From the early 60s', Joe Barbera and William Hanna explain the process of animation from the Hanna Barbera perspective. I've never ever seen this before so this is pretty cool. I think HB's early product is terrific because there's still a whole lot of care in the preparation of their animated shorts. The drawings are well drafted, the timing works, colors look neat and the voices are great. Unfortunately, somewhere after the sale of their studio to Taft Broadcasting around 1966, the studio fell over a cliff!
Don't get me wrong...there was still good things coming out from Hanna Barbera, just not so much. Anyhow, this stuff still fascinates me! HB's early animated cartoons like Ruff and Reddy were made for a budget of just under $ 4000 for a 5 minute animated cartoon. By the time they got to the Flintstones, the quality was upped and the budget became $35,000 for a half hour television show. I know it sounds like chicken feed today but the Rocky and Bullwinkle show had a budget that was paltry in comparision, roughly 1/4 the Budget of a Flintstones half hour!
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Thanks for sharing this with us Brian. I always found it fascinating to see this type of documentary. There is also one that is from Disney.
Actually, Disney has quite a few making 'ofs' over the years, from theatrical shorts to hour long television shows. Some of these were available on the Disney Treasures DVD set, which can be loaned from local libraries or can be bought on the secondary market.
Also, Disney has a habit of adding this material to the features it releases on blu ray and DVD. It's rare to see this type of thing come from Hanna Barbera. Walter Lantz used to have segments on his Woody Woodpecker Shows that featured segments showing how cartoons were made. These have been included on the Woody Box sets that can be bought for a very reasonable price.
No surprise about the budget of "Bullwinkle". There's a reason why they farmed out production to Mexico.
It's obvious why Bullwinkle was farmed out to Mexico. The crazy thing is because of all the screw ups on the production, it probably ended up costing more in the long run to fix all the mistakes!
I'm no fan of overseas production houses, but a select few can do quality work.
Maybe ten years back, I was looking to produce a direct to video project and toyed with the idea of farming out the animation overseas, guided by strong layout poses and color keys here. One of the overseas houses gave me a quote of $ 800 a minute for animation, ink & paint, backgrounds and delivered photographed on 35mm motion picture negative. When I received the quote, I was blown away. For ANY animation production, that is really dirt cheap. How cheap?
For roughly less than half the price of a 1960's Flintstones episode, I could have a half hour animated show produced for just over Seventeen Thousand Dollars! Even better; a Seventy Five minute feature film would cost around
$ 60,000! It's no wonder that so many producers over the years have been seduced by low cost animation production.
$800 a minute. Dang! That's lower than Bill Plympton's $1000 a minute rule (and he does all the animation himself!)
I wonder what the rate is now, with the advent of digital ink & paint.
With flash animation in the picture, it could possibly be even less! I know when I looked at this studios' reel, the animation was sub par, but it was still better than The Spooktacular Adventures Of Casper! I figured that if I sent over a strong package of pre pro art guiding the production, they couldn't go far wrong. The truth is, you can't just send a package. To get the results you want, you have to send over some talented supervisors as well. That's exactly how Hyperion made The Brave Little Toaster and got the stellar results!
And one more thing...it's not hard to produce a minute of animation in an afternoon....if you have the right designs and a storyboard artist that knows how to get the most motion out of a few drawings!
I single handedly animated an industrial film, about two minutes of animation, in a few hours. Because of limited animation and a simple design; a slew of held drawings, mouth charts and using a whole lot of camera moves, the spot was animated, cleaned up, inked and painted and composited in a day. I learned a lot from that experience! Believe me, Hanna Barberas' early TeeVee material uses much of the same tricks!
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