Friday 13 April 2018

The Kornered Kitties

I get the feeling that Bob Clampett told his animators “Go as much over the top as you want to” when Kitty Kornered was in production. Some of the takes are just insane.

Porky’s pets are drinking, relaxing on a couch, smoking El Ropos and chowing down on chocolates when the pig bursts in.



Some reaction drawings. Nobody but Clampett would have had anything like this in their cartoons.



The littlest cat spits out a chocolate he’s eating. These are consecutive frames. This must be Manny Gould at work.



The characters are panicked a lot in this cartoon. Here’s a great example.



Gould, Rod Scribner and Bill Melendez receive screen credits for animation. This seems to have been the third-last cartoon Clampett directed before he left Warner Bros.

The verdict in the Motion Picture Herald from Fred J. Hutchings of the Community Theatre in Leader, Saskatchewan, not far from the Alberta border: “Not too good. There have been better cartoons from this company.” Said the Showmen’s Trade Review: “All Right. Porky Pig and the cat have a runaround here which goes so fast it is hard at times to follow the action on the screen. However, this crazy pace is going to pep up any program, so you will probably want this one. Artwork and Technicolor are splendid.”

6 comments:

  1. I noticed that the comic book being perused by the cheese-liking kitty ("SMACK!") is similar in design to Daffy's in The Great Piggy Bank Robbery, with its four panels per page lacking gutters between them, and rudimentary artwork within. Also, Porky apparently owns volumes of his own comics (comp copies from Dell, hopefully).

    I won't mention what the chocolate being spit out resembles.

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  2. I am firmly in the Clampett "cult", I always get a big laugh out of his cartoons. Thanks for posting that chocolate spit-out shot by Manny Gould, Yowp! It goes so fast at speed that I've never actually seen what went on in that scene before!

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  3. Love those wild expressions, and the intermediate frames.
    Makes me so wonder what Clampett's version of Sylvester & Tweety would have been like.

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  4. There was a great "mc escher" moment when Porky points his Blunderbuss upward at the cats waiting at the foot of the stair case.

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  5. The cat wild takes and the cats taking off are actually the work of Bill Melendez. The animation is a bit spontaneous to be the work of Gould.

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