Animation spotlight - Swing Shift Cinderella

Here is another section of the blog, devoted to showing my favourite animated shorts and all other things animated. I thought I'd start off my showing an animated short from what is probably my absolute favourite animator of all time: Tex Avery.

Before we get to the short, a little bit of info on good ol' Tex and the massive impact that he had on animation as a medium. Most followers of animation already know this as old hat, and it certainly isn't an indepth biography, but for those of you unfortunate to experience the wonders of Avery, I hope this serves to enlighten and enthrall you.

Back in the 30s, the premier animator was Walt Disney. With his powerhouse of a star Mickey Mouse, he dominated the cinema circuit with charming, fluid animation featuring cute and quirky characters, set to the tone of a fairy tale and with an emphasis on music to heighten the overall storyline. Other fledgling animation studios at the time saw a goldmine, and churned out thousands upon thousands of copycat animations, which sadly captured neither Disney's spirit nor heart, and resulted in the majority being rather bland and hollow. This included Warner Bros and their Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies shorts (the word Merrie Melodies almost like a counterpart to Disney's series of Silly Symphonies shorts).

Along came Tex Avery, who (in many ways literally) threw a batch of TNT into the mix. Suddenly, things got a little crazier. The cartoon characters become self-aware, realising that they were in a cartoon and often interacting with the audience, the title cards and anything else they could find. The animation got zippier, the laws of physics and gravity were constantly violated, and the once innocent fairytale world that animated characters inhabited started to resemble the Hollywood of the 30s and 40s, with aspects like nightclubs and modern technology referenced, as well as the characters themselves becoming edgier, with an acid wit to match any of the popular comedians and movie stars of the time. One such character was Bugs Bunny, who Avery certainly didn't create but gave him his familiar personality, coining the phrase "What's Up Doc?".

It was pure anarchy, matching the name of "Looney Tunes" to a tee, and it took off like a firework, shaping the language of that series, and many cartoons to come since then. After being booted off the Warner Bros animation team, he went to MGM, where he took this anarchic style even further, the characters becoming zanier and crazier, and the world becoming more seedy and decadent. One character that stood out was a lustful wolf, embodying the type of men that lurked around Hollywood at that time. He starred in a number of shorts, usually after a glamorous female, which almost satirized what Walt Disney was doing with classic fairytales. Under Avery's watch, Little Red Riding Hood and Cinderella became Red Hot Riding Hood and Swing Shift Cinderella, which spat in the face of the traditional tellings of the stories, and gave them a 1940's edge.

Although Red Hot Riding Hood was the most popular of the shorts, I thought I'd show the lesser known Swing Shift Cinderella instead. I hope you enjoy it.

Enough talk! Roll the cartoon!

Comic Artist Showcase - Chester Gould

So now that my blog is up and running, it's time to introduce one of many sections of this blog (yes, I'm so egotistical that my blog has sections - all high and mighty eh? :P): Comic Artist Showcase, where I post examples of some of my favourite comic artists, and explain the qualities and attributes that I like about them. To start it off, this post is dedicated to newspaper strip artist Chester Gould, aka the creator of Dick Tracy:

I recently bought a volume containing over 500 Dick Tracy strips, so I thought I'd focus a bit of time on the crisp, stylish art that characterises Gould.

Although Dick Tracy is one of the most beloved comic characters in the medium, there are many young un's out there who, sadly like Popeye, have no idea who the character is, seemingly lost in that void that many strip characters from the 20s and 30s are stuck in. Indeed the storytelling format that the comic uses, a daily strip where each part of the story is revealed with each strip is almost a dead art form in a world where attention spans can be measured in nanoseconds. If you have the patience, however, you'll be enthralled by the tales and escapades of super-intelligent master detective Dick Tracy, who together with his faithful sidekicks Junior and Pat fights crime, solves perplexing mysteries and does battle with a colorful rogues gallery of villains.

What I love about Gould's art is the emphasis on form over little details. All of his characters are well-defined, often using a thick and thin approach on his lines like on the pictures mentioned above and making proper use of black and white in his compositions. With a lot of other black and white comics it often feels as if there's an absence of color, whereas in Dick Tracy all the blacks and whites are carefully composed and organised, contrasting one another to create a striking image:

Although some comic fans today might belittle this sort of art for being "too cartoony", "not realistic enough" or "not enough detail", what needs to be kept in mind is that Gould was telling a whole story in parts day by day, and there were often chase and action sequences throughout each strip. Therefore, the story had to keep moving and keep the reader's attention, so this "quaint" style works better as far as storytelling goes, as having the reader stopping to admire all the "little details" would slow the story down. I've always believed that storytelling comes first in comics, animation and film, and clearly Chester Gould thought so too.

