Diversity and "Fairyations"

There was an interesting comment from Bill Drastal in regards to my last post. He says:

I worked for a web company designing characters and other images and while I can't say what I designed them for, we were defiantly pushed in a direction where all the main characters came out looking like the same, and when we had to design characters of different racial backgrounds the direction was to make them, quote "Normal looking"

Believe me, Bill, I can sympathize with what you say. Unfortunately we live in politically correct times, and there's far too much sensitivity to portraying people of various ethnic backgrounds (other than caucasian, of course) with any degree of caricature. Sure it's a Black character, but it mustn't look too Black. Inexplicably, there seems to be a mindset that says that only caucasians can be caricatured and that the features of other races must be played down or, ironically, made to look more like those of caucasians. Frankly, I don't get it. In fact, I would think that the tendency to make Blacks, Asians and Hispanics all look like blandly designed White people would be more offensive to them.

Back in the early 1970's we had Bill Cosby's "Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids". Though the entertainment merits of the show may be open to debate, the character design was rather commendable. It wasn't brilliant cartooning, but there was at least a very distinct, individual look to each character. Furthermore, this nice variety of shapes and sizes of the characters also helped to visually communicate something of each one's personality. This is something I can't stress enough in my class at Sheridan. Remember, you don't have a lot of time to explain your character to the audience. Ideally, the viewer should have some indication of what your characters are all about from a quick glance. Then you can use your acting and dialogue to further flesh them out as your story unfolds.

Alas, here we are in the politically correct new millennium and Bill Cosby has come back with another animated series, albeit aimed at the preschool set. Still, I really don't think that fact justifies dumbing the art design down to the level found in "Little Bill". As you can see, Little Bill and his whole family are a group of lookalike clones, completely lacking individuality of design as well as being devoid of real expression. I love Bill Cosby as a brilliant anecdotal comedian, but I really do question his taste in regards to the art stylings of "Little Bill".

Little Bill's friends don't fare much better either. They're still pretty much all the same basic design and rather robotic looking in their expressionless poses. I suppose I have to give some credit for varying the body types a bit, but overall they're pretty bland and similar in design. Is this something that today's little tykes really would enjoy? I'm just glad that I grew up on "The Flintstones" and old "Popeye" cartoons in my kindergarten days, before the days of highminded "childrens' programming" came into being.

Not all is bad today, however. Here's a character lineup from "The Proud Family" that shows character designs far more to my liking. I personally think this is one of the finest looking animated shows on TV currently. Yes, the stories are all little morality tales, of course, but it manages to be quite funny and entertaining too, not the least because of the beautifully designed characters. Just looking at this lineup of kids, you get a distinct impression of what each one is like - their personalities are obvious in a glance. Also, the visual designs work well as "silhouettes", that is, if you filled them in as solid black shapes they still would read clearly to the eye as distinct, appealing characters, all different shapes and sizes.

Here's Penny and her family, including her Dad, who's a real opportunistic type. I think he's a great character! Even the backgrounds on this show are pleasing to the eye and unified in design. I really give a lot of credit to all who have created the look of this show. Just compare these funny, colourful characters to their bland and boring counterparts on "Little Bill". I know what I'd be watching if I were still a 5 year old kid...

And now I'm going to look again at the new "Tinker Bell" movie from Disney. Like I said before, I would consider any one of these Fairy designs appealing enough on its own, as there is certainly a visual appeal to the head to body ratio, the flowing, organic shapes, and the colour schemes, as we've come to expect from Disney (though the impact is lessened by the CG animation, in my opinion, compared to the linear characters in classic Disney films.) But the fact that there are five of these tiny girls, all identical in face and form is what I see as a big, big mistake.


In looking at this publicity still from the film, one gets absolutely no impression of who these five fairies are: what their personalities are like, or how they might relate to each other in the story. Cute though they may be, they really communicate absolutely nothing to the viewer in their design. All of their various personalities are going to have to be explained through the dialogue, which is a real waste of the animation medium, I believe.


