Episode 013 - Visual and Physical Comedy in Animation

Stuart Evans and Dave Osborne return to talking about visual and physical comedy in animation from a directing perspective. 

 Nobody really teaches this in a practical direct way that can ever emulate a production environment and now because of remote working people in the industry do not witness the process first hand, so no one learns by listening and watching. 

This is a chance to understand how to make animated visual and physical comedy work on screen from a very practical standpoint by two directors who have created their fair share of laughs on screen!

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Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

So, David Osborne, let's start with a simple question that opens up the whole subject of physical and visual comedy and animation. Who are your top three comedians and what do they reveal about how comedy works on screen?

SPEAKER_00 0:15

Well, I think the three comedians that I have in mind, one is not really strictly speaking a comedian, but he I would describe him as a visual artist that both you and I would admire. And that person would be Tex Avery. I think his contribution uh to animation and also a type of humour which I think, you know, the the I guess the screwball humour that we would recognise from the films of the 1940s and 50s that he directed, and the sort of surreal element, I think he took it to quite an extreme, and I think it had a a big influence across both animation and actual other forms of physical comedy. Um, I'm going to say Jacques Tatty as well because he's my one of my great heroes. Um, I like the observational comedy, I like the simplicity about what he does quite often, and the fact that he he does it in a very well-observed way. Um, I mean, there's plenty of examples on YouTube if if you've not come across Jacques Tatty, and I would certainly go and have a dig around on YouTube. Um, but yeah, for me he's one of the great heroes of comedy. And my final hero is somebody I've um actually been fortunate enough to work with, and that's Rowan Atkinson, because I think he's probably is still currently one of the greatest comedians around at the moment, still, um, certainly in the UK, and I think internationally, I know he's very well recognized, and I think he can do things that other comedians just cannot do. Um, he he is genuinely brilliant. There isn't much more to add to that particular uh accolade.

SPEAKER_02 1:52

Some fantastic choices. Well done. So, welcome to Director's Cut Animated Vision.

SPEAKER_00 2:02

Hello, and uh, my name is Dave Osborne, and I've been directing for over 30 years, and I am known for shows like uh Super Team 4 and LEGO's Nexo Night, and of course, especially um applicable for this particular episode, Mr. Bean, the animated series.

SPEAKER_02 2:21

And I am Stuart Evans, and I've been directing for 30 years, and my largest uh show today has been the CG version of Bob the Builder. 104 episodes. Goodness me, that's a lot. And I've also worked on 2D and in physical comedy shows with non-dialogue. So uh I know a little bit about this myself, but it's all gonna be about this man here. So, our subject this week is physical and visual comedy in animation. Let's define the terms. What's the difference for you between visual comedy and physical comedy?

SPEAKER_00 3:02

So for me, um visual comedy is is is the broader sort of uh category. It includes things like working with props, it includes performance, and it probably includes everything else that's around that, you know, whether it's bits of visual things that are in the background or whatever, or whether it's just, for example, um like John Cleese and Michael Palin in the very famous little fish dancing that they do on the side of the quay, where he comes out with a little fish, Michael Palin, and he slaps John Cleese around the face, and then John Cleese pulls out this massive great fish and slaps them straight into the water. You know, there's anything like that at all. That's that's that kind of broader subject of visual comedy. Um, I think you know, the other side of things that you might say are performance-based um comedy, I would say is it and the physical comedy things are probably things like um Jack Tatty and and Rowan Atkinson, where we have that more intimate thing where you have facial expressions and perhaps just things being done with how the body is working and moving.

SPEAKER_02 4:06

How do you develop a physical or visual gag from a script all the way through to the screen?

