Tuesday, October 05, 2010

Rod Scribner Sneaks Entertainment Value into a Koolaid Commercial

By the 1960s, most animation - even animation done by the classic animators - had gotten very conservative. Even squash and stretch eventually became "too cartoony".
Here's Rod Scribner going completely against the style of the times and I don't know how he got away with it.
I'm guessing that Tex Avery must have directed this and just let Rod have fun with it.
Rod sure wasn't inhibited by the 60s model sheets of the WB characters.
He not only makes his key drawings funny, but most of his breakdowns are too.
By making every drawing in his animation a unique creation, he ends up doing a lot more work than if he had just made a few on-model keys. That's a true animator. He can't help creating, rather than merely executing.
I can't believe this got by the ad agency. When I worked on commercials the ad execs would go though every frame of film to make sure that each drawing was uncreative, unfunny and "on-model".
The agency folks always hate anything that "looks weird". They must think that somehow the consumers will decide not to buy their products once they have freeze framed the commercials themselves and checked them against their model sheets.
This commercial would only make me drink even more Kool-Aid than if it was bland and boring.




I was laughing as I went through this scene a frame at a time, but the drawings kept getting funnier and funnier. These almost seem bland to me now - compared to what came next. There are so many crazy drawings in this one commercial that I'm going to have to spread them out over a few posts.