MODELOS SISTÉMICOS DEL DESARROLLO POSITIVO

Lip synch (short for synchronization) is quite simply the act of matching up a character’s mouth and lip positions with spoken lines of dialogue. If you’ve ever laughed at one of those old Saturday afternoon karate movies that was poorly dubbed, I don’t have to explain the importance of synchronizing dialogue to the positions of a character’s mouth. Woody Allen carried this example to the extreme by making it the basis of his film What’s Up, Tiger Lily?

when he used the whole premise of lip synch purposely not match-ing original dialogue by turnmatch-ing a former Japanese spy thriller into a search for an exclusive egg salad recipe.

Another example of poor lip synch is in some anime. I’ve watched some anime where I’ve counted two mouth positions per character… open and closed! (Now I understand pinching pennies and limited budgets, but I think that’s carrying it a bit too far.)

As you’ll notice in the following illustration there are a number of different mouth positions, many thankfully similar to one

another, that make our work just a bit easier. For instance, the mouth positions for m, b, and p are pretty much identical. (Although I did notice that John K. had Stimpy’s cheeks puff out a bit on one instance of the letter p, which I thought was a rather clever touch.) Another good reason to mention that position in particular is that while most of the other positions may last only one or two frames (depending on your actor’s dialogue track), that m-b-p position should really be held for a minimum of two frames… three frames perhaps when you can spare the extra frame. But as always, these so-called rules are merely recommended suggestions, to be used with judgment and with each unique circumstance.

A public service announcement from Tangent Man:

Please let me take this opportunity to kindly request anime fans to resist the temptation to ask author-illus-trator Mark S. Smith precisely which series that was where he noticed the two mouth positions per character.

It was a long time ago, and Mr. Smith is nearing his late 30s, so naturally, senility isn’t far behind. Please save your time and energy and ask other, more pertinent questions about the fine art of classic-style, hand-drawn animation. Specifically, why did Daffy suffer a severe shift in personality during the early ’50s, beginning drastically with The Scarlet Pumpernickel? Yes, we do know the answer to that one, but sorry, for legal reasons we can’t go into the details in print. Besides, your poor, pure inno-cent minds couldn’t handle the deep, dark cartoon conspiracy underlying that dreaded tale.

And make sure you don’t ee-nun-cee-ayyt evv-urr-ee seen-gull syll-uh-bull. Did you get that? Believe me, it looks just as silly if you do enunciate every single syllable as I just did. We don’t enun-ciate, or carefully pronounce, every single syllable of every single word we utter. I’m glad we don’t because it would get profoundly irritating if we did. The best thing you can do is listen carefully to the dialogue track for that one word that people have a tendency to emphasize in every sentence, and accent that syllable, either with that carefully chosen mouth position or a gesture.

For a good example of using gestures for emphasis, watch Madame Medusa in Disney’s The Rescuers. Milt Kahl’s animation on this aging villainess just blows me away (almost as much as his animation on Shere Kahn in The Jungle Book). There’s one scene in which Medusa is taking off her makeup, and she scoots her chair across the room while she’s talking. She bounces her chair on the key words in her dialogue. In other words, she hits… every…

accent. (And yes, admittedly sometimes you will have those rare occasions when more than one word per sentence is accented.

Therefore, you may find the flamboyant villain is your exception to the rule.)

If you have trouble deciding which words to emphasize in a line of dialogue, try getting someone else to read the line and watch that person’s lips in action. You may be thinking about it too hard.

(And you’ve probably figured that it’s best not to let them know what you’re up to, so they’re not thinking too hard about it either.) Sometimes, as you can guess, what is supposed to come naturally is one of the most difficult things to fake. (Or to draw!)

While I’m on the subject of animating dialogue, another anima-tion director whose work I find especially entertaining to watch is Robert McKimson. Again, perhaps not a household name like the other Looney Tunes directors, but he can perhaps be credited as the proud papa of longtime Looney favorite, the Tasmanian Devil.

(My favorite childhood character, of which my mom made me a cus-tom stuffed doll years before they became so readily available.)

McKimson’s first Taz cartoon was Devil May Hare, and my per-sonal favorite was when Taz costarred with Daffy in Ducking the Devil. Though Bugs easily outwitted Taz on numerous occasions, Daffy was the only character to physically overpower the seemingly unstoppable brute. (It seems Daffy’s unadulterated greed is just as effective as Popeye’s spinach.) Both these cartoons and all the orig-inal Taz shorts were released years ago on VHS in Stars of Space Jam: Tasmanian Devil. Undoubtedly, I could credit this as the most overdue Looney Tunes DVD title to date.

With most of McKimson’s other more, well, verbally versatile characters, if you watch his cartoons, you might notice that they often make grand gestures during their lines. Some of them, partic-ularly Foghorn Leghorn, almost seem like ham Shakespearean actors, placing one hand emphatically on their chest and/or raising the other hand in the air to point during a key word. Because it’s animation, it works.

We have an artistic license to overact. Take that license firmly in one hand and a pencil in the other. You’re about as ready as you’re going to get to start animating.