SPEAKER_00 4:13

Well, first of all, my process is you've got to hope there's something in the script defined like that. Um I think I think having worked quite a bit with the animated Mr. Bean series, we certainly lay out in that process a lot of the ideas, the visual ideas in the script. It's got to be there from that onset. That doesn't mean we're not developing it as we go through the process. So, so to give you an example, there was a gag that we did on series three, and I suppose it is a gag, it's a bit a little bit more than that, really. I suppose it's a whole little scene on its own where Bean is bored in the car, he's waiting to pick Mrs. Wicket up, and he's trying to entertain himself. And having tried the radio a few times and there's nothing he wants to listen to, he starts to entertain himself by sort of humming a tune, and in doing so, he gets kind of involved in the process and starts playing the car like an instrument. So he's he's wiggling the windscreen wipers in time to the his singing and humming, and he's kind of opening the car doors as like percussive sounds, uh tapping the roof, and um turning on the lights so that you get all of this is a happening in time to this little tune that he's humming. It's a piece of animation that I I really adore, actually. I I it makes me laugh every time I watch it. I think on the script, what we had at that stage was I think it was along the lines of Bean is bored and starts to tap a musical sound out on the car. I think it wasn't much more than that. I always felt there was something more we could do with it, and so fairly early on, and that was the sort of brief I gave the board artist, um, I said, let's let's look at doing something with um, you know, give give me the visual options to be able to do things like wiggling a windscreen wiper stem, whatever you call it. And also because it's the car on Bean, we always have a slight limitation because it's either a 2D object for us, although I know for everybody who watches it all looks like 2D, but or it's a 3D object, and generally I'm not allowed to do many 3D scenes with the car because that becomes more expensive. So we have to usually save that for driving and doing things. This was all going to be static, and so that was all blocked out. And originally I thought it should be something fairly big in terms of the musicality, something an orchestrated idea that um Bean would be able to hum. It had to be something that we could do in terms of the rights. When we came to record the audio, and that meant actually humming something, and that meant you know, asking uh Rowan Atkinson to hum something, he had his own thoughts to the visual side of that, and he brought in um the piece of music that we did eventually use, which is interesting because it's um it was Colonel Bogie. If you hum Colonel Bogie correctly, it gives you a beats per minute of about 120, which is ideal for working out animation walks. It's and it was one thing that um Richard Williams used to teach in his classes that he uh he did. Um, of course, we had to then check whether we had any rights issues in that, which we didn't, it was okay. And so he basically then hummed it kind of a little section, and and so the audio then we took that back into the picture side of things, having boarded it all out, and then we reworked it in the edit. Um, and that probably took us several passes to to block it all through, and you know, coming up with extra little ideas visually that we thought, okay, we can add that now, we could add that. So it was okay, it was kind of there-ish at the beginning in terms of a fundamental idea in the script, but it certainly took the performance of both the storyboard and the performer himself to actually kind of bring all those bits in. I kind of knew from the script what I was wanting to do with it, that I wanted to do this kind of slightly absurd musical, I'm bored, entertaining myself thing, but it took a long time to process itself through. I never thought I know exactly what it's going to look like in my head at the end, but I did know where it was going all the time.

SPEAKER_02 8:38

When you said when you see on a script that there is a visual gag, would you would you rather that it was quite sparse in its description, or do you do you find that it's best to have from the writer as much detail as possible?

