They tend to ask me to teach something with animals when I go, and this time around I thought I’d have the students all do cats. I think I kind of overwhelmed people with anatomical information, which is a particular geekery of mine! When I saw people trying to get in each individual muscle in their ruffs, I tried to do a streamlined version of how to think about the anatomy for animation purposes. It’s pretty rough and random but I figured I might as well put it up here in case anyone missed the handouts.

Click on the image to get to the large version, but these are formatted for printing so they’re really huge…

There’s a few more pages, click on the “continue reading” link. At some point I should clean these up and make them make more sense! I have notes on the legs as well, if people are interested I can put those up here (at least I could when my laptop gets fixed.. motherboard, ouch! ).

This is a very introductory, superficial look at the subject, and I’d say the MOST important study would be to draw from a skeleton if you can find one, that you can see from several angles to get your head around the structure. Beyond that there’s loads of great reference online for anatomy on cats, if you have a strong stomach and can disassociate the images from your own kitty– try Saddleback College’s dissection pictures, or Dr. James Strauss’ at Penn State.

On the last day of the course just for a change I talked a bit about animation as a stylized theater– before I studied animation I did a degree in Theater History. I was particularly interested in masked theaters, such as Noh or Commedia del’Arte, and as I got more into animation I started to see it as obviously part of this tradition– an animated face, after all, very much resembles a mobile mask:

It isn’t so easy to find good reference about this sort of thing and it helps to know your way around some theater history lingo so I promised the class I’d collect some stuff and put it up on this website. You could write several large books on this subject so this is going to be more like a Rough Guide to Abstract Theater with a lot of YouTube links:

This is a scene from “Weyreap’s Battle”, with the Monkey-king so well-known all over Asia meeting a mermaid. Khmer classical dance, rescued from extinction in Cambodia with extraordinary heroism by these great artists, is one of the best and most compete examples of masked theater.

All theater right up until about 70 or 80 years ago was masked in one way or another– either with actual masks, or heavily painted faces, and the kind of performance and movement the actors used was also highly exaggerated and stylized. The kind of acting we’re used to in television or the movies, that doesn’t LOOK like acting, is very new. This is the ‘Method’ school, and it bears the same relationship to the theatrical tradition as photography does to painting. This kind of realism in acting of course is something every animator needs to understand. For me however animation fits more naturally into the older stylized school– Bugs Bunny would look quite weird acting in an ‘invisible’ style like Marlon Brando; personally I think with stylized characters and stylized backgrounds the performance needs also to be stylized. The Golden Age guys all took their acting from Vaudeville, and Vaudeville took all it’s acting from Commedia del’Arte, which comes from Roman comedy, which comes from Greek comedy.

It’s hard to think of where to start on this subject, so here’s a broad outline of the universal characteristics of this kind of theater. When you see a very abstract performance such as Noh it may seem very alien, but actually if you look again you will see some things that are surprisingly familiar. I think, for example, that every single element in the following list appears in “The Lion King”:

Attributes of masked/stylized/abstract theater

Story:

Elements:

Performance characteristics for the actor/animator to be aware of:

Someday I’ll put up some posts going into some of these points a bit futher (or at least to clarify what the heck they mean!), but in the meantime, you can always browse around the playlist I’ve put together.

Names to Know (a very random list):

Jaques Lecoq, the very influential in the physical theater movement, wrote many books that are worth reading. “The Moving Body” is a good introduction

Eugenio Barba, those of you in the class will remember the videos with the ‘falling’ actors– this is Barba’s troupe. He’s written several excellent books on physical theater including the “Dictionary of Theater Anthropology”, easily the best book on physical theater for the animator. The Table of Contents will already tell you how much great stuff is in here! You guys in the Animation Workshop are very lucky to have several videos of his Odin Theater, which are very hard to get so be sure to have a look at them.

Lee Breuer, head of the Yale Theater Department, directs avant-guard shows involving dance and puppetry

Julie Taymore, from the same school, has done several high-profile projects including the stage version of “Lion King”.
Improbable theater, does fantastic shows in an expressive style with a strong Commedia del’Arte influence

Whew! I’ll put up a bit more as I have time.. I hope this is useful to you guys as a starting point, anyways!