Great BBC Caricature Video Short

Frequent reader of The Mad Blog and fellow Minnesotan Marv Sohlo emailed me a link to this video which features a short but informative piece on caricatures and why they resonate so much with people. It’s from the BCC show “The Human Face” narrated by John Cleese. Unfortunately the creators do not allow embedding, but click on the screen capture to go to the YouTube clip:

Click on the image for the full clip… it’s less than 2 minutes…. we’ll wait…

I’ve always said that a really good caricature looks more like the subject than a photo does, and some of the observations this video makes about how the brain processes the human face offers some explanation as to why that might be very true. While that is interesting, it’s the short interview with Spitting Image caricaturist Tim Watts and his great caricature sculpture of narrator Cleese that really makes this video good. Watt’s observations on what needed to be exaggerated on Cleese are spot on. Most enlightening is his observation that in order to exaggerate the chin and forehead “something had to give” and that meant reducing the size of Cleese’s nose and making it more delicate. That’s a great example of the theory of constant mass in action.