From BlenderWiki
[edit] Introduction
[edit] What
Exaggeration means what the name suggests: going beyond expected limits. It can be applied to drawings (models, in 3D), sounds -- and story, exaggerating in the personalities, physical and mental abilities, situations or, more generally, the natural "laws" governing a cartoon's universe.
[edit] Why
In the Illusion of Life it's mentioned that Walt Disney asked animators to come up with exaggerated, wilder but still more realistic material, which confused them until it became clear that Disney wanted an exaggeration of real life, instead of something more surrealistic or simply impossible.
If a character drove off the road, the car wouldn't become a dragon or raise long limbs, catch itself with its new arms and come walking back to the track with its new legs and an annoyed expression. It would bump and turn over and fall down cliffs like a real car, but with much exaggeration added and violence removed. Thus it would bump more and harder, turn and turn, chase chickens, break houses -- and other crazy things the team came up with, hopefully involving a pie or two – but finally end safely back on the road or even destroyed, but with the occupants well except for some degree of dizziness.
Exaggeration is on the essence of humor, so it's just natural that it was used in comic cartoons. And soon they learned that it could work very well in animations, better than very realistic, watered down actions. In fact, the main reason for it to become a principle, was that some exaggeration made cartoons look more lively than action traced from live action footage.
People also have always liked to overstate features and achievements, good and bad happenings. So we might just end this saying that we like to exaggerate.
[edit] How
[edit] Classic Disney
The classic “Disney way” recommends that exaggeration be done like a caricature of reality. Their way to exaggerate is not extreme neither in looks nor in more violent action. Here it's worth noting that their main style of caricature is a particular, cutesy one, which is one of the most influential designs until today.
Finally, they recommend using good taste and common sense to guide choices.
[edit] Another vision
Tex Avery, an animator and director contemporary of Walt Disney and responsible for some other of the most famous cartoon characters, like Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, had a different opinion: "in a cartoon you can do anything".
One of the amusing ideas he used was to make "metajokes", with one of the characters suddenly stopping to act in the cartoon to talk directly to the audience.
Tex is only one example, many animators brought their own ideas about what was interesting or appealing in animations.
[edit] Later
After these principles were developed, there have been decades with considerably different styles of animation and we have many more examples today of alternative approaches to exaggeration.
Most japanese animation, for example, is very different from Disney's or more generally from original western animation. Among other things, anime uses symbolisms and styles directly imported from mangas.
In the last two decades many well appreciated american cartoons have shown exaggeration both in themes and in drawing style that don't have the immediate appeal of cute Disney characters, but we've seen that it works well in each of those contexts.
[edit] Physics
[edit] Story Development
Summer of documentation 2006 -- Willian 07:20, 5 July 2006 (CEST)
|
![[]](/skins/blender/open.png)