SPEAKER_00 8:54

Um, I I I quite enjoy being inspired, if that makes sense. I quite enjoy where perhaps there's only the nuts and bolts. Does that make sense? You know, that you get you get enough information that you go, okay, I can build onto this. And especially working with the team that we usually have on beat, you know, we have board artists that are quite visually adept, you know, they know why they're there, they're there to help produce physical and visual comedy, and also again, you know, with the lead star that we have uh involved in the process, you know, he's gonna have a perspective on it and he will bring a layer of understanding and and genius sometimes, you know, absolute genius sometimes into that and make suggestions along the way. So I quite like the organic approach, um, especially on something as big as that. I think it's quite nice to slowly develop it, um, which is almost like a theatrical thing. Um, um and you're trying to capture both good planning, that's my view. You're trying to you're trying to guide something in terms of good planning, a little bit of that sort of thing where you know you get the happy accident when somebody tries something and finds something. I think you want a little bit of that as well. Um, so there's a mixture of things, you know. I will act things out at home, you know, to the extent that you know, one of the things that we did on one of the episodes, again, probably, you know, we'll go in later on to things like safety and whatever. Bean is hanging off the roof. And before going in to do the recording of that, we had the storyboard, so I knew physically roughly what we were trying to do. I actually climbed up onto my shed roof and hung off the roof in the similar fashion to see how much and where my body weight was, so I could understand at what point I would tip and fall, at what how much pressure I needed to apply to myself to hold onto this bloody roof without falling. I mean, my approach on it is I like to work out the physical stuff by trying it. Um, and then you learn things, you get that little bit of exploration involved as well. Um, and then I think then the whole process as you go through working with both the performer and then into layout and animation, at every point when you're briefing into people that have got to recreate these moments, you do have that understanding. Um, and I think that's something, and and I'm sure there are other directors and other approaches, don't get me wrong, this but this is my approach that I feel that by having the understanding of what it is to try this and understand you know where what the body is doing physically, I will actually be able to make a better call in terms of actually giving advice and feedback to somebody who's perhaps having to do more imagination. I mean, if you think about it, the voice artist will, you know, even if they've got to make sounds like ooh and ouch and whatever, you know, you've got to be able to give them the visual clues about what sort of pain it is that they're in, you know. Um so from that perspective, I think it's quite a useful approach.

SPEAKER_02 12:12

But it's it's it's very interesting with you talking about that and testing it out and then and then Rowan coming in and just saying, okay, so now you've done that, I know that I can do that. But with because so many, so many people who are not in the industry, just just regular audience members, will say, Yes, but you can do anything because it's a cartoon. But the thing with physical comedy in cartoon, well, it's not live action, but in animation, is that if it's going to work properly, you have to apply real-life physical forces to that, otherwise, it's not going to be believable. You won't get the weight, the drop, or anything like that. You can slightly suspend disbelief. So you've got Wallacochi hanging in the air, but you know he's gonna drop. So so you so you are you are applying those forces, but you're just sort of pushing them ever so slightly, but you are keeping that real world the real world physics, you have to bring all that in, because otherwise the physical physical comedy is just not gonna work in animation.

SPEAKER_00 13:24

I I I agree with all of that. I and I think that to me, with a physical comedy and the visual comedy, there are two forms of gags that work within across that world. One is the possible gags, and the other is the impossible gags. Um there are two different spectrums. You have um, you know, somebody like Jack Tatty and you know, probably Rowan Atkinson as well, who are on that sort of um impossible gag um hook, and then on the other hook, you have somebody like Tex Savory who who will you know have a character fall off a cliff and bounce right back up, you know, from that perspective. Uh if if Jacques Tatty falls off something, he will hit the ground and it will hurt, and the comedy will probably be about how he responds to that. And so, you know, with Mr. Bean, for example, you have a set of rules. Now they're not really written down, but there are a set of rules that all of us, you know, both on the directing side and the animation side of it, and the performance side of it, and the executive producer side and producer side of it, we all kind of and the writers, of course, all collectively sort of have a sense of what the rules are, and we know that when we're probably putting an idea out there that's on the margin of the rules, or maybe even stepping on the boundary or out of the boundary.

SPEAKER_02 14:51

But would you say that storyboarding and briefing is storyboard artists and the role of acting the whole thing out is absolutely key? How much of how much of a physical comedy sequence is from the storyboard and the director, and how much is input from from the performer?

