TEACH YOURSELF | Character Design

Can anything be appealing?

In animation, the answer is typically "yes." Character designers can make any design appear appealing based on the attitude and personality of the character. Even a villain needs some form of appeal, something that communicates who that character is -- else, the audience will be distracted by the design. 

If you'd like to study appeal, I'll share some advice and links to blogs online so that you can 'teach yourself' and use the knowledge available on the internet.

Defining "appeal"

As I hint above, appeal is not necessarily "beauty" – it’s a conscious design choice to make different forms and proportions stand out in a character, based on who that character is and what the designer wants the onlooker to feel. 

Appeal can take many different forms -- in Disney's Bambi, the designers chose to make the appeal apparent through contrasts; the head is big, compared to a small body. The legs are long, compared to the small body. The eyes are huge, compared to the rest of the head. These contrasts make the proportions 'appealing' to the eye because they give the eye various shapes to look at. 

The importance of negative space

In contrast, a design that has the same proportions might not be as interesting to look at or give the eye periods of "rests." The negative space (the places where not a lot of things are going on) in Bambi's design functions as a type of break for the eye. If you give the eye too much "sameness," the eye won't know where to look and you might automatically find the design 'unappealing' without consciously putting a finger on it.

Glen Keane put this concept very simply -- three shapes put right next to each other is not as 'appealing' as three shapes where two of them are closer to each other than they are to the third.

Coming back to Bambi, the designers also chose to make Bambi appealing through round shapes, which connote softness and typically 'cutifies' anything (whether or not it is appropriate to "cutify" in animation is a topic worthy of its own post).

As Bambi grows up, these proportions change. His head is smaller than his body and his legs appear shorter. However, his design is still made of varying, round shapes that make for an appealing design.

Advice on the web

Griz and Norm share a lot of tips about appealing design on their Instagram, Griz & Norm. Here is an example:

Mark Kennedy also has many posts devoted to appeal on his blog, The Temple of the Seven Golden Camels.

I hope you'll find helpful tips on these sites and that my explanation of appeal has made sense to you. Enjoy studying these concepts! 

You can read more of my Teach Yourself tips here

TEACH YOURSELF | Sincerity

How do you take a drawing from "good" to "amazing?"

Many mentors from all corners of the internet believe the answer lies in "attitude." According to them, putting personality into your gestures/sketches is the single most important thing you can do to make your drawings stand out and have people connect to them on an emotional level.

Disney's Nine Old Men referred to this concept as "sincerity" and described it as the act of transcribing on paper what makes a character unique -- and therefore believable.

So how can you go about practicing sincerity in drawing? The answer from online sources: observation.

In a few lecture videos below, Glen Keane explains how he likes to make mental notes about what is going on with the pose he is sketching. He will ask himself what it is about the subject he’s drawing that makes them unique and worth depicting. He will not only put a verb to the action of what is going on but also observe exactly how the character performs the verb. 

The drawing has to be saying something – it has to communicate a feeling or a unique characteristic of the subject. Capturing this attitude takes a gesture drawing to the next level.

Keane begins his lecture at 2:17.

All the things that you observe out in real life help you put truth into the characters you animate. Your observations help you make each character unique. Just think about it – when you sit down to animate, you start with nothing and have to create a believable performance out of that thin air. You’ll need to know a lot about human behavior to do that; you'll need to know where to draw inspiration from. 

So what are the little things that people do in real life? How do people differ? How would a shy person walk? A confident one? Through these observations, you'll have a reservoir of impressions to pull from when the time comes to animate or create a character design.

As Glen Keane says in the above video:

“If there’s anything that I want to communicate to you guys, it’s not principles of animation in terms of squash and stretch and overlap and anticipation. I mean, there are a lot of things that are really essential. But the most important thing that I want you to come away with is learning to see. Or I guess I should say, learning to observe.”

