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A blog for updates on the progress of my current animated projects as well as studies, practice drawings, comics and animation
8 comments:
Scooby Doo, Garfeild, it's really just amazing how these insipid characters retain some sort of popularity for so long.
ARGH ! GARFIELD I MEAN !
What makes Garfield "insipid"? Granted he is not as awesome as Heathcliff, but what brings you to make that statement? I find it very odd. You have to quantify it. And if your argument begins 'John says...', er, then don't worry about it.
I was actually wondering the same thing. I figured it was because of the terrible CGI Garfield movies.
I personally enjoy the Garfield comic strip.
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I apologize for the tardiness of this response. The reason why I find Garfield dull is because the gimmick of his laziness and gluttony gets tired rather quickly. After you read one Garfield strip, there is no need to read another.
That's being disingenuous to state that his 'laziness' and 'gluttony' are gimmicks. Those are his personality traits; what essentially makes up his character. You could do this simplistic breakdown on all cartoon characters [and even live-action characters]. For example, I could say 'Homer Simpson is a boring character, he's just dumb and does dumb things and eats like a pig'. Which he does. But to reduce it to just that implies that is all he does, every episode. Which he sort of does... HAHA! BUT he also does other things within this characteristics, which make him a very entertaining character.
An example would be from one of my favourite Simpsons episode, in which Homer decides to become an inventor. Now, if his character is simplistically and rigidly 'the dumb bastard', he would have never been able to come up with a single invention. Yet, this dumb fuck manages to invent a make-up shotgun that you shoot into women's faces to apply! And best of all, the 'everything is okay alarm', which beeps every few seconds to let you know EVERYTHING is okay! Even a genius couldn't make such a thing, but Homer did. Of course it's a dumb idea [in keeping with Homer's base characteristic], and the practicalities is that the battery runs out because it is assumed this thing is working constantly to check that everything is okay.
That is not to say Homer, or The Simpsons is constantly hilarious. There are plenty of examples of bad handling of the characters and situations. And that's a good point. As Frodo shows above with that link, you can really fuck up a good character, quite easily. Ryan mentions the CGI movies as being terrible [I don't think I've seen them so I wouldn't know].
So, with all that in mind, someone could easily say [and have said] Ren and Stimpy are boring characters. Ren's gimmick of being angry and selfish is dull. Stimpy's gimmick of being a fuckwit is bland \ generic \ verbatim etc [HAHHAHAHHAHA!]. Then they can site Onward and Upward as a prime example. 'Look, they just do gross stuff and then it is inferred that they are sodomising each other in the end for no reason'. Which is what happens in that terrible episode. But just because this was an [extremely] bad cartoon, which betrayed both those characters and amped up their most simplistic and basic characteristics, whilst forgetting to add any jokes, does that mean Ren and Stimpy are bad characters, or dull?
Where 'Garfield' made a wrong turn is in creator Jim Davis' implementation of a factory system, where other people drew and wrote the strips, and he simply approved it. Probably believing he had the same control over the strip as actually drawing it and coming up with jokes [what a tough life being a cartoonist... ]. Similar to thinking you are the one animating when you send off a couple of layouts for animation outsourcing , which have to be fixed up.
Yeesh crsP. I didn't want this to turn into a full blown debate. All I am saying is, I don't find Garfield's antics that funny. I think of him as stirctly one note. Woody Woodpecker is also pretty simple but the way he acts allows him to be a bit more proactive in his comedy.
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