Category Archives: modern animation

Tom & Jerry Tales Volume 6, completing the entire run of the Kids’ WB series, was released earlier this month. As with the earlier episodes, none of them turned out very good. Out of the batch here, noteworthy are: Kitty Cat Blues, haphazard attempt to follow up The Zoot Cat, featuring a rather long gag of Jerry tricking Tom into chasing a laser pointer (like a real cat) that comes out of nowhere; Kangadoofus, with Jerry posing a joey in Australia (and you thought Hippety Hopper had “artistic license”); Game of Mouse and Cat, which bizarrely uses the “Jasper” model of Tom (and he walks on all fours through the thing!); and (not joking) D.J. Jerry, with Tom owned by a joint smoking Jamaican music store owner, and Jerry running a pahty howse in the back (cameo by a street-talkin’ Tuffy: “Yo, Tom dawg, don’t be hatin’ on mah homies.”)

Story and characterization problems aside, the music in these things leaves no synthesizer effect unused. The classic T&Js tend to get whatever vitality they have from the soundtrack, and less so from Bill Hanna’s timing or Joe Barbera’s (expressive, but limited) rough sketches. A brassy musical score and destructive sound effects were more or less the foundation of those cartoons, and if you can’t at least get that, the shorts are going to flounder. (I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Scott Bradley really functioned as a third director on the T&J shorts of the 1940s and 1950s. Whether it was Mouse Trouble or Downhearted Duckling, the guy clearly wanted to hog the spotlight and tell the world that the film was his.)

If you just un-glossed whatever character layouts survived from overseas (Warren Leonheardt, who boarded on the episode Kitty Cat Blues, seen to the left, isn’t too convinced anything of his survived), you’d basically get what Hanna-Barbera would be doing with the characters if they were alive today: shallow, “modernized” reincarnations. And I honestly don’t think either of them would have a problem with that. It’s a shame that corporate agenda is the heart of these new cartoons, because the people working on the show really studied everything about the classic shorts (see the motion chart sketch below), and may have come up with a more reasonable facsimile in a better environment.

But all I can come up with after watching this DVD is “leave well enough alone.” I don’t want to see new Tom & Jerry cartoons anymore than I would want to see new Bugs Bunny or Popeye cartoons. They were films done in a different era, under different circumstances, and by people with a different world perspective than our own. But unfortunately, the standard thinking of the average joe in animation can’t fit that in his or her head: whatever worked once can and will work again. It’s why every cartoon on TV today looks like anime or Dexter’s Lab. A student I knew, who dropped out of the animation program at art school, summed it up bluntly: “Animation is too repetitive.”

The Screwy Squirrel modelsheet on display here has had me thinking about the backlogging of cartoon shorts again. For those unfamiliar with the term, it refers to how the cartoons were sitting on the shelf for months to years before being released to theaters. It’s why Rod Scribner’s animation shows up in cartoons released in 1955 even though he was part of the 1953 Warners layoff, or why Dick Lundy’s Barney Bear cartoons were released three years after he left MGM.

My question is: how were series and characters established if the backlog was an average of 18 to 24 months at most of these studios? As the modelsheet shows, Tex Avery had Screwy Squirrel redesigned almost a whole year before the first cartoon was even released. Similarly, I have a Baby Huey modelsheet (somewhere) dated 1949 for the third cartoon in that series, months before the first one hit theaters.

Unless I’m mistaken, it doesn’t seem like average movie-goers were used as a basis of what constituted an entertaining character (not before a few thousand was spent on dud series, learning the hard way). It sounds like the suits told the animators to be the judge themselves what would catch on. In a way, the old Chuck Jonesism, “We made them for ourselves,” has some truth to it.

It’s also probably why good animation making a comeback won’t happen any time soon, because that art was part of a society that is now antiquated. Back then, unless the studio was in some state of near bankruptcy, they didn’t need to see immediate revenue. It’s why Walt Disney could afford a bomb or two now and then without folding up.

Today’s society can’t handle that. Everything needs to be instantaneous, and done faster and cheaper. We need to see whether the film bombed or not 36 hours after it premieres. Every retard with a keyboard is allowed to voice an opinion, often destroying others’ work simply because they are able to so quickly and for free. There is no room for error.

Another problem is, unlike with movies in the 1960s, animation didn’t have enough people wanting to figure out how to get around the new system and still produce great work. Just about all of them embraced the shit. I can count the big names of people who tried to preserve quality animation on one hand. And about half of even those people wanted to stick to ‘tried and true’ principles that didn’t deserve to be preserved (i.e. the Disney studio, Jones, Bluth). This is why there have been only a few bright patches in the otherwise soiled mattress that is the last 45+ years of animation.

We all encourage it though, whether we want to admit it or not. We’re all reading and bitching about this with a high-speed Internet connection, are we not?