Wednesday 27 February 2019

Walking and Running by Carlo

Yogi Bear and Boo Boo dip their knees, tilt from side to side and then straighten up in a six-drawing walk cycle in the 1958 cartoon Big Bad Bully.



The animator is (as you may have guessed) Carlo Vinci. It takes 96 frames (one drawing shot on two frames) for the bears to get from one end of the background drawing to the other and repeat the cycle. Unfortunately, when the cartoon was shot, there were lighting flares from the camera. That’s in evidence if you isolate the cycle.



Yogi and Boo Boo disguise themselves as a cow to fool a bull in a farmyard. The bull accidentally strips the bears of their costume. Here’s Carlo’s drawing when they realise what’s happened.



When Yogi makes a break for it, there’s a high-step, three drawing cycle. The three drawings are animated on two frames, then Carlo reuses the second drawing of Yogi with his feet in mid-air as the fourth drawing.



Carlo liked to use a two-drawing stomp cycle before characters zipped out of a scene. Here’s an example in frames three and four. Yogi then leads with his chest to run to the left.



These are just a few examples. Carlo has some other walk/run cycles in the cartoon, including a version of the jaunty butt-walk he animated in several first-season cartoons. The animation was limited, but Carlo Vinci made sure it didn’t look too repetitious (imagine the same cycle all through the cartoon) and kept things fun for the viewer.

4 comments:

  1. Isolated into still shots, the best of the early H-B stuff, in terms of poses and facial expressions look like they could have come out the final season of MGM CinemaScope releases. You could rarely say that by 1961-62.

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  2. Good looking first season cartoon! Love my 16mm print.

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  3. I like the early, unrefined Yogi look.

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    1. So did I, Errol. He had the best animators before he got his own show.
      Can anyone say Breezly and Sneezly were as interestingly animated than these early Yogi cycles by Carlo Vinci?

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