Not long ago, however, I saw this on Jim Hill's site. These young ladies have been hired by Disney to portray the five Fairies as meet 'n' greet walkaround characters at promotional events and maybe at Disneyland.


Ironically, I find these live young ladies to suggest far more in possible personality than their animated counterparts. We know who Tink is, but how about her friends? If I were to hazard a guess, I'd say that the one on the lower left suggests an outgoing, "Voted most likely to succeed" type of girl. The Black girl looks pensive and serene, maybe a shy type. The girl with the braid might be a goofy and not particularly bright type, reminiscent of Goldie Hawn in her "Laugh-In" days. Finally, the Asian girl looks rather mischievous to me, perhaps given to pulling pranks on the others. Whether these impressions are accurate to what the film's characters are all about is not important - but the fact that these live actresses convey something to me in terms of a perceived personality is what counts. Why am I not able to read the animated characters as such? In cartooning, personalities should be even more obvious because you have the liberty of pushing them more through caricatured designs, expressions and body language. Which leads me to the following sketch:


Just for fun, I thought I'd try redesigning the Fairy characters as caricatures of these actresses, cartooned in a Disney style. I haven't drawn Tink herself though, for obvious copyright reasons aside from the fact we already know what she looks like. Is this what I think the final designs should be? Not necessarily, as I think they could be explored more in various ways and then simplified and refined more for the final models. But I genuinely believe this makes for a better starting point - to try and create distinct individuals that suggest their specific personality type through the visual designs. This is what Disney has historically always been so brilliant at in their classic animated features. Female attractiveness should not all derive from just one template - variety is the key to engaging the viewer's interest! I know there is the art talent at Disney to pull it off - but why are the artists not calling the shots?

Generically Speaking...

Katie Rice has just posted a very thoughtful analysis of "generic" versus "specific" female character designs over on her blog. What I like about the way she's written it is that she is not slamming generic design when it has a visual appeal (which does have its place), but rather, showing how designs with a more unique individuality can be more interesting to the viewer. I've long been an admirer of Katie's art, as I feel she's a naturally funny cartoonist who also manages to bring out not only great humour, but also some real humanity in her cartoon sketches. Her girls do not display a cloying cuteness, but instead she taps into the mindset of young adolescent girls, somehow bringing out an endearing goofy side in addition to their cute femininity. She's even got a term for her special brand of drawing girls: "Retarded Cute". One of my favourite posts is this one recalling her high school girlfriends. I find it very charming and funny. By the way, this drawing to the left is one of her many self-caricature sketches. Katie has a goodnatured way of lampooning life, even when drawing herself.

Unfortunately, there is an awful lot of art out there in the world of animation and especially consumer products that is extremely generic and not even aesthetically appealing. Look at these "Bratz" characters for example. In fact, I'm rather loathe to even call them "characters" at all, as that term would imply that there is some personality there. From having looked at much of the art on "Bratz", I can honestly state that there is absolutely no personality to be found in these designs whatsoever. None of the characters are capable of emoting - their faces are frozen in one generic, non-expression. And as you can see, there is no discernible distinction between the girls, save for different clothes and hair colour. Facially they look to me like five identical little clones of Angelina Jolie!

Remarkably, even the folks at Disney are content to add to the generic glut with their "Disney Princesses" line of merchandise. I would like to state for the record that I have always admired and championed the Disney classic animated features, so it pains me to see how these characters are now being handled by Consumer Products. The concept is an awkward one to begin with, actually. If you study the merchandise art out there, you will notice that these princesses, though posed together, will never acknowledge or interact with each other because they are all from separate character "universes". If they're on the cover of a book, the content of the book itself has them portrayed separately in their own stories. But on the cover they are posed as if in some inane Vanity Fair photo shoot, looking out at the viewer, never at each other. So right away the "Disney Princesses" is a concept with inherent problems. Besides, these girls were always more interesting within the context of their own films, surrounded by colourful supporting characters that they could work off of, being part of an appealing ensemble. Taken out of that context they are not particularly interesting.

