Green Darmok's Mostly Animation Blog

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...

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 cas...

 It all started with Pinocchio .  Twice.  More often if you stretch the definition of "all started." At 4 or 5 years old, as the '80s gave way to the '90s, I thought I knew what cartoons were: the cheap and tacky looking things that the other kids in the neighbourhood watched in the afternoons, and I had no interest in them.  That was until I saw Pinocchio (1940), which we videotaped from the TV, and I discovered how great a cartoon could be. A few years later - I must have been 10 - and I was a major fan of cartoons from the Golden Age of Animation (roughly, 1930s-1950s), but I hadn't seen Pinocchio in years (and a year is a long time when you've only lived for ten of them).  I got a yearning to see it again, but the TV-recorded video had long since worn out.  So it was at the top of my Christmas list, and when I got a new video copy on Christmas Day, the family sat down together in the evening to watch it. And... I was terrified. When you're a little bit...