With week 4 I came in with a clear plan of what I intended to do. Improve that walk animation.

As I had mentioned before, I became intrigued with the 1940’s rubber hose style animation seen in early Disney and Max Fleischer cartoon’s after adding the squash and stretch to my walk cycle.
I wanted to steer into this style and embrace it. I started looking at classic animations like Disney’s Steamboat Willie (1928) and Max Fleischer’s Bimbo’s Initiation (1931).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48Ka0xvim3c&ab_channel=GoonCartoons

In these earlier animations the characters are fluid and seemingly without much bone structure (hence the rubber hose name). As animation was still a fledging art form everything is drawn in it’s most basic shapes, heads and bodies are sphere’s and the limbs are simply cylinders. This won’t be too hard to replicate and actually works for my benfit since I’m still learning the basics and don’t want to create a character too complex.

Bimbo’s Initiation offers a great look at an example of a walk cycle but it doesn’t encomporate the arms and feels very bespoke to the charcter of Bimbo and has a more nonchalant feel than I’m looking for in my own animation.

I decided to look at more modern references. Studio MDHR’s 2017 video game ‘Cuphead’ is heavily influenced by 1940’s animation, so much so that it even features traditional hand drawn animation for all the animation in the game. I was able to track down references from Jake Clark and Tina Nawrocki, animators who worked on Cuphead. Below is an example of Clark’s work.

And Nawrocki’s work can be seen below.

There’s a partciluar bounciness and ‘gloopiness’ to the animation in Cuphead that I really like. Plus I just love those odd timey cartoon gloves. Once I had enough reference I started editing my walk cycle, begining with the hands. I took the stiff bent arm and redrew it in the rubber hose style and matched it up better with the squash on the body. I was happy with the original timing on 3’s so I kept it in the newer version.

I didn’t really like how this turned out. I felt it looked too stiff and contained. The elbow jinters weirdly at the top of the back swing and the arm swing looks more like a single drawing that’s simply being rotated at the shoulder and tweened. I realised I needed more of an arc and exaggeration in the swing, the arm needs to extend and swing back further. In William’s Animator’s Survival Kit he stresses the importance of arcs in helping to make an animation appear more alive. So I went back to the arm and loosened the elbow.

It looks a lot more lively now. Exaggerating the back swing has made the return look a lot more snappy but I feel that suits the style.

The left arm was easy as I just had to redraw the arm in the new style. I however encountered the same issue I had before with the bent elbow looking too stiff so I extended the left elbow on the back swing too but found now the arm just looked out of place and no matter how much I played around with it I just couldn’t get it to ‘feel’ right. I decided to shelve the left arm for now and move onto adding additional seconday animations by adding a top hat.

With the hat I used the squash and stretch on the body as my guide for timing and then offset the hat by a few frames so it didn’t distract from the head and body.
I had also finally managed to work out the kink with the left arm and was able to extend it behind him to create and nicer arc and loosen up some more of the stiffness.
Thirdly I added another secondary animation addition in the form of a smoking pipe. I wasn’t sure how to exactly animate the smoke. I was aware that along with fire, smoke is one of the hardest things to animate in 2D animation. Lucky I knew I could steer into my 1940’s influence and create a cartoony smoke puff that wasn’t as confined by real world physics. Steamboat Willie offered me the clearest reference for smoke puffs.

The final smoke cloud looked horrendous. The timing wasn’t quite right and it looked like something cooked up by the clip art team at Microsoft. It looked horrible and moved horrible. I decided to scrap it since smoke was more SFX based than my walk animtion needed to be, and I already had enough secondary animation going on. The pipe animation itself however was a success with a nice bounciness to it.

In conclusion: I liked this animation when I first finished it but now looking back I think it’s a little bit of a mess. There’s a bit too much going on I feel. The squash and stretch is probably too much, especially in the head, which detracts from the hat. Having a steadier head would have made the hat all the more bouncy and alive. I decided to leave the legs as they were in the original, after talking to Sarah she felt they suited the style and that changing them could lead to massive timing issues with the rest of the body. In hindisght I probably should started fixing the walk with the legs first. There’s a slight clip near the bottom of the arm swing where I didn’t erase enough of the leg’s lines behind the hand but I’m not too worried about it since the animation is only meant to be rough anyway.

As I became less stressed with my full time work I was able to sit down and actually go through the Animator’s Survival Guide properly. In it William’s mentions a trick of breaking the elbow on the swing so it looks more natural and fluid.

 

 

I think in future endevours I’ll try this trick to hopefully breathe some more life into my work.

In the end some parts of the walk cycle are too exggrated like the squash and stretch in the head and body while other parts, like the arms need more. I’m willing to write this animation off as done since I’ve learned the fundamentals of what I need but if I had time in the future it would be nice to go back and just polish it off a little more.