SPEAKER_00 15:11

In terms of briefing, I think, yes, I mean I try to, you know, by the time I'm talking to the board artist, I would have been through the writing process of the script. So I understand, you know, having worked with the writers and the production, I know where, for example, where the humour should be. Um, and you know, you're you're trying to bring the storyboard artist to that point. I I you know, to a certain extent, uh we are quite uh on something like Mr. Bean, the animated TV series, it's quite um script driven in terms of we do work very heavily on that side of it. Um we've also got this legacy of all the previous material, uh both the animated and um also the live action, uh, which is kind of unique, and we do look at that again, and we think, oh, we did these sort of ideas in in series three or series two, or you know, in the live action, um, there was this particular episode. Um, so that you know, that had these ideas. So we were kind of you know, you've got a little reference library in your head, as well as you know, coming through and thinking, what can I do that's new with this? You know, and you're hoping to find something every time that's a little bit fresh, a little bit different, and that makes you engage, you know, me even as the director, hopefully the storyboard artist. So there's there's that aspect of it that you're trying to find that. I mean, there are little rules, you know. Um, and as you as you're probably, you know, the rule of three in terms of comedy, you know, you do it twice, and on the third one, that's you know, that's the one where he gets hit on the head or whatever it is, you know. Um I and I think there is another thing that I also find is that you need to be able to put the audience into a position where they uh are either in front or behind. So, you know, if you put something rhythmically down in terms of you know, you're track perhaps trying to give each idea the same amount of time, you know, so it's got that rhythm to it. But it doesn't have to be fast, you know, comedy doesn't have to be fast at all to be funny, and I know some people like it to be fast, but I I think it actually works better sometimes when it's slower and you've got a chance for the audience to go, yeah, I know what's gonna happen. I know it's gonna happen, I know what's gonna happen. Yes, bang. You know, so I think there's that aspect where you try that's certainly something when you're looking at animatic. Um, and you know, something I will do is I'll put temporary music down to give me some rhythms to work, or rather, the editor will put some temporary music down to make the rhythms work so that we get some things to actually lay out the visual ideas to, so that we can get that kind of dum di-dum dum di-dum bang bang, you know, so we can get some of that worked out and get those rhythms going into the storytelling. Um, you know, you you are sort of also, you know, clearly different performers bring different aspects to the kind of visual, you know, performance element of it. You know, working with other uh voice actors and whatever, you you will find, you know, they they've got their own approaches apart from say, you know, somebody like Rowan or whatever. Um, and that you work with all of those and you you kind of have to adapt your approach a little bit, you know. Maybe um, you know, they they are looking at purely at the script, usually quite often, so they're not necessarily seeing all the visual impact or input that I've seen. So you're trying to feed them that information as well, you know, how big's that cliff that they're stood on, you know, is it a really big cliff, in which case how much fear they need or whatever, or or vice, whatever it all of those things that you're trying to work out in those along those processes, and equally going into animation, you know, you you you by the point that you're heading into animation, if I'm honest, uh I usually got a fairly clear idea of what I'm striving for now. But equally, uh I I still want to give a little bit of that space just to give us that final phase, you know. Certainly with television animation, you know, we really kind of get one, two goes at it. You know, you get a second retake, you know, third retake. If you're kind of really lucky on the on the budget, depending on where you are, so you kind of got to have a pretty clear idea where it's going. But equally, you know, you will notice and you will read uh animators who can just lift it, you know, and sometimes it's not big physical things, you know. On on one of the episodes, there was a point where Irma, his long-term Bean's long-term girlfriend, had had a major scare. And she just looks at him and there's just this moment of like realization. There's almost no animation in it at all. It's just almost purely one expression. And the animator and she's like running, stops, looks, has this moment and then moves off again. He timed it perfectly. I mean, I I mean, yes, he'd worked with the animatic, but clearly he knew the exact frame to pull the head around and start to have it run off because it it just made it very funny. It it it brought you knew what she was thinking, um, and all of those things, and that's something at the end of it you do need the animator to have got right. I mean, sure, you know, as director, I might look at it and later on say, you know what, another two frames. Can we try another two frames on that look? And it might just improve it, it might just tweak it. But on that first pass, on that first watch, you went, Oh, yeah, it made me laugh. And and that was an important thing. I think the other thing with comedy as well, um, I think it's a reaction. You've obviously got a taste, a personal taste, but I think the other part of it with physical comedy is be in a room, watch the animatic with other people if you can, because you want to see what they're laughing at, especially if perhaps they've only it's the first time they've watched the animatic, say, from having read the script, or you know, maybe you want to see what their reactions are, you want to see has it made them smile, has it made them giggle? Um, you know, are they confused by something? So you're looking for all of that in that process. Um, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 21:36

