look at the really old ones, like these two. They represent the first entries in a very long series by Warner Bros:  Merrie Melodies. (Perhaps you've heard of them.)

The first one, Lady Play Your Mandolin, features a drunk horse, and the second, You Don't Know What You're Doin' (which some YouTube wag called Justin Trudeau's theme song) a drunk dog who must have had a genetic mixup with the horse or something. Or else the animators just got lazy.

I mean! This is Cartoon One and Cartoon Two of the immortal, incomparable Merrie Melodies series, and they're repeating themselves in the second cartoon. The shot of the character screaming at the camera is pretty much identical, except the horse is white and the dog is black. Even the dragon-ish looking thing is pretty similar.

They say Disney stole from everyone - I wrote about that once, and I may steal from myself and re-run it because I don't remember much about it. But on the second cartoon? I think they should've quit while they were ahead.

Actually, it was this documentary I was thinking about. (I can't believe I found it again! I had no idea of the title or when it came out or anything, but if you keep Googling, anything is possible.) It was shown once on CBC, years and years ago, and never again - in French, with English subtitles. There's no English in this version at all, so I didn't get very far. But hey, if you're French. . . It's an eye-opening look at just how much Uncle Wally got away with.

Night sky in 14 takes

I must be a frustrated animator, for every once in a while I am taken over by the urge to make something move.

I found a set of old photos of San Francisco, and wondered what I could do with them. This one seemed to have the least potential because it was relatively plain, but I thought I'd give it a go.

I ended up tinkering with it all evening. It turned out to be a very good subject because most of it was background or foreground. The building, figures and car were the filling in the sandwich and remained consistent while everything else changed. Black and white always works best for these gif-related experiments because figures stand out in a strange kind of 3D.

These started out fairly conservatively, then I got bored and started experimenting more with the foreground. Some of the animations wrapped around nicely. Some didn't come out as I designed them, at all. This is a primitive program, it's a Blingee, for God's sake, so it isn't supposed to be very sophisticated.

As I went on, these became stranger, then gloomier and more dystopian, and, finally, apocalyptic. As I finished this set, it struck midnight and I heard the most heart-chilling sound outside the window. It was pitch-black out there and raining hard. I heard a weird, trilling, screaming sound like something out of a horror-movie, a dozen different cold-blooded voices in an unhuman choir that isn't tame and doesn't belong in a city. I recognized it as the pack of coyotes that lurk and slink around singly during the day, then congregate at night to send up an unearthly squealing moan. This is why people still insist on believing in ghosts and demons and the supernatural. Weirdness surrounds us; it's just on the other side of the curtain.