The camera pans over a long Fernando Montealegre background drawing after an establishing shot in the Mike Lah-directed “Sheep Wrecked” (released in 1958). I’ve had to break it down into two graphic files because it’s so long, and the camera moves in on it slightly about halfway through the pan.
The drawing is from an Ed Benedict layout. Monty and Benedict’s work wasn’t quite as stylised at Hanna-Barbera, where they were working when this cartoon appeared in theatres.
It is interesting to see how drastically the backgrounds at MGM changed during the CinemaScope years. The Warners backgrounds -- even Maurice Noble's work -- took to their UPAization in a more gradual way, and in the Jones unit by 1957 there was still a certain sense of weight and depth in the backgrounds for the Road Runner cartoons. Compare those to what was going on in the wide screen efforts at Metro, where the backgrounds (even, by the end, in the Tom & Jerry shorts), were allowed to go as flat and stylized as possible while remaining viable the character designs that had their roots in the 1940s.
ReplyDelete