Green Darmok's Mostly Animation Blog

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...