ThadBlog

Talk about getting knocked down! When Disney’s top animator, Bill Tytla, left after the strike, he ended up doing animation in NY at Terry and Famous! Poor devil!

But that doesn’t mean none of Tytla’s amazing skill didn’t end up in those films. At Terry in particular, he added a sense of dramatics to the Mighty Mouse shorts that was not there before or after. I believe the transformation of the cat in this scene, from Jekyll and Hyde Cat (1944), is Bill Tytla’s work. There is no way in Hell any regular at Terry could pull that scene off. It looks like something directly pulled out of Snow White!

I’m not sure how much Tytla did in this clip. He may have been responsible for the cat’s dead body, which is the most disturbing thing I know of in a Terrytoon (outside of the music). Cool to see Mighty get a few punches thrown at him too.

Johnny Gent was at Terry before he started his tenure at Famous, and I’m trying to find out what he did on those early 40s films.

I think this piece, from Champion of Justice (1944), is his work. I really like the animation of the nephew here, and the posing and timing looks like Gent’s work. Anyone else agree? Disagree?

There’s a slight discrepency with this film’s release date, as it is within a few months from the first cartoon he animated at Famous on. Gent said he worked on Mighty Mouse when he was still Super Mouse, so who knows.

Here’s a clip from The Helpless Hippo (1953), featuring one of Tyer’s brilliant shrink-takes. I wonder, what are those little black ’sticks’ left behind when a character runs off in many Tyer scenes? My guess is that it might be pieces of lead left on the drawings by this eccentric guy!

Mighty cartoons tend to be better when he’s actually in the whole cartoon, and not just the last two minutes. Too bad it didn’t happen often.

Yeah, I know, it’s been too long since the last one!

Here is a scene from one of the better Mighty Mouse cartoons (I should know, having sat through about 50 of them recently), The Reformed Wolf (1954), featuring the antics of a mentally-challenged sheepdog and a schizophrenic-sounding wolf. Mighty is more fun to watch when it looks like he’s just having fun abusing his enemies.

I’m not sure who animated the scene before Tyer comes in. Paging Milton Knight!

(Thanks to Andrea for this and the next few Mighty Mouse posts)

Lots of folk claim that many of the things that made cartoons fun were sucked out by the Disney influence. While for the most part, this is true, but there were a few directors that said “screw the Disney influence” and went ahead with doing a hybrid of sort of cartoony animation (and gags) with sophisticated designs. Clampett, Avery, and Tashlin in particular.

I don’t think the Disney influence was bad. I can’t stand most of the early 30s cartoons save the earliest Boskos, Iwerks Mickey, and Irv Spence Flip the Frog I actually enjoy. But there were really great principles in those films that made them animation fun. I’m actually glad the influence came in, because it made those who excelled with using it, like Jones, all the better, while Clampett, Tashlin, and Avery remained unique with the preference for broad, cartoony actions.

The ducks in these two clips from Booby Hatched (1944) still move in the stylized way Tashlin originated and Davis animated, but there is a lingering remainder of the bounciness from the old 30s cartoons. See if you can spot it!

Great timing in animation is extremely hard to do, and it’s even harder to make it unique.

The thing that’s always stood out to me in Frank Tashlin’s 1940s cartoons is how stylized the movement is. Daffy in particular always moved beautifully.

In other directors’ cartoons, characters snapping from pose to pose looks cheap with a lot of brush blurs, and in the case of Freleng and McKimson’s shorts, badly drawn. The animation in Tashlin’s shorts is unique and unlike any other director’s in the history of Warners.

Lots of animation in Tashlin’s shorts seem to use leftover drawings, but it’s pieced together so well it looks more like it’s intentional than an error. In my opinion, Tashlin was as every bit exaggerated (or ‘cartoony’) as Clampett, only Tashlin was more sophisticated, while Clampett took a more sophomorphic approach to it (that is not a bad thing).

Art Davis seemed to be Tashlin’s favorite animator, or at least his best one, as he is behind all of those great scenes of sophisticated ‘cartooniness’. These techniques are seen nowhere in Davis’ own films of the late 40s, nor in his animation for Friz, so it goes to show you what a great director and a great animator are capable of when they are working at their full potential.

These two clips are from one of my all-time favorite cartoons, Plane Daffy (1944). Look at how beautiful Daffy is in these scenes! Go out and buy the new Looney Tunes set, because it’s worth it just for this cartoon, and the other Tashlin shorts, alone.