Green Darmok's Mostly Animation Blog

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, th...