What The Hell's Wrong With The Pancakes Cartoon: The Animation Itself

 

      I didn't mean to wait this long to get to this post. But what can I say, I was catching up with some old friends over the holidays. Anyway, I thought I'd go over the animation, or more simply put, the movement. And for the most part, it's all right. There's little to no jerkiness, and it's almost always smooth.

 

     One of the problems I have is that the movement is so unimaginative and uninspired. Every time a character moves, it moves in the most literal way possible. There's no variation in timing and spacing. In the sequence above, when Harold moves his arms they're evenly spaced, which is just plain boring. It's smooth for sure, but good animation needs more than mere smoothness.

 

      Some parts didn't even have good timing. In this sequence, Lucy goes from surprised to annoyed before Tommy's even done yelling. I should have held out Lucy's surprised face for a few more frames to make it more believable.

     My biggest problem is that none of the sequences really warrant being animated. Because the animation is so straight forward and uncreative, I could have just left it as a comic and been done with it in two weeks. Every idea in the cartoon works just as well, if not better, if it was just a single drawing with a word balloon above it. Especially the third scene. Near the end, you could tell, there was some effort to making the facial movements more noticeable, but the movement didn't add anything to the dialogue, let alone the visuals.

 

     In the sequence above, I tried to make it more visually stimulating, but I didn't have strong enough drawing skills to pull it off. So in every frame, the details and the form move haphazardly. It doesn't look like a solid figure in motion, it looks like a mess.

     Something I want to do in my next cartoon (and every cartoon I do from now on), is to make sure there's a reason to do movement in a story. If it's mostly standing and talking, I should consider just doing a comic. Animation can do a lot of interesting things if you take advantage of it, but you don't see as much of that anymore in mainstream cartoons. The Pancakes Cartoon certainly didn't. The first scene was the only part that actually took advantage of the medium, since the reason for it's existence was almost strictly the movement. The second scene didn't hardly need movement, the third scene didn't need it AT ALL, and the fourth scene didn't need it too much.

     The cartoons I like the best are the ones that entertain me though the movement, like Looney Tunes and Tex Avery Cartoons. I like some of the more modern cartoons, but shows like Family Guy or The Simpsons only use movement as an afterthought. You can do so much with variations of movement, and I want to explore it more from now on. But that's all for this post. Next time I'm gonna wrap this whole critique up with my final thoughts. 

1/5/15 EDIT: I forgot to mention this when I originally posted this, but I need to bring up one last thing on the animation.

     One thing I think I relied a little too much on was sliding the drawings across the page. This is easier than animating the character since you only need one drawing. And, more importantly, it can be entertaining if you use it right. Well, I didn't. It would have been ok once or twice, but I simple used it too much. I got the idea from early Cartoon Network shows like Dexter's Lab and the Power Puff Girls. In those cartoons, sliding characters worked because everything was flat and stylized and they had good sound effects to go with it. And they didn't abuse it. 

 

    The only time the sliding worked was when Tommy's eyes came around the door, which is also the only scene that takes advantage of movement. A joke like that wouldn't work in a comic. This joke is probably my favorite part of the cartoon simply because it does something that can't be done in a comic, and it catches people off guard.