Genndy Tartakovsky - How To Animate Movement

There’s a stiffness in recent animation. And whether that be due to budgetary constraints

or character designs limiting articulation, modern animation tends to either lean towards

edgy static limited animation or bland overly immature children's entertainment. The drawings

feel lifeless and there’s a loss of what made the medium so special; which is why Genndy Tartakovsky

is such a unique figure within western animation as it stands now. And even if you’re not familiar

with the name, chances are you’ve seen one of his numerous cartoons or films. There’s

an unmistakable fluidity to the movement of his characters and a focus on clarity of expression

even if that means smudging reality because he draws inspiration from Tex Avery and Hanna

Barbera, something he learned from his time in CalArts. Though there’s still a noticable

difference between a Tartakovsky made show and the Looney Toons. His character designs, for one,

are much more simplistic and angular when compared to characters like Bugs Bunny. He doesn’t just

draw from a single inspiration, being influenced by anime, 70s cinema, and a whole host of other

things which all combine to create something uniquely Tartakovsky. But what is it about

Tartakvosky that makes him stand out amongst his contemporaries like Craig McCraken and Brad Bird.

Well let’s trace it all the way back to 1995, Tartakovsky was just given a chance to be a

part of What a Cartoon! a series of shorts that were aired on Cartoon Network to find promising

new programs and undiscovered talent. Dexter’s Laboratory's original run officially began a

year later in 1996. Even in the earliest parts of his career, his distinct traits as an artist

peer through. Dexter himself is made up of all these simple geometric shapes and sharp

angles. Those qualities carried through into his style of 3d animation. New technology had

to be created in order to capture that clarity of posing that’s essential to his style and

in order to recapture some of that personal nature of hand drawn animation, Tartakovsky encouraged

the animators to convey themselves in the CG.

Genndy Tartakovsky: "one guy drew Drac's eyes kinda small. One guy drew them kinda big.

One guy drew really funny hands.

And that really started to come out. And all the sudden you saw these super stars of animation rise

and suddenly they were expressing themselves in the animation."

But beyond those surface-level stylistic traits,

what it is about him that makes him truly distinct. Well that wouldn’t be as apparent until

after Dexter’s Lab when Genndy and his team moved onto Samurai Jack and Clone Wars. Tartakovsky was

continuously frustrated with the flat compositions in Dexter’s Lab, which was ironically the first in

a long line of cartoons with practically identical art direction, so both Jack and Clone Wars had an

immense focus on style and action. And by action I don’t mean just the action scenes and fights but

the very movements of the characters; you’ll notice that no one Jedi moves the same way.

Shakti moves with swiftness and grace, reflecting her gazelle like design while Windu moves with a

much more hard hitting precision and commanding sternness. What pulls it all together most is

the very specific timing and rhythm of the movements that make the actions, big or small,

fit into the overall story; which is why the most memorable scenes of these shows

are when it strips back the dialogue and focuses on telling the story through action.