Sunday Mailbag: Pixar Parody?

Q: What is going to be your approach to the parody of “Toy Story 4” in the upcoming CLAPTRAP book? How do you “caricature” cartoon characters? And how will you fit in a caricature of a real human (backer) in a cartoon story?

A: A timley question… I happen to be working on that very parody right now!

I have done a few “Pixar” parodies for MAD in the pst, and I am taking a similar approach to the art in the spoof of “Toy Story 4” in CLAPTRAP. Essentially since the characters are all animated characters I do not seek to “caricature” them in the same sense I would a person. In a way, they are already caricatures, since the characters themselves have exaggerated expressions in the film just like most cartoon/animated characters do. What I will do is draw them more or less as they appear in the films, and maybe make them a little more “over the top” when the gags warrant that. Otherwise I concentrate on “selling the gags” Des has written through the expressions of the characters themselves.

Des and I teamed up on a Toy Story parody once before in MAD, a mash up called “Toyota Story” that spoofed both the Pixar films and the (at the time) news stories about Toyota cars having mysterious spontaneous acceleration that caused several accidents.

Actually the above image was originally done for MAD’s website, but then we did a couple of story pages and turned it into an article in MAD. Here are some close ups from the “poster” and a few of the panels from that story:

Now that feature was a short one, so I did a fully digital painted approach. That’s not really practical when doing a 7 page story. Technique-wise, I am going to do with the CLAPTRAP parody what I did with the few panels of the mini-spoof of “The Incredibles 2” that appeared in a more recent MAD piece:

This is my “colored line” technique. I do the same pen and ink traditional linework on board I do for the usual MAD stuff, but after scanning the pages rather than leave the lines black I color them to compliment the objects/area they are defining. This entails a little more overall painting for the color as well, so it’s a bit more time consuming. However the results are a softer, richer, more “3D” look that better represents the look of Pixar animation.

As for working in the “real person”, that person is Toy Story 4 director Josh Cooley, so we are working him in like the onlookers are worked in above, only directing a scene.

Des’s script is great for this spoof. I hope people enjoy reading it as much as I am enjoying drawing it!

Thanks to Ferd Smerdly for the question. If you have a question you want answered for the mailbag about  cartooning, illustration, MAD Magazine, caricature or similar, e-mail me and I’ll try and answer it here!