Green Darmok's Mostly Animation Blog

The Unbearable Bear  (Schlesinger/Warner Bros., 1943), directed by Chuck Jones Here's the scenario. A cock-er-ney rogue of a fox is trying to rob a bear couple's house.  Mr Bear, a "bloomin' copper", is out, while Mrs Bear complains about him in her sleep. One by one, more characters will join the story, changing the scenario and sometimes altering the dynamics of the other characters, keeping the cartoon fresh and entertaining. First, a talkative little mouse named Sniffles, who catches the burglar trying to crack a safe.  To stop him from alerting Mrs Bear, the fox convinces him that he's Robin Hood, stealing from the rich to give to the poor.  (Sniffles gets in a great bit of bad logic here: "If you say you're Robin Hood then you must be Robin Hood, 'cause Robin Hood wouldn't tell a lie!") So here's the new scenario.  The fox is trying to rob the house without waking Mrs Bear.  Although Sniffles is on his side, he's still makin

Despite its seemingly loose and unfocused story, Porky's Party  (1938) is a very well-structured cartoon.  Let's take a look at it. Bob Clampett and his team take a few seconds to establish the setting, then approximately the first third of the cartoon (two and a half minutes) to set up the three main elements. The setting: Porky Pig's birthday party.  Element 1: Porky gets a silkworm as a present, who will make clothes whenever you instruct him to "sew".  Sometimes these clothes are embarrassing. Element 2: Porky's dog, who, as Michael Barrier puts it in Hollywood Cartoons , is "ridiculously and thus appropriately" named Black Fury, gets drunk on hair grower after watching Porky applying some to his scalp. Element 3: Porky's two party guests are a gluttonous penguin and a goofball goose. Each element is introduced in a separate sequence, but they flow together nicely.  They are also set up in advance - Black Fury is around from the start of the

Nobody did manic energy like Bob Clampett, especially in his last few years at Warner Bros.  And no cartoon did manic panic like Bob Clampett's  Draftee Daffy  (1945). The story is a variation on the "escaped criminal" plot previously used by Tex Avery in Dumb-Hounded (1943) and later in Northwest Hounded Police  (1946) - updated to be more World War 2-relevant (and probably more relatable to most of the contemporary audience).  Daffy's gung-ho patriotic fervour turns to panic when he learns he's been called up by "the Little Man from the Draft Board." While Avery's escaped jail-wolf travelled all over the world in his attempt to escape the Long (and calmly stoic) Arm of the Law, Daffy spends most of the cartoon just trying to escape his house.  But any restrictions in the setting are made up for by Daffy's performance - that is, the combined performance of voice actor Mel Blanc and the animators. I posted before  about how fascinated I was by th

Last week  I posted a couple of "Tom and Jerry oddities", where directors Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera used perspective trickery to make an object fit into a space that was too small for it, and changed Tom's front paws from feet to hands between scenes, and had trouble determining how many digits he should have. Maybe they should just have done like Bob Clampett did in Porky's Tire Trouble (Warner Bros., 1939), and made gags out of both oddities. Porky's large and ungainly hound, Flat Foot Flookey, is introduced emerging from a comically small dog-house, with long shoes on each of his four feet.  Within a single shot, one of his front feet turns into a hand - and his shoe into a glove! - so he can pluck a flea from his hide.  With his task completed, it becomes a foot wearing a shoe again as he proudly displays the flea to the audience. And, just as proudly, Clampett displays the impossible actions of the characters to the audience, making them sources of deliberat

 In the cartoon Mouse Trouble  (1944), Tom opens a steel trap and slides it into Jerry's mouse-hole in the wall. That's never going to fit in there! The circumference of the trap is clearly too wide to fit through the hole, but the scene requires that it does.  So, how do they get around this?  Maybe Tom could squeeze it in.  The trap would squash into a narrower shape (as if it were made of a softer material) as it goes through the small gap, then pop into shape once it had reached the other side.  Impossible in real life, of course, but cartoon props are usually more malleable than they would be in real life. However, this approach didn't seem to be part of directors Hanna and Barbera's cartoon vocabulary (yet), so they (and animator Irv Spence) employed a perspective trick instead. When Tom slides it in (and when Jerry slides it back out the other exit), the steel trap is at an angle so it appears narrower from the viewer's perspective, and therefore, the viewer

Some people describe animators as "actors with pencils" (or actors with... digital animation tools).  After all, the animators create performances with pencils, as actors create performances with their faces and bodies.  By the start of the 21st century, the marketing departments of animation companies were starting to advertise the voice actors as if they were solely responsible for the performances we see on screen, advertising their names above the title like they do with live-action actors.  But the animators deserve equal credit. In the early '90s, starting with Beauty and the Beast  (1991), the closing credits for the Disney animated features started listing the animators alongside the voice actors for each character, acknowledging their dual responsibility (perhaps they should have mentioned the live-action reference models as well, but that's another story).  With the stage-musical influence in the storytelling, and the stock characters making up the cast, one