Thursday 10 May 2018

Owlight

I’m not sure why an owl’s eyes would light up a forest, but that’s the situation in Bear Raid Warden, a 1944 cartoon starring Barney Bear.

Barney wonders why he can see a shadow in the supposed dark, then takes care of the situation with a pair of sunglasses.



The lighting effects are quite nice, but the cartoon seemingly exists for the purpose of reaction drawings. The cartoon is climaxed with Barney destroying his own home by mistake. The audience already knows it’s his home; the gag is his reaction when he realises what he’s done. And Barney’s reactions are hardly as extreme as what the Tex Avery unit was doing at MGM at this time.

Arnold Gillespie, Mike Lah, Ed Barge and Jack Carr receive animation credits. Director George Gordon’s name is absent from the screen; he had gone to work for, I think, Hugh Harman by the time the cartoon was released. It sounds like Billy Bletcher plays Barney.

1 comment:

  1. It is Bletcher. He plays Barney again in Barney Bear's Polar Pest (another Gordon entry).

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