'Toons Learn Physics, The Better To Break Its Rules

by Lonny Shavelson

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Bulked up: When Bruce Banner becomes the Incredible Hulk, where does all that extra mass come from? Professor Alejandro Garcia explains in the video below. Universal Pictures

 

 

 

If the Hulk kicks this guy, which way will he fly? Watch and see.

 

 

 

"You have to know what the rules are in order to break them, to advance the story successfully and [to] keep the audience believing."

Illustrator Courtney Granner

 

 

 

Lonny Shavelson

Alejandro Garcia teaches The Physics of Animation at San Jose State University.

 

All Things Considered, July 3, 2008 · What is it that makes Looney Tunes so loony?

Well, for one thing: when Road Runner lures Wiley Coyote at seemingly supersonic speed off the edge of a cliff. The coyote freezes in mid-air, looks down and realizes there's no cliff under him anymore.

Then, usually with a pained expression, he rockets straight down into the ground.

Of course if a real coyote — one subject to the laws of gravity — were inattentive enough to go speeding off a cliff, it would fall immediately. And its downward path would follow a continuous arc, as vector laws and the physics of velocity insist.

Still, despite its scofflaw ways, Road Runner is physicist Alejandro Garcia's favorite cartoon.

Which is saying something because, thanks to a $200,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, Garcia is spending his summer teaching a master class, The Physics of Animation, for cartooning students at San Jose State University.

In the first class of its kind, he's showing animators how the rules of physics apply to their world.

 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=92189335
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