Back in the day, when I was watching Pokemon, I was always cheering for Team Rocket. Nothing good ever happened to Team Rocket. The amount of cartoon violence they experienced is only comparable to that suffered by the cat in Tom & Jerry.

One summer holiday I convinced my mother to buy Tom & Jerry: The Complete Series. I’ve never had violent dreams before. That changed after watching The Complete Series for 6 hours a day the entire week. My brain was turning around the possibilities, how far a cat can be stretched & squashed? Nothing bad ever happened to the mouse. I though that was not fair-play, because Tom had the best plans. Touché monsieur pussy cat!

It is standard animation scenario to punish the bad guy. But the good guy must appear weaker, and smaller. If the good guy for some reason appears invincible, all of a sudden he becomes a bully.

Back in the 19th century, Charles Bargue observed the quality of draughtsmanship at the French academy was declining. He traced the cause to the lack of classical models, and created a series of nearly 200 lithographs to be copied by students.

The drawing course he created consisted of the following:

* Classical models of sculptures, like the Belvedere Torso, the head of Dante, and various arms, legs, hand and feet.
* Series of academical figure drawings in a simplified linear style.
* Master drawings intended to be copied as accurately as possible by the students.

Having re-copied all the litographs the student was ready to draw from life. Van Gogh copied the entire set, so that’s 200 large drawings meticulously copied, and if you assume 5 days per copy it totals 1000 days of drawing.