What I particularly object to is the way they are handled in the art, always highly airbrushed to the point where they lack definition of tonal value. But the worst thing about them in my opinion, is the way their designs have been homogenized, their expressions reduced to vacuous smiles and their features becoming too similar, so that they start looking like all the same character. Though I understand the reason for this, for example the more angular design of Aurora being rounded down to fit in with the other girls, I find the process rather insulting to the great Disney artists who brought those characters to life onscreen.

Likewise, these drawings of Tinker Bell and the new "Disney Fairies" marketing program leave much to be desired. To be fair, any one of these characters I'd consider to be visually appealing in their design as separate entities, but collectively they suffer from the same problem as "Bratz" - all are identical if not for their costumes, hair and, in this case, skin colour. The tragic thing is, it doesn't have to be this way. In fact, I suspect if this were placed completely in the hands of the talented artists that work at Disney, these characters would show more individual distinction in design. I'm convinced it's the executives in Disney's Consumer Products division that have mandated this appalling blandness of design, as these types rarely show good taste when it comes to the art aesthetic.

Coincidentally, this reminds me of a project I worked on back a few years ago for a merchandising concept entitled "Bella May". The title character was an all-American type girl of about 15, and had a group of friends that included the prerequisite girls of different ethnic background. Unfortunately, in the rough concepts that they'd had someone come up with (pictured at left), all five girls looked identical, just like my complaints about "Bratz" and the new "Disney Fairies", despite the fact that one was supposed to be Asian, one Black, and one Italian. Now, I don't have a problem with overtly politically correct concepts so long as each character is treated as a distinct personality. It's when they are homogenized into all practically the same design that it offends my artistic sensibilities. Anyway, the folks putting this program together had been referred to me by a publisher I'd been working for and they knew these characters were in need of a massive overhaul.

Since they'd agreed to my terms that I'd want to redesign them so they all looked more like the nationalities they were supposed to be in addition to trying to capture the personalities better as described in their character bible, I decided to take on the project. The finished pencil art on the left is what I finally arrived at after exploring different ways of portraying each girl based on her character description. However, the initial designs had to start with some sort of reference material so I'd have a better idea of what I was trying to do and that their designs would have some basis in reality, though caricatured into appealing cartoons.

My first step, therefore, was to start compiling reference photos of girls of that age. I recall looking through department store catalogues and sketching various young girls, as well as collecting a bunch of images through Google Images. (The cartoonist's best friend!) The fact is, though, there is an unfortunate trend today in some members of various ethnic groups not wanting to see what they consider to be "stereotyped" depictions of themselves, therefore one is always having to be careful in the way these things are handled. Disney is constantly under fire for this (always unfairly), which makes me think that their lookalike fairies is their way of playing it safe and avoiding controversy. It shouldn't be this way of course - nothing should be sacred where cartooning is concerned, and anybody should be fair game for the art of caricature. However, I do like to make sure that my cartoons have some basis in reality, for the simple reason that I can learn more by studying real human types rather than just trying to make things up from scratch. This makes for richer personalities in my opinion. These rough sketches were made after trying different approaches, maybe combining different physical aspects from several reference photos to come up with a satisfying character type that seemed to suggest the right personality I was looking for.

The people I was working for were very nice and they liked what I'd come up with. They paid me upon delivery but, sadly however, this project never did get off the ground. I think they had underestimated the costs involved in starting up a merchandising venture like this and got cold feet about it. It's too bad "Bella May" got cancelled, as I was hoping to develop these characters further and, hopefully, work on the actual artwork for the various merchandise. Ah well, it was not to be, but at least it was fun to revisit this project in today's blog post.