Monday 12 November 2012

Snafuperman Snafu

In cartoons, arms, hands, legs or bodies sometimes disappear, and it’s not because an anvil has been dropped on someone. It’s because someone screwed up and the animation checker didn’t notice.

You know how it works. Part of a character may remain still for a few drawings while other parts move. The other parts are on separate cels. Occasionally, one of them is forgotten when the scene is photographed and no one spots it.

That happened in the military cartoon “Snafuperman,” animated by the Freleng unit at Warners. For two frames, part of Snafuperman is missing.






This hit military screens in February 1944, so Gerry Chiniquy, Virgil Ross, Manny Perez and Dick Bickenbach were probably in the unit at the time. Paul Julian drew the backgrounds.

6 comments:

  1. There's a really weird one in 1949's "Bear Feat" where Junior's head detaches from his body while he's spinning Pa with his feet. It's hard to see how the camera department could miss that one, but it may have just been too much of a bother to go back and x-out that exposure on the film negative (which is why Jones said Warner's directors became so good at pre-editing their cartoons when it came to timing, since there were no corrections allowed once it went to camera).

    The same thing may have happened here -- once it's shot, it's shot, and they're not going to post-edit the cartoon to fix 1-2 frames of mistakes.

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    1. I bet. Interesting how it was back then given the circumstances.

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  2. I remember seeing the same thing in Freleng's "Foney Fables" (1942) in scene with the kid.

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  3. That's the "this little piggy" scene, isn't it? I can never remember the titles of all of them but that one was really bad.
    I'm not sure if I've done it on this blog but there's the one when Elmer vanishes for a couple of frame in "The Wabbit Who Came to Supper."

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    1. I've watched "The Wabbit Who Came to Supper" countless times since I was a child, but I've never noticed Elmer vanishing, so I guess that goes to show the animators (or producers) were right not to care too much – the general public won't notice anyway. The same goes for the two other cartoons discussed here (I've only seen "Snafuperman" once, though).

      Mistakes that irritate me a lot, on the other hand, are the ones where they've mistaken the position of the cels, even if they last for just a few frames, like Daffy swinging back and forth before striking the hotel manager in "Porky Pig's Feat", or one of the cats jumping under (actually over) a bed in "Kitty Kornered".

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  4. Woody's disappearing/reappearing pillow in "Smoked Hams" is one of my favorite glitches.

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