Stork Naked Backgrounds

Irv Wyner took over as the background artist in the Friz Freleng unit at Warner Bros. when Paul Julian left for UPA. Since it was the 1950s, his work was stylised. Certainly not as much as at UPA or in animated commercials made at that time, but more so than the 1940s.

To the left you see part of a painting of Paris in Stork Naked, released in 1955, where Daffy Duck takes on the drunken stork (which has Mel Blanc’s real voice at the outset). I can’t snip the whole thing together because of colour issues but this gives you a good idea of what Wyner was trying to do with Hawley Pratt’s layouts.

Pratt evidently loved tall, Victorian houses. You can see a great example in Back Alley Oproar (released in 1948) painted by Julian. We get some in this cartoon. They’re simpler as rendered by Wyner as we’re now into a period of stylised cartoons. They’re still very attractive, though I lean toward Julian’s work. The shades on the foliage of the trees is excellent.



More outline buildings over a solid colour with just a bit of green and purple to augment.



Same house, same basic angle, two entirely different backgrounds. Note the difference in the tree behind the fence. I’ll bet that later, the studio would have used the same background for both shots to save time and money (a la Hanna-Barbera).



An interior.



For reasons I do not understand, the version of the cartoon on DVD is cropped. Maybe people who demand everything in wide screen want it at 16:9, but it’s missing artwork at the top and bottom of the screen. Not terribly fair to Mr. Wyner, is it?

There’s an inside joke where the first family the stork visits is named “Pierce.” As there was alcohol on the premises, one can presume there is a relation to Warners writer Tedd Pierce (this short was written by Warren Foster).