Y’know, I’m not sure I’ve shown how crazy you can make an animation.
We’ve seen a lot of great art, realistic movements, creative worlds, but I don’t
think we’ve taken the rules and thrown them out the window.
You really can do whatever you want.
So on that note, here is A Prank Time by Jaime R. Link below.
Haha, did you want me to warn you it was weird?
Too bad!
If you want an example of how severely you can deform your characters, this is it.
Sure, a human peeking around a corner like this would move a certain way to get off screen,
but why be realistic?
Let’s just liquify the face.
It’s a cartoon.
It doesn’t have to move the way people expect.
Sometimes we get so caught up in making the characters have weight and be believable that
we forget that.
Anyway, there isn’t a term for the type of liquid body mechanics Jaime is known for.
It’s not smear frames, because a smear frame helps transition between one pose to the next,
like this door.
A Prank Time has some pushed expressions, which is the animation industry’s term for
highly exaggerated poses.
But this?
There isn’t a word for this.
It’s just creativity.
It is interesting that despite how insanely deformed the man’s anatomy becomes, it still
makes sense.
If I slow down the huge liquid rope body, you still see the feet, legs, this is a hand,
here comes the head and tongue, and the other hand at the end.
This is a human body following motion principles of a liquid.
Even this part - it’s still the pieces of a human head.
A human head wrapped around a ring.
What if we took the character and squeezed it through a tiny knot of itself?
Then you’d get this.
If you are wondering why this animation is so smooth, it is because there are no shortcuts.
On a low budget animation, animators draw around 12 images per second.
A Prank Time is always 24 images per second when something moves.
Couple that with a good grasp of the principles of motion, and the animation comes out super
smooth.
Besides the bizarre body transformations, the other thing I appreciate about Jaime’s
animations are these severely distorted perspectives.
This clip out of his Money Maker animation demonstrates what I mean.
The horizon is here, but instead of straight perspective lines like the real world, this
background is modeled more like this.
It’s like putting a fisheye lens on a camera.
In A Prank Time, you may have noticed a similar distortion on the staircase.
This is a straight staircase, but when it pans up from the side here, it’s curved.
Drawing the background this way creates the trippy illusion that we go from looking down
the stairs to looking up the stairs, even though it’s a flat piece of art.
Same thing here with the window rush.
The straight wall curves in to meet us, honing in to an almost V shape.
It makes you feel like you’re being fired out the window.
If the wall stayed flat, the animation wouldn’t have the same impact.
The moral of the story is you can really push animation to do lots of crazy things if you
want to.