Apart from watching endless BBunny toons growing up I continued to watch these bad boys long after I should have and was reminded recently..
Now I'm no "animation" aficionado to know how well they are draw/animated but I do know what I like and I like this. They were off the wall and I loved them..
Apart from being funny, I think the expressions on Ren from 4:40 onward when he's describing what he's gonna do to his pal Stimpy and his cousin Sven are awesome.
One of the best Ren and Stimpy episodes. I believe the best scenes were animated at the great Carbunkle cartoons run by Bob Jaques who was the one who was really responsible for the way the Ren and Stimpy cartoons were animated.
It's really sad how John K's style has kind of devolved now into ugliness and bizarreness for the sake of bizarreness. Most of the animation I've seen done by him now is uncontrolled and spastic.
Unfortunately, John isn't a great animator himself (he's even admitted this on his blog... he's a director and layout artist, not an animator) and doesn't have someone like Bob Jaques to make his layout poses move well and have good timing.
As I have said in the past - animating for R&S was a problem solving process - trying to get all the layouts to work together to look seamless and make the animation 'sing' was a challenge. It took extra work to mask all the volume changes that were often between layouts - and that meant making key drawings to hide those volume changes. To say that it's just inbetweening and that inbetweens are unimportant is ludicrous. I'm glad that you and others have the eye to appreciate the work we put into the series.
If you watch Eddie Fitzgerald's 'Tales of Worm Paranoia' you can see the effect of not masking the volume changes. In some of the scenes that were animated overseas the characters melt from pose to pose and the volume changes are noticeable. IMO it made that animation look cheap by drawing attention to those changes. Had we taken the easy way out and 'just inbetweened' the layouts our animation for R&S would have been a bunch of shapes melting from one pose to another.
and was reminded recently..