Another thing that I love is that each character in the comic has a unique appearance, almost representing the characters personality, (literally) warts and all:

It's very easy for any artist (even the good ones) to make their characters resemble each other (unintentionally) as if they're clones of one another, especially when it comes to background characters. Here, every character was interesting, unique and fascinating to look at, and clearly defined their characteristics for all to see.

Dick Tracy himself, for example is characterised by a strong build, and an infamous square chin that inspired a hundred heroes and superheroes after him, implying a strong, determined and confident man who would always win out and solve the crime at the end of the day:

This fantastically blocky chin was the inspiration for Bruce Wayne in Batman The Animated Series, which creator Bruce Timm himself admitted to:

But there is no finer example of this than Tracy's classic gallery of rogues. Instead of having your stock standard bunch of gangsters in pork pie hats and pinstripe suits, you had a colorful range of villains with with the most deformed, distorted and downright wacky facial features ever seen in a comic. As if they represented the deformities and horrors that lay within themselves:

Flattop - the Joker/Luthor/Moriarty to Dick Tracy's Batman/Superman/Holmes

The Brow

Pruneface (Duh!)

Hmmm, a rogues gallery that's physically deformed with colorful gimmicks, representing the psychopath inside. Where have I heard that before:

Anyway, this is getting a bit long, so I'll wind up by saying that Chester Gould's work on Dick Tracy has helped me considerably with my own comic strip, The Adventures of White Wolf, in telling one part of a story month by month, keeping the action and the narrative compelling enough for the reader to follow each month, as well as making sure that the art and characters are clear and defined to make sure that the story has the same qualities. As I stated before, the idea of a newspaper strip with serial-esque story-telling seems dead in the water. Fortunately, however, I've only reached the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Dick Tracy, and I look forward to his many more adventures in the fight against crime, and hopefully for my own creations too.

The Adventures of White Wolf - January Strip

The latest strip of The Adventures of White Wolf, the monthly comic series that I'm doing at the moment, has been posted today!

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the series, The Adventures of White Wolf is a monthly comic strip which is a throwback to the classic newspaper strips of the 20s and 30s, influenced by Chester Gould, Milton Caniff, Winsor McCay, among others, as well as the Golden and Silver Age of comics. It also serves as an allegory for mental illness, portraying it in a positive light. Influenced by Batman, Blue Beetle, Hourman, Doc Savage, Dick Tracy and Captain America, among many others, the comic series is a spin-off of my animated film "Beware of Black Dog!", which features the superhero known as White Wolf:

Stills from "Beware Of Black Dog!"

The series chronicles Max Height, mild-mannered science and psychology teacher, who suffers from lycanthropy, aka werewolfism. One night, Max accidently kills a young child in his werewolf form, and Max, overcome with remorse, decides to commit suicide with a mixture of chemicals that he concocted, also containing the element of silver. When he takes it however, he discovers that the silver element, mixed with the other chemicals gives him phenomenal strength and a howl that can break the sound barrier at the full moon, instead of becoming a werewolf. Seeing a chance to redeem himself and to use his affliction for good, he decides to become a dashing superhero, adopting a friendlier image of the wolf that is inside of him, known to civilians as WHITE WOLF!

The first strip debuted on the Australian illustration site and zine Forth Thread.

The series will be updated roughly around the first week of each month, and as a serial it reveals each part of the story with every month that goes by, so you will need to read the first few strips and the origin before reading the latest strip. These can be found at Webcomics Nation. You can see the latest strip here:

First post!

Greetings, fellow citizens!

This is Frank Candiloro speaking, you're friendly neighbourhood animator/cartoonist/editor living in Melbourne, Australia. I've been meaning to make a blog for a while, and given that 2010 is here, I thought, what better time to do it?

Here, you'll be seeing the animated and comic stuff that I do, and from time to time I'll also be posting some of my favourite animated clips and comic strips, in the same fashion as John K or Will Finn and all the other animators in the blogosphere like to do. For more info about me, you can check out my website at http://www.frankcandiloro.com

To start it off, I thought I'd show a few pics that I recently uploaded to my website, two of which I did for short stories by talented writer and good friend James Andre for his site Milkshadow Press:

Wish Last:

Kittens:

And also a random pic that I did, with the extremely generic title "Cyberpunk Soldier:

I don't have a huge amount of time slotted to making numerous posts, but hopefully as the year goes by I'll be able to keep you posted with everything that goes on!