Monday 15 April 2013

The Two Looks of Andy Panda

For reasons lost to time, someone decided to redesign Andy Pandy for the 1944 cartoon “The Painter and the Pointer.” Here’s Andy on the title card. I think this is an Alex Lovy design, with the cutsey-poo rounded two-teeth-in-one.



And here’s a shot of Andy from the cartoon itself.



The dog isn’t consistent, either. Sometimes, he looks like a near relative of Pluto. Other times, he reminds me of the Shakespearean dog in the cartoons put out by the Art Davis unit at Warner; not a surprise considering Emery Hawkins worked on both.

Hawkins and Les Kline get an animation credit.

5 comments:

  1. At least he started wearing pants at this point! :-P

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  2. Visually, Andy's redesign is way worse than the closest thing I can equate it to, which is 'Fat Elmer' in those four 1941-42 WB shorts. Fudd isn't all that great looking (particularly in Friz's first effort), but there's still a bit of a pleasing, rounded facial design in the character, even if the body became tougher to animate. I'm still not sure, other than a more adult-looking Andy, what Culhane and his crew were trying for in this short, especially since they had done such a good job in improving the overall design of the Lantz cartoons from the Lovy era up until this point.

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  3. I can't find it right now, but there's this Andy model sheet that was obviously based on a Mickey model sheet- no doubt brought over by a ex-Disney animator.

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  4. Matt Groening mentioned this cartoon in a list of "Things Which Disturbed and Frightened Me As A Child."

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  5. Perhaps this was their attempt to move away from Andy being a nice, gentle character...if only for this one short. It's almost like the director and the animators are deliberately creating this jarring, angry version simply as an experiment. Andy clearly woke up on the wrong side of the bed and doesn't even appear to even be in the mood for painting.

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