I've been reading David Mamet's great little book "On Directing Film" and around page 80 there's this paragraph I found puts into words something I've been feeling for a long time, even since before I went to animation school:
"Cartoons are very good to watch - are much better to watch, for people who want to direct, than movies. In the old cartoons, the artists realized the essence of the theory of montage, which is that they could do whatever the heck they wanted. It wasn't any more expensive to draw it from a high angle or from a low angle. They didn't have to keep the actors late to draw a hundred people rather than one person, or send out for that very expensive Chinese vase. Everything was based on imagination. The shot we see in the film is the shot the artist saw in his imagination. So if you watch cartoons, you can learn a great deal about how to choose shots, how to tell the story in pictures, and how to cut."
David Mamet is a Pulitzer and Tony winning playwright and an Oscar nominated screenwriter and film director, known for writing numerous films including Wag the Dog and The Untouchables.
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