Here are a few extra quotes on the connection between sincerity and observation:

“My sketch books and the figure drawings are the source for everything I’ve ever animated. It’s all these observations. The little things that make a huge difference. You don’t see it unless you are drawing it, and you have to draw it. In order to draw it, you have to have observed it. You can see it, or you can really see it” – Glen Keane

“DUUUUDE, we live in permanent Christmas-land. There are all these presents, all these great faces, moments and stories just surrounding you, and you only have to open your eyes and look at them to have them. Incredible!” – Iain McCaig

Lastly, here is a link to a brief documentary about animation. About halfway through the film, Glen Keane and Joanna Quinn explain how they use their sketchbooks to make sincere observations that can later be used for their animation.

I hope these explanations prove helpful.

As always, thanks to the artists who have shared their advice online for us to teach ourselves.

You can read more of my Teach Yourself blog posts here

Story Analysis Of Nephtali And The Revenant

How would you represent nature in animation? Would it be a place where nature heals and helps the main characters process their inner turmoil? Or would it be an environment where nature takes no sides and serves as an indifferent backdrop?

Alejandro González Iñárritu’s, The Revenant, and Glen Keane’s short animated film, Nephtali, are two stories that provide polar opposite answers to these questions.

Using wilderness as a backdrop, both these movies portray a search for meaning and spiritual transcendence. Only The Revenant suggests that meaning cannot necessarily be found in nature.

In Nephtali, we see a ballerina who dances her way through an internal struggle in a forest. The animator of this piece, Glen Keane, was a 38-year veteran of the Walt Disney Studios before he left the studio in search of new opportunities. He describes in an interview how this longing for something new partly inspired the story in Nephtali. As he says, “As I left Disney, I didn’t know how I was going to express myself as an animator. I just knew that I needed something maybe deeper, something less commercial, more artistic, but I didn’t know how that would happen.”

He goes on to explain that Nephtali is like a visual poem in three movements that explores an idea of yearning for 'something more.' The story is built on Psalm 42, which begins with “As the deer pants for streams of water / so my soul pants for you, my God.” In the first part of the short-film, the ballerina is yearning for something, looking into the distance; Glen Keane describes it as a “spiritual calling.”

The second part of the short-film involves conflict. The ballerina is swept away by the wind and has to dance her way through this struggle.

The third and last part is about freedom. It is based on the blessing of Nephtali as it is described in the Bible: “Nephtali is a doe set free, that bears beautiful fawns.” Having searched through the forest, the ballerina thus finds what she is looking for.

Using nature as a backdrop for a spiritual search, Glen Keane communicates that we can find what we are looking for in nature and achieve a new level of consciousness. In essence, he shows us that God/spirituality is in nature.

The Revenant similarly portrays themes of yearning — yearning for meaning and transcendence. Throughout the film, the characters are always searching for something or someone; Elk Dog for his daughter; Hugh Glass for the revenge of his son; John Fitzgerald for wealth and security. Within all of these wishes lay prevalent religious/spiritual undertones, like we saw in Nephtali.

For one, the word “revenant” itself has supernatural associations – it implies returning from a long absence, even death; like a ghost.

In a similar religious/spiritual vein, Fitzgerald discusses the idea of God during a conversation with Bridger around 1.17. He promptly ends a story he is telling by stating that “it turns out, God is a squirrel.” By saying this, he highlights a sense of meaninglessness with life and what they are doing. He implies that God does not exist.

The characters all long for more than what they’ve got; they all communicate a sense of despair.

Unlike Nephtali, however, the characters in The Revenant do not find the meaning they are looking for. People are killed; Elk Dog’s daughter is raped; Glass gets his revenge – but is it ultimately fulfilling?

Like in Nephtali, the filmmakers have chosen to make nature the backdrop as the story unfolds.

Thus, both Nephtali and The Revenant express a desire for spiritual longing and have situated that search for meaning in nature. However, whereas Nephtali offers the hope that transcendence and meaning can indeed be found in nature, The Revenant, on the other hand, does not imbue nature with this power. In this movie, nature doesn’t offer the characters the consolidation they are looking for. Their suffering and interpersonal conflicts never cease to exist – not even as they search through the wilderness.