[pitbulllady]

I'm gonna weigh in on this with my personal take on the whole proportions thing.

First, it's pretty much well-known that cartoonists and animators(which are NOT the same thing)exaggerate certain features of a character, and usually this includes making the characters' heads bigger in proportion than they would be IF these were living people, or animals, or whatevers. Many Western animators also tend to leave off drawing things that are not absolulely necessary to make the character "believable", if you will, like fingernails, eye lashes(especially on male characters, even though males have eye lashes, too), nostrils, etc. This is certainly the case with the Foster's characters, both human and otherwise. I tend to look at it this way: I know that those features are intentionally exaggerated, and therefore I know that if these WERE real, live people, Mac's head would not be so huge, Frankie's neck would not be that long, Goo and Wilt would both have much larger torsos to accomodate vital organs, Madame Foster would be taller, and so on and so forth. The logistics of how So-and-So would be able to hug Whats-Her-Face doesn't bother me, because I tend to automatically assign "real people" proportions to them, mentally. It's like that pencil drawing of Wilt relaxing on a chair that's on my DA gallery, and that drawing of him made by one of my sixth-grade students last year, in which both of us chose to assign more realistic proportions and anatomical features, like muscles and lips, to him while still making him look like Wilt, rather than just a very tall human with a missing arm. We both gave him a torso that was more in proportion, with enough space for a set of lungs and other vital organs, without making him look unrecognizable. I've seen plenty of art on DA in which Mac and Frankie were drawn with realistic human proportions, for their respective ages, and these still were recognizable as Mac and Frankie, even without the deliberately exaggerated features or left-out features that are so common in animation. I guess to some extent many of you are "spoiled" by Anime', since Japanese animators spare no expense in creating their products, and draw/animate many more details, and include realistic proportions, so examples of Western animation seem "off". I don't watch Anime', and didn't have it when I was a kid(other than "Speed Racer"), so I don't tend to find the over-large heads and other typical features of American animation to be strange.

As for Goo's height, it's a well-known biological fact that girls grow much faster than boys, up until puberty, when boys usually experience a rapid growth spurt that puts them ahead of the girls in terms of height. In my fourth-grade classes, many of the girls are a LOT taller than the boys, and some are nearly as tall as I am! At the Jr. High, though, only a few of my eighth-grade girls are as tall as, or taller, than their male classmates. Compared to Frankie, Goo's height does not seem that extreme.

pitbulllady