Make It Real — Part 6: Loving Your Inner Bart
A contemporary father-son portrait — the father enraged; the son with mouth wide open, eyes bugged out and head bulging in response to the father’s hands wrapped firmly around his neck…
Like Whistler and his mother, every era has its icons of parenthood and this one of Homer and Bart Simpson will surely go down in history as one of ours. But what makes an icon iconic?
One important element is visual simplicity — a strip down to the essence, the more graphic the better, which is why animation has produced its share of icons over the years. And it’s about emotional resonance but even that’s not everything. For the icon to fully work, you also have to consider context.
What’s interesting and perhaps, surprising, is how complex the context end has to be to make the resulting symbol seem so simple and compellingly right.
This involves what the audience is thinking, what the creator is thinking, even what the iconic character is thinking. In fact, the thing about context is that it involves so many aspects from the tiniest details to the universe at large and all of it is deeply interconnected.
Not only that but all the strands in the web are potentially important and the specific way they work is different for every scenario. And all this applies as much to animation as to icon building in general…
So instead of looking for an elusive formula for success here, I invited Charlie Bonifacio, Stephen Barnes and Matt Ferguson to join me one last time in an exploration of some of the elements that create context.
Before we start, let’s remember two big elements that are always in play. First, that audiences are constantly scanning our work for points of comparison between their own reality and the work in front of them and within the work itself, on its own terms.
Second, that for all the license we have to screw around in our animated worlds, the only rules which should be held sacred (well, almost sacred) are cause and effect and its legitimate offspring, internal logic. Mess with these at your peril! Unless, of course, you have an idea that takes them away and does something really cool with what’s left when their gone… oh but wait, that would still be a kind of logic, so never mind…
Now let’s begin with an interesting kind of context — the kind which characters create for each other. Characters can rarely operate alone. More likely, you’ll find a key character being pushed and pulled into action and reaction by characters around them and this is what sets a story in motion. But this can’t be just any combination of characters so the key here lies in the matchmaking.
There are those strange and happy couplings that somehow work — Peabody and Sherman are a straight reversal on man and dog. And perhaps it’s opposites attract when a special moose meets a flying squirrel in Rocky and Bullwinkle. But their partnership, based on naïve New World optimism, begins to make more sense when you match them with the thoroughly evil Soviet spies, Boris and Natasha. Now suddenly you have a tongue-in-cheek political commentary on the absurdities of the Cold War. How unlikely for a kids’ show.
But for psychological reality, think of how families interact — how we are assigned roles within the family drama to which we might comply or rebel (and even this might be, in fact, part of the script); how we change when we leave home and regress when we come back; how well we function in the big world, so well we think we’ve actually escaped our familial fate until we encounter a boss, a girlfriend or boyfriend or maybe even have a child of our own and suddenly find ourselves back in the same old play.
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