I did a lot of work on my spider-squashing animation this morning. Don’t worry, that’ll be finished soon, but as usual I’m doing a lot of learning and revising along the way. One thing I’m doing to facilitate that is animating in vague scribbles, rather than spending too much time laboring over each drawing. That way I won’t hesitate to revise drawings or throw them away completely.

Once I have the motion exactly how I want it, I can start to worry about filling in the details.

Ren and Stimpy animator John Kricfalusi has lots of great advice for budding animators, and makes a great argument for using simple early-1940s characters as the basis for animation practice. By then, animators had nailed down the best practices for animating, but were still tentative about moving beyond typical pear-shaped characters. So they’re perfect vehicles for a beginning animator to conceptualize how cartoons move and carry their weight, without getting thrown off by any zany stylization that later evolved.

So, after trying to animate a girl with a ponytail, I think my next twick will be the mercifully bald Elmer Fudd.