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Drawing LOONEY TUNES Characters Is Harder Than You’d Think

Drawing LOONEY TUNES Characters Is Harder Than You’d Think

By Movieguide® Contributor

With several LOONEY TUNES shorts under his belt, Peter Browngardt decided to bring them to life full length in THE DAY THE EARTH BLEW UP: A LOONEY TUNES MOVIE.

“Although he has experience with the characters at this point, Browngardt still says the animation style is one of the trickiest to get right, and even harder to teach to new animators,” Deadline reported Dec. 13.

Browngardt says “great character animation” defines the LOONEY TUNES style.

“It doesn’t have to always be the slickest animation where it’s beautiful, Disney-fluid animation. We have a lot of that in there, but it has to just pour with personality, character, acting and funny drawings…tons of funny drawings. There’s always a funny result drawing when something bad happens to the character or something silly happens.”

“Finding artists that still have the right skillset and the right studios to work with to produce that is very challenging. Those crews of directors, artists and animators that made the original shorts had four decades to master it and refine it to a peak,” he explained.

“For us, it’s finding the talent, people that can actually draw the characters, because they’re not easy characters to draw. They aren’t the modern style of animation anymore, and the current artistic workforce that’s out there, everyone has been raised on those classic principles of cartooning and draftsmanship and comedy…so it was a lot of self-educating for myself and our own crew, but also anyone getting involved and even educating the studio.”

Artists in the ’40s and ’50s had none of the modern influences we have today, like Pixar movies or CG effects.

“They looked at film, they looked at vaudeville, they looked at entertainers, but most of all, they all had more traditional fine arts training. At that time, there was no photo illustration, so illustrator work was huge for people and you had insane draftsmen and artists. It almost felt like, ‘I want to be a fine artist or I want to have my own illustration career, but I’ll take a job in animation.’”

“You were getting these people that were just incredible artists in their own right, and they were just working in animation to get a paycheck, and some of them ended up loving it and turning it into their whole life,” the director said.

READ MORE: NEW LOONEY TUNES MOVIE WILL MAKE ITS WAY TO THEATERS

But Browngardt doesn’t recommend looking at art to get inspiration.

“I always tell people who are trying to get into this stuff to draw from the world around you, and the life you live and nature and people, and don’t look at other animation. It’s important to learn how to do this stuff, learn traditional art training, life drawing, all that stuff,” he said.

“But also, how do you see the world? How can you caricature the world? How can you tell a story through your own lens of the world? This is a special animal for the LOONEY TUNES,” he continued, “in that you have to look at the old stuff and it’s important to study all that animation, but you need to be broader in your own sense of the world.”

The movie shows Daffy Duck and Porky Pig as aliens invade Earth. It’s got lots of comedy, but also character growth — which isn’t something audiences are used to seeing in LOONEY TUNES.

“I think there’s a lot of ways to experiment in short form, more than you could in the long form, but yeah, you had to have more for an audience to hang on to or to attach themselves to and want to see what happens,” Browngardt told Deadline. “But it’s scary too.”

“The classic Hollywood-storytelling thing is that a character changes and it’s a new person and now they’re happy and they’ve worked all their problems out, and they’ve overcome the sort of ‘hero’s journey’ …but that’s not how LOONEY TUNES works. They’re kind of like these whirlwinds of characters that affect other people in a lot of ways. So that’s one angle, but then since we were doing Porky and Daffy as a duo, basically like brothers that live together, you have to play that sort of relationship.” He felt that audiences would easily be able to relate to that kind of dynamic.

The movie comes out next February, on the 28. The teaser trailer just came out Thursday, available below:

“Browngardt directed the film for Warner Bros. Animation and wrote the script with Darrick Bachman, Kevin Costello, Andrew Dickman, David Gemmill, Alex Kirwan, Ryan Kramer, Jason Reicher, Michael Ruocco, Johnny Ryan and Eddie Trigueros,” Vital Thrills reported.

READ MORE: HERE’S HOW BUGS BUNNY IS CELEBRATING HIS 84TH BIRTHDAY

 


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