He did some terrific work for Bob Clampett and then for Bob McKimson before quitting Warner Bros. in 1947 to work for Jerry Fairbanks.
I love the work Gould did in “Daffy Duck Hunt” (1947). Gould handles the climax scenes at the end of the cartoon. Warren Foster does a switch on an old joke where Daffy cons Porky Pig and the McKimson dog into singing “Jingle Bells.” In mid-song, Porky checks the calendar and sees that it’s April. There’s a cut. Gould and the in-betweeners did a great job. Porky seethes. The dog keeps singing (note how he gestures daintily).
Look at the dog’s pupils. He finally notices Porky’s expression.
Porky grabs Daffy’s Santa beard and pulls him down with one hand, then grabs his neck by the other to pull him out of the Santa suit and swings him toward the camera. The dog runs for cover.
Wham!
Porky goes for the axe. The dog tentatively peers at the action.
Porky notices something. Then comes the take.
The stamp on Daffy reads “Do Not Open Until Xmas.” Daffy has one last wisecrack before the cartoon irises to Daffy’s eye, which closes to end the cartoon.
Chuck McKimson, Phil De Lara and John Carey are the other credited animators, but McKimson’s animator credits for the first few years are inexplicably incomplete.
Why isn’t Manny Gould appreciated more?
ReplyDeleteHe is, but like most folks in animation, it's of a small collect group of people (I worship the ground Ted Eshbaugh walks on, but you barely hear a peep out of him in most circles).....
Gould seems to have gotten some negatives from Leonard Maltin's profile of the Mintz studio in "Of Mice and Magic", where he and Ben Harrison come off as the uncreative part of the studio's directions because of their 1930s Krazy Kat cartoons.
ReplyDeleteHarrison gets the worst of it in the book, but the inference I got from the chapter was that Art Davis and Sid Marcus were the creative ones at Columbia during the time period. It seems to have carried over into the views of Gould animator work at Warners, where Bob McKimson and Rod Scribner were the ones out of the Clampett unit animation historians focused on for their styles (if mentioned at all, Manny tended to be portrayed simply as 'Scribner lite' in that his work was energetic, but not groundbreaking).