Yup. There’s a puss. And a booty.
This 1943 Warners cartoon features more of Frank Tashlin’s experimentation with layouts. The evil cat slinks toward the camera in perspective and his body fills the whole frame. There’s a quick cut to the cat creeping away in perspective and then sitting down, watching the bird in the distance.
Tashlin fills the cartoon with jagged camera work and low angles, as if parts of the film are shot at the cat’s level. And there’s the angular, deco-style house exterior and interiors that Tashlin loved, apparently drawn by Dick Thomas.
Cal Dalton gets the sole animation credit. Izzy Ellis and Art Davis would have been in the unit as well. Dave Hilberman worked with Tashlin and I’ll leave it to the experts to definitively say he did the layouts on this cartoon.
This was the last B&W WB short, aside from a few SNAFU shorts...and the one and only one shot in B&W that got retrraced in the 60s and in the nearly 80 original short package that got added to the "post-48" shorts, starting with "Plane Dippy"[1936] with Porky.Steve J.Carras..
ReplyDeleteWell, let's see...David Hilberman was the most possible person to do such layouts - layouts in the last Tashlin's(and McCabe's too!) looks basically the same, like the one person done them.
ReplyDeleteEarl Klein was stick with Clampett, but it' quite possible that Tom McKimson worked on layouts at the same time(+ animating).
Jerry Beck says in the commentary that Don Williams and Shamus Culhane also animated here.
ReplyDeleteCulhane's autobiography does have a drawing of Rudolph (that's mis-identified as Sylvester), so he definitely did some work on the cartoon.
ReplyDeleteTashlin said he hated having to go back into B&W cartoons when he returned to Warners as the low man on the totem pole, but by the time this cartoon was made he had to know it would be the final B&W effort by the studio, and seemed to use that to do a cartoon that emphasized the fact it was supposed to be happening in a low-light/monochrome setting (he would also tinker a bit with nighttime look of his cartoons once his Looney Tunes went to color, especially in 'tinting' Porky darker for the final scene of "Swooner Crooner").