Thursday 20 June 2019

Tailing the Penguin

“He’s got m’tail again,” says the guard dog to the viewing audience in the Chilly Willy cartoon I'm Cold.



Here are some of the drawings as the dog tries to extricate itself from the hole in the floor. These are consecutive frames, shot only once.



Tex Avery borrows from himself here. The laconic dog with the accent is taken from his southern wolf character at MGM (both were done by Daws Butler). The gags have a nice flow. Avery handled Chilly Willy very well in the two cartoons he made with the character.

The orchestrations in Clarence Wheeler’s score in this cartoon are really good, especially the selection of solo instruments and the flute when the penguin scurries about. The animation is by Ray Abrams, Don Patterson and La Verne Harding.

1 comment:

  1. Avery and Wheeler use a very minimalist, score here to go along with the limited animation, and they would do that again for "The Legend of Rockabye Point" where the music is completely there to emphasize the action (something Avery apparently fought with Scott Bradley over in his MGM cartoons, according to Mike Barrier, where Tex wanted the music to make obvious references to what the characters were doing or what the gag of the moment was on screen and Bradley wanted to do things a little more subtle).

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