Mayerson On Sympathy

One of the most intelligent blogs I've found on the subject of animation is Mayerson On Animation by a multi-hyphenate from Tornto, Mark Mayerson. He consistently writes thoughtfully and intelligently on the subject of animation from the perspective of a writer, director, teacher and Masters candidate.

My favorite of his posts is the first one I discovered called The Importance of Sympathy. It's an interesting look at character, in particular the the conventional expectations of a lead character, both then and now.

Here's an excerpt:

The conventional thinking these days about film scripts is that you need a main character to actively struggle against obstacles to achieve a goal. Thinking of characters, I found it interesting that some of the most successful early animated features starred passive characters.

Snow White is almost an entirely passive character. She yearns for her prince, but does nothing to win him. She is a victim of the evil Queen and is rescued by the prince. The only positive action that Snow White takes in the film is to befriend animals and to serve as a housekeeper for the dwarfs.

The Importance of Sympathy

The Nevermending Story

Logic--the bane of a cartoon writer's existence sometimes. The argument, "it's a cartoon" too often fails to win the day when trying to justify actions in the script that defy logic--even if you're writing about a dead child's ghost who befriends a suburban everykid.

Oftentimes, when presenting scripts to studios, it feels like the goal isn't to entertain kids, it's to make sense. Are kids tuning into their favorite shows because, "Hey, this one makes sense!" "I love Skippy & Flippo because it's so LOGICAL!"

The link below will download an article by Andrew Nicholls, who's wrote the book I posted about last week, "Valuable Lessons."

Click Here for The Nevermending Story

Here's an excerpt:

Meanwhile, you are trying to think of a way to have a character who’s never been on a date or talked to a girl stun an auditorium full of kids with his dancing skills. Sorry; skillz. And the same people who want you to do that because it will be funny (actually, because it was in a movie they saw) urge you to keep it “truthful.”

Hard work and craft get us through 99 percent of our days, but every writer prays for an epiphany. Over the past year – my tenth writing animation, overlapping 30 years of live action – I’ve begun to have a heretical one. It’s that when we alter reality in order to entertain, Story cannot be fixed, not properly, anyway. It’s not only broken, it’s inherently broken. The best we can ever do is to find the least conspicuous fudge to glue it back together.

Tad Stones: directing on the page

Director Tad Stones, he of the animated Hellboy, and one hell of a nice boy himself, has a great and relevant post about directing on the page. He says the kinds of things I'm not only always trying to do myself in scripts, but always trying to get everyone who writes for me to do.

I've found that if you're writing a pilot, or other type of first draft that needs to be a "fun breezy read" then heavy directing on the page is going to send you into revisions. However, for most animation scripts, this here's the gospel. Folks aspiring to be seen as someone who knows how to write animation should check out the link below.

Click Here

--Evan Gore