beatgirl

The landscape is abstract and looks like nothing less than a forensic closeup of the head of a man with extreme hair loss. A group of giant tubing structures spiral and twist up into the sky, big enough for a character to run on, but slippery in the wrong shoes.

To the tune of, yes, Beat Girl by John Barry (main theme for a forgotten British bad-girl melodrama, thanks for asking), Beat Girl makes the scene; she leaps, she twists, she kicks, she Frugs. Then she sees a bad guy standing nearby, minding his own business. He’s tall and thin, with a Thing-like red brick head and purple bellbottoms. Nix on that action chum! SMACK goes Beat Girl, he goes down and she does the swim. From the sky drops a green baddie with that under-the-skin gas-mask look of the guards from Flash Gordon. Bop! Bop! Bop! goes Beat Girl’s fists! Bop bop bop go Beat Girl’s hips! Then a sort of Godzilla-head Swamp-Thing guy with green skin and a pink T-shirt joins the fray. Beat Girl bites down hard on that bicep. Ouch.

Then she runs up one of the giant hair-like curlicues, the baddies in hot pursuit. Up up up she goes, and when she’s got a big enough head start, she stops to re-apply the lipstick. But she sees the nasty monsters come up behind her in her compact mirror. Turning around, she opens her mouth wide and exudes a burst of secret yellow Yowza Ray. They freeze; they disappear. Beat Girl blows on her lipstick tube like a smoking gun. Fade out. That’s all there is to this vignette -- just a slice of action-oriented character animation that animator Martin Leeper created to shore up his own technique.

On those terms it’s a success -- the action is fluid, naturalistic, and full of life, and the choreography is thick and slick. Leeper is an animatic lead/character animator at Technicolor Interactive in Hollywood and he animated Beat Girl in Maya.

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