With that in mind, so if you if you are playing an animatic and you think, okay, here's here's my intention, and people are confused, they don't get it, it's really not landing. When do you actually decide that a gag has to go that you can't really you can't really squeeze any more out of it, you can't fix it with timing, you just say it. It just didn't land.

SPEAKER_00 22:02

One of the things that you've got to be conscious with that is the first thing to probably check is what else is the audience dealing with at that particular point in that moment. Um and I feel one of the things I tend to look at immediately is go, is there music or sound effects or is there verbal information coming across at this point? Is there something else that's distracting us from the payoff of the visual gag or the physical gag? So I think that's one thing to consider is you know, is there a sound effect that you've got be or you've got something going on in the atmosphere that you really needed, you know, to help give the idea that the space was XYZ or whatever it is? So I think that's quite often something I will look at first before kind of concluding. Um the next phase. I mean, and it it sort of goes on to something else as well, which is actually, do you have time to do the idea? Um there's there's you know, there's an aspect of that as well. Have you given it enough time to make it work? And I think that's something always worth considering if something's not landing. You know, what what is it that you're not doing or the audience is not getting? So I would always consider that, you know, is is it that needs to be longer? And then I think in the final thing, you've got to be brave sometimes, and you have to kill your darlings, as they say. You know, you have to go in and go, um, you know, I cut it. And and and you know, you can have, you know, you I I've done it at a point where there's animation and and you go, Oh god, you know, some poor person's, you know, animated it, but we've laid it out, it's been storyboard, and lots of people have proved it, and it doesn't work. And it's not funny, or it's not gelling, or it's not delivering what we thought it was gonna deliver. Um, and I and I think whilst that can be, you know, that in a way is a failure or a tragedy, it's not it is from terms of production, in terms of you've spent money that's not gonna end up on the screen. Um, but it it is it is a way of making things better, and and I'm I'm always um I'm never surprised, or I am surprised in equal amount of measures of what happens when you do cut something out, and then suddenly you go, Oh, this now works. Suddenly the story flows and it moves on.

SPEAKER_02 24:21

Yeah, that that's that's that's the thing. If there's a gag in there that puts a handbrake on everything, and you go, it feels like it feels uncomfortable because it's like it's been dropped in and just sort of literally shoehorned in. It's not it doesn't feel like it flows, it's not a natural part of of the story. It's just yeah, I've got a great gag. Yeah, but it's not, it's just not gonna fit. Just just log it, just put it in the library, don't use it here, use it on the next show. You know, it's it's your call, it's your call as director. Just say, I'm gonna call it, it's gone.

SPEAKER_00 24:59

And and I think actually, in some respects, it's it's probably one of the most important functions of a director to actually make those sort of calls. Um, you know, to actually go, okay, this does not work. I cannot make it work unless we go back and rewrite and rewrite. That is an option if you're doing perhaps a feature film with a large budget, um, but it's probably not such an option if you're doing a television series. And and my experience also is quite often when you do take something else that's not functioning, you suddenly do get go, uh-uh, okay, this is all flowing a lot better, and suddenly you understand the story a lot more, and and you know, so yeah, I I agree. I think you know, and and yeah, absolutely. You you know, I have a whole library of jokes and visual ideas in my head, and they're all you know, you you look at something and you think, yeah, I could use that here or whatever, you know, from from a past thing, and um, and you try things and it works, you know, and lots of jokes are recycled in different ways. So I don't think that's the end of the world, you know. There's uh you know, there's as they always say, there's nothing new, but um, I yeah, I do feel that yeah, it's it's important to have the the ability and also the gut to cut it.

