Inside Animation
BY JAIME WEINMAN
Is there a type of TV writing that’s only appropriate for animation? If there is, it seems viewers don’t want to sense it while watching. “We found out, especially when we did our focus groups with kids, that they were very hungry for smarter content, that had things that adult sitcoms had,” says Tom McGillis, cofounder (with Jennifer Pertsch) of Toronto’s Fresh Animation. “They wanted multiple plot lines, a really high gag count, a really solid story structure, well-rounded characters.”
Suzanne Bolch, who has written for both animation (Captain Flamingo, Blazing Dragons) and live action (Naturally, Sadie) adds that there’s no difference in quality or talent when it comes to what’s required for this kind of writing: “The people who write good animation are awesome writers. There’s schlock out there, just like there is for live action, but the people who do it well really do it well.”
Writing for animated shows has sometimes been seen as separate from “regular” writing; a holdover from the days when cartoons didn’t have formal scripts. But for writers like Pertsch and McGillis, who created shows like 6Teen, Total Drama Island and the upcoming Stoked, not only is animation purism not an option–not when budgets are tight and every department needs a formal script to follow–but it’s just not the route to a quality show.
Animation often requires more sophisticated writing than it used to, with more writer involvement to match; many writers are in charge of their animated shows, just as they could be on a live-action series. And yet, even as there’s more of a live-action sensibility in the way animated shows are written and produced, they can never be exactly like live-action; these shows require a different writing style and some very different steps in the process. For any animation writer today, the big challenge is balancing the two elements: understanding the animation process, step by step, while remembering that the fundamentals of good writing are pretty much the same no matter how the project takes its final form.
Animation vs. Live-Action
Even animation writers with a live-action sensibility know that you can’t write exactly the same for both formats. Alex Ganetakos, who has written for live-action shows like Made in Canada, along with cartoons like 6Teen, sees two differences between writing for flesh-and-blood people and writing for the characters on 6Teen.One is that because every action and movement in animation needs to be drawn by somebody, an animation script, she says, “needs to spell it out a lot more.” Alice Prodanou, who has written and story edited animated shows since 2001, agrees that “in animation, you need lots of description,” whereas in live-action scripts, the writer isn’t supposed to include many stage directions.
The other difference is that viewers seem to expect more physical action in an animated show. Having two characters talk isn’t enough; they have to be doing something. Ganetakos says that the first time she wrote a 6Teen script, she found there wasn’t enough action in it: “there’s something about a cartoon; as soon as you settle on it you expect things to be more physical and you really notice when it’s not. Even if it’s just something like walking down the hallway: if all they’re doing is walking down the hallway, it’s not enough. When you’re watching animation, you expect a different pace of visual stimulation.”
Simon Racioppa, who writes and produces animated shows like Spliced, adds that “the pace of animation on screen naturally moves faster than live action,” meaning that a fast live-action script would seem to have “glacial speed” in animation. When Pertsch and McGillis first saw the pilot of Total Drama Island, “Jennifer and I almost barfed,” McGillis says. “We were so upset at how slow it was going. It was dull, it was just so sluggish.” They cut several minutes out of that first episode and re-cut it to make it fast by animation standards–not live-action standards.
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