When I was a wee lad, I thought making cartoons meant someone had to draw every single position a character or object stood in: take one drawing, trace over it and move the lines ever so slightly that they're still touching the previous outlines, then continue doing so until you've made a whole cartoon. I didn't know you didn't know positions are always skipped; I thought that if that ever happened, the audience would notice. I had way too much faith in the human eye. I didn't even realize that my favorite TV cartoons were animated at half the speed of my favorite theatrical cartoons-- sometimes less. And I just took it on good faith that, every time a cartoonist drew a character, that character's proportions were exactly the same, no matter what angle the character was seen from.

I don't remember when I learned I was wrong about these things, but I remember the circumstances. I remember asking my mother at one point how cartoonists managed to draw characters exactly the same over and over when I couldn't draw two identical tyrannosauruses even once. The first part of her answer probably had something to do with practicing a lot, but she also said that you don't need to draw them exactly the same; just similar enough that the differences aren't too obvious.

I remember my mother going to see The King and I (the animated WB movie) in a theater with one of my sisters, but she walked out of the film out of dislike for it. One of the reasons she gave for disliking it (the third or fourth reason she gave) was that it had bad animation; she used the phrase "Saturday morning cartoon quality animation". "Saturday morning cartoons have bad animation?", I asked. My memory is fuzzy there, but I was told at that point that television animation is not drawn as lavishly as theatrical animation because of the smaller budgets, which I'd never noticed before.

As for learning that you don't have to draw every tween position, I don't remember when it happened. I remember determining from Pokémon at age nine that Japanese animation is jerkier than American animation, but I had seen Sailor Moon some years before that because it aired on the same channel as The Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog (my favorite show at age four/five along with Animaniacs) and around the same time. I do remember trying to make a flipbook-style animation of a velociraptor coming from off the page and leaping at the viewer and not drawing every tween frame of that. I was age... ten, I think? Give or take two years maximum. Come to think of it, it's a shame I don't still have that raptorleap. It probably counts as the first animation I ever made... or started to make. I never finished because I got tired of drawing the same raptor over and over.

Oh, my. All that was supposed to be a preface, but it ended up being so long it probably counts as the face. As a postface, let me tell you what was supposed to be the face.

I'm animating the first episode of Enthalpy (and probably everything from now on) at industry standard 24 frames per second. Don't give me that "29.97" crap; cartoons are filmed at 24 frames per second and then telecined to 29.97 by adding an extra frame after every fourth frame. Giving me that "23.976" crap is perfectly acceptable, but I'm animating at 24 so there.

Erm... so... right. I started going at it animating on ones (that's one drawing per frame, or 24 drawings per second, for those of you who make me ashamed to know you), but while watching this wonderful Animaniacs clip, I thought: "You know, this looks just fine on twos. It still looks very fluid and lavish; doubling the frame rate is probably a waste. The viewer settles into the 12 FPS animation and doesn't even usually notice that it's slower, and if he does then he doesn't think about it if the content is engaging." So I determined that I'd save a lot of time by animating Enthalpy primarily on twos (that's when one drawing is held on screen for two consecutive frames, effectively creating animation at 12 frames per second instead of 24, for those of you who are hobos who know nothing about animation and are listening to my story read aloud to you by Microsoft Sam in hopes that he will give you booze money for your time when he's finished, which he won't) and it would still probably look as good. As it turns out, only the absolute super-duper highest budget animations are done entirely on ones. I determined from going through Looney Tunes DVD rips frame-by-frame (downloaded, yes, but I only download the public domain cartoons, of which there are plethloads) that the old Warner animations constantly switch between ones and twos and I often can't even tell the difference unless I'm going through frame-by-frame or looking reeeeally hard. So it's settled: animating on ones is just wasteful.

But then I took a walk cycle I was animating at 24 FPS, slowed it down to 12 FPS and... uh-oh. It's visibly slow and jerky, especially compared to the 24 FPS version. Yes, it's missing some body parts as well, but that's just because it's unfinished. Could I have done it wrong? Is Flash lagging ever so slightly so that what I'm seeing is less than 12 FPS? To test this, I imported a 12 FPS Warner cartoon segment into Flash and it looked just fine. Could it be because the ducktators are drawn with more detail and moving more dynamically? I imported a much less lavish Family Guy walk cycle into Flash and it still looked fine, but my walk cycle at the same FPS rate still looked annoyingly jerky. Why? WHY?

I'm still not sure, but I think I'm close to finding out. As an experiment, I animated this short loop. It's 12 FPS, it's the same character, but I just drew quickly without worrying about staying on model or whether the individual drawings are any good... and it looks way better than the on model, smoother, sleeker walk cycle.

So from what it looks like, drawing off model at 12 FPS looks better than drawing perfectly on model at a faster speed. I probably shouldn't worry about staying on model at all, and I wouldn't if not that Enthalpy episodes are nonsequential and some take place during others, so an episode I animate a few years from now needs to look about the same as an episode I'm animating now, and if the drawings look sloppy in the early episodes and I keep improving then that won't work out so well. If I'm going to be drawing off model all the time and not just during cartoon takes and squash-'n-stretch, it's something that I need to commit to from the beginning and stay with it. And boy, do I hate making commitments.

I'm perfectly fine with going off model for the sake of expressiveness. In fact, staying rigidly on model like many modern cartoons do is not only bland, but unrealistic. If you don't believe me, this woman became this woman in a period of a few seconds. She certainly looks like she's going off model to me-- at least by FOX standards.

My problem is with having a character stand there with his head the same height as his torso, then showing him from another camera angle and his head is no longer the same height as his torso. Or having his arms at rest reach down to his waist in one shot and have them reach lower in another. Stuff like that that my kindergarten self never noticed once in The Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog but that now always pops out at me. I don't think I should worry about it, since I consider the drawings you see of the world of Enthalpy to be a semi-abstract representation of what happens in that world, yet whenever I draw a character from another position I feel like I have to adjust the drawing using the model for reference until the proportions are as exactly the same as I can get them. And now I've confirmed beyond any doubt that drawing off model looks much better than drawing perfectly on model. My OCD's in over its head.

OHHH, now I remember! I remember when I realized for the first time that you don't need to draw every tween position! I was in a Disney store at a mall, and it had little flipbooks. I looked at one of them, which was of Tarzan sliding down a tree trunk, and I realized from looking at two consecutive pages that Tarzan's position jumps further per frame than I'd thought. That was 1999, I guess, so I was nine years old.

As for the walk cycle, I ended up translating the character to the right on ones while having his body animate on twos. It looks better, but it's still obvious that the animation is on twos, which it usually isn't when that technique is used on TV. Maybe I should just redo the whole walk cycle in a more organic, less on-model fashion. Time to scrutinize me some more Warner Bros.

Annnd I may as well post this here, since I never uploaded it to Newgrounds since it didn't turn out like I wanted it to and I wouldn't expect it to be received as well on NG as the first TRANSMOGRIFIERS Flash:

.
/* */