SPEAKER_02 26:13

And this is the $64,000 question to end on. What, in your opinion, actually makes something funny? It's a big one. Oh you go.

SPEAKER_00 26:26

Um, I think sometimes thinking about things can make it unfunny. Um, that's that's for sure. I think one of those things the little lesson I learned very early on when I was a student, um, and I made a film about privatization of all things. That sounds hilarious. It was hilarious, I can assure you. Laugh a moment it was. Um I okay, one of the things, and I was sat there and I was thinking, I need a I need a I need a joke. I needed a joke in the visual side of things where this character that had gone through all of these things was he was searching for air because the story was about the privatization of air. You know, one of the things I wanted to express and show was actually I thought what was going to happen was, you know, at the end of it, ordinary people would become subject to exploitation. And I had this kind of guy on the street corner with a big coat on doing the sort of you know, he's selling something. And um every every character in my story had a an oxygen tank and a mask because you had to buy your air, and um he was selling air, but of course it was dodgy air, and I was thinking, well, what what would what would be obvious to an audience that it was bad air, you know, because I I didn't I couldn't, you know, you can't breathe it in that sense, or you know, that all of this is a scam. And so in the end, I I had this idea, well, where where is there no air? And I was asking myself all these questions, and that was the one that came up, and I thought, the moon. There's no air on the moon. Okay, so this guy is selling moon air, it's a con. And that that and and so he opens this coat and he shows he's got these canisters of moon air on and says, You know, do you want to buy one? And they go, Oh no, you know, anyway, that that was a joke. And when I had the review for it, the the the you know the lecturer said, Oh, that that's quite funny. And I thought, good, that's the object, the idea. But equally, it made me understand the structure of what it was, and that was really it was about an opposite, it was about asking yourself questions about how you could find a contrast to something, and I think a lot of humour revolves around contrast, and I think that's something that you you need to look for in ideas, certainly visual ideas, you know. If if, for example, going back to the little kind of joke with um the Monty Python and the fish, you know, the contrast is that Michael Palin's got this small kind of sardine-size fish that he's slapping John Cleese's face, and then you know, John Cleese produces this enormous the you know, this fish that's 30 times bigger than this little sardine and slaps him once. So there's a lot of contrast in that visual. You know, you you know, Palin is slapping the guy's face multiple times with a small fish, and Cleese is just hitting him once with this great big fish. And I think that's something to look out for if you're searching, you know, if you're sat in this position and looking to see why something's funny and why it's not funny, that's another aspect of it. You know, it's about contrast, especially you know, visual. I think you have a sense of humour, you will find things that are funny, and that's a lot to do with probably what you watched. I mean, you and I both watched a lot of Laurel and Hardy when we were kids, and I still will look at that and find it funny. Um, I know it's not everybody's cup of tea, um, but I you know, you know you're getting the signals, you know when they're gonna drop the piano or whatever it is, you know. So all of those things, you're looking for the signals, you're looking all the other aspects around telling that story, and that the humour is fitting and you know, working with the story.

