Tuesday 8 December 2020

A Bob Clampett Background Trick

There are two ways you can have a very long background pan in a cartoon. One way is to paint a very long background. The other way is what you’ll find in Chicken Jitters, a 1939 Bob Clampett cartoon.

Dick Thomas painted two different backgrounds. The cameraman simply dissolved while panning both backgrounds. Because the pan is quick, you can’t see where one faded in and the other faded out.



Vive Risto and Bobe Cannon are the credited animators. There’s no story man listed. Perhaps Clampett did it himself. If so, he doesn’t seem to have been enthusiastic about this cartoon. The gags aren’t strong. There’s even one scene where the bad-guy fox talks but his mouth doesn’t move, as if Clampett wanted to get the cartoon done and saved time but not putting mouth movements on the exposure sheet.

1 comment:

  1. Clampett also reuses some obese Porky drawings from Tashlin's "Porky's Poultry Plant" in this one, where Porky uses a pipe to coax the worms out of the apples (He did have one of the animators tweak the facial image slightly from the Tashlin original, so the disconnect with the animation in the rest of the cartoon is only mildly, instead of blatantly obvious).

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