Animation Absorption: July 2019

Jim Soper is a marvelous talent from the small Boston, Massachusetts animation industry who is now the lead character designer on Looney Tunes Cartoons. Most of the story of how Soper was discovered was already discussed in Browngardt's entry, so here is a recap from it.

"Browngardt discovered Lead Character Designer Jim Soper at just the right time, just before Soper made plans to quit the animation business altogether after being stuck doing uneventful motion graphic projects that didn't make use of his real skills."

To go further in detail, Soper worked in the Boston animation industry for about ten years before being discovered by Pete Browngardt. The Boston studios Soper worked for, which included the likes of Clambake Animation, Hero 4 Hire, and Soup2Nuts, had wanted to do a form of traditional animation on their projects, but they never really knew how to achieve desirable results on that end due to lack of available talent, time, and resources to effectively accomplish it. The schedules were very long and merciless on Soper, who ended up hurting his arm while being overworked on one project. It turned out to be focal dystonia. An effect of this dustonia is that Soper's drawing hand would randomly cramp up at a certain point in time while working. Ten years of this destructive life style unfolded before Soper made plans to give up the business altogether.

Due to the smallness of the Boston industry, Jim Soper ended up serving in various positions in the Boston studios such as character designer, storyboard artist, animator, layout, and animation director. You can see an example of this in the special Hero4Hire did for a baseball team's mascot named Wally, where he takes both storyboard and animation credits. His most prominent position in Boston was that of animation director, and later storyboard and layout director at Evan Sussman's studio Hero4Hire from 2013 to 2017. He was responsible for bringing in traditional animation to the studio.

The point is that I'm glad that Soper is now on a show where where his drawings can reach millions and millions of more people than the obscure Boston studio work could ever have. I don't even have much knowledge of the individual work Jim Soper did while in Boston. The only specific credit I have on hand is his storyboarding and animation credits for the kids geared baseball cutout animation special Wally's Opening Day for Hero4Hire.

A project he worked on at Hero was for Sesame Street's original youtube content. The Kitchen Crew, a blend of live action and traditional animation put over real life kitchen appliances

.Jim Soper's team profile from the archived Hero4Hire website in 2013. This confirms that he was lead animator for Hero's Nick pitch short Kid Impressive. If I had to guess what character he animated, it would have to be the monster, although this is just speculation from my part.

His profile from the archived Hero4Hire website in 2017. His next stint at Warner Bros. would prove that he was indeed born in the right era.

On Looney Tunes, Jim Soper is Lead Character Designer bases on his mastery of the 1940s funny animal style that dominated classic cartoons in all major studios.

So what makes Jim Soper's art of classic cartoon characters stand out? One answer: His mastery of drawing appealing golden age cartoon character designs.

He has a great understanding in structure and volume in character poses. In this drawing, you can see visible structure lines. While invisible in the final image, these lines help make the character come alive off the page. It makes the designs feel like it was from an actual Termite Terrace animator from the mid-40s.

A page from a guide on structure from Soper himself.

There's also the proportions Soper nails down to make his 40s approach successful. What Soper nails with Daffy is he makes him look like a classic screwball character by a combination of drawing his head and body skinny but making his bottom look really large and thick. Also, his tall eyes that make up most of his head adds a youthful exuberance to the duck.

The last thing I enjoy about his Daffy is making the the most of his extremely expressive hands as shown below.

Onto his Bugs Bunny, the thing that really gets me about his take on Bugs is that he can do both extreme ends of Clampett's two most best animators extremely well.

Bob McKimson:

Rod Scribner:

I'm really stunned at what range Soper has on drawing the rabbit. Bugs is a very tricky character to draw already, let alone the two specific Bugses that were drawn by two of the very best Warner Bros animators of all time during the golden age.

Bugs has been Soper's favorite Looney Tunes character since his childhood because he was always in control of the situation at hand, which deeply spoke to Soper's anxiety issues.

Porky is really hard to get right. Porky's classic design has an ambiguous quality to his age. He was used as both an adult and a little kid in his late 30s appearance. Even when he was an adult, he has that young boyish innocence to him. His eyes are very hard to get right, they're basically tall rounded rectangles with some curviness to them. These style of eyes Soper drew appear to hearken back to the early Clampett-Jones cartoons of 1938.

This is one of Soper's other styles. He can draw various golden age cartoon characters extremely well, but it's not the only thing he can draw extremely well. Small heads, thick, strong bodies with sharp dynamism in poses. More examples below.