SPEAKER_02 30:18

It's also also very clear from what you just said the importance of character, of the audience, knowing what the characters' expectations are, what their abilities are, how they're gonna react. Like with Laurel and Hardy, you know they are very, very different characters, and you know they're gonna react in a in a very very particular way, and you're expecting it. And I I know this is this is one part of of physical and visual comedy that we we slightly diverge on is the use of breaking the fourth wall, and it's and yeah, it's it's a great Laurel and Hardy trope, and Ollie does it all the time, and that is for me one of the funniest times when it's he does it so many times when Stan does something so ridiculous, just a little look. Be we are brought in, the audience is brought in, and we go, Oh my god, yeah, feel your pain, absolutely feel your pain. But we know he's gonna do that. Very rarely Stan does that because that's not his character, and we know, and you said you said with with Mr. Bean, and the setup that if someone imposes on him, his character is going to is going to be victorious in the end, and the audience knows how that character is going to react in a certain situation, and it's it's in live action, but it's also in it's also in the animated the animated versions of of of Mr. Bean, the animated series, but also in in so much else, even in Texavery. When Drupy is is having a having a scrap with a with a couple of couple of bad bad dogs, and you know how he's gonna react. He's gonna just be slow and they're all gonna be all manic and everything. But you know, you know how they're gonna how they're gonna react. So everything does come down to to character, that with the with visual comedy, especially with animation, and we say, Yeah, with animation, you you know, you can do anything. Yes, you can do anything. So many times in in shows that I've had, even in Bob the Belder, someone, someone came to me, the producer said, Yes, but yes, but we can't do that because of this and this and this. I said, So, um, so let me get this straight. You have a problem with this person doing this with the talking digger. That bears no resent uh resemblance to real life. This is a cartoon, so we can do that, we can push it a little bit further. That's what we can do in this medium. We can go that extra step, and that for me is is when you can bring your imagination and you can bring the library of the absolutely absurd in. That's such a such a joy to me when I get that situation. There are so many different aspects of comedy in in animation, and it's that's that's what keeps us going. That's what keeps us in this field, in this industry, at a greatly advanced age, is because we know that there is so much fun to be had.

SPEAKER_00 33:38

I do need to show you something, which um, you know, talking about the absurd and talking about Tech Sabory, talking about Droopy, um, I need to show you something. So do you know what that's from?

SPEAKER_02 33:56

Oh, that's the that's the the guy when he was in um it was that's the that's the guy in prison in the jail, isn't it? I can't remember what the name of it was.

SPEAKER_00 34:09

And it's a sequence when he's on the escape from and he shuts multiple doors.

SPEAKER_01 34:15

Oh yes, brilliant.

SPEAKER_00 34:19

That's an original animation drawing.

SPEAKER_01 34:22

Wow, fantastic.

unknown 34:25

Where did you get that?

SPEAKER_01 34:27

Did you steal it from a museum?

SPEAKER_02 34:29

No, I didn't.

unknown 34:29

I had to buy it.

SPEAKER_02 34:31

Wow, oh that's that's brilliant. I love that, and then every time, and then he does all this frantic stuff, and he hits somebody and goes, Hello Joe, and he's always there, and then he's off again. Oh, that's fantastic. Yeah, that's the epitome of tech savory right there.

SPEAKER_00 34:52

As we were talking about physical comedy today, oh I thought in just a fantastic to show you.

SPEAKER_02 34:59

Oh dear. Right. If Mr. Bean were here and we asked our usual question tea or coffee?

SPEAKER_00 35:09

I think Mr. Bean as a character, I would certainly say probably tea. We did do a story once where coffee was he went to a coffee bar, which he found a kind of a very unique experience. I know the rest of us in the in in the 21st century uh, you know, used to meeting up in coffee bars, but hit for him it was a kind of unique experience. So I am very much gonna say a cup of tea.

SPEAKER_02 35:33

Oh, right. And what about toast, assuming we can show toast being being cooked? Um does Mr. Bean have a preference for that?

SPEAKER_00 35:42

Well, you know, the obvious answer is beans, but um it's it's I I I think to be honest, having him making toast and he's done it a few times, he quite likes jam. I'd imagine he likes jam. I'm pretty sure we've put jam on the toast before. So I'm gonna go with jam.

SPEAKER_02 36:02

Excellent. Well, that's pretty definitive. I'm sure there will be contacts from agents if if there is uh if there is an issue with with tea and toast with jam on it. Okay, thank you, David, for a fantastically insightful conversation about physical and visual comedy in animation. There is much more to be discussed on this topic, and we will be returning to this. But at the moment, if you have liked this, please like and subscribe to our channel and keep coming back and tell everyone you've ever met all about how wonderful this is. And as always, we're not saving lives, it's just a cartoon. See you next time.