Thursday 8 July 2021

Multiple Eyes

Don Williams provides some beautiful animation in the not-all-that-exciting A Hick, a Slick, a Chick, a 1948 one-shot by the Art Davis unit at Warners.

His animation of Elmo mouse putting on clothes to leave the house (while singing) really is expressive. And he also employs multiple-eye in-betweens as he did in other cartoons for Davis. Here are some examples.



Williams will stretch a character, drop his bottom half down, then follow with the rest of body, with the multiple eyes left in the path.

Tex Avery began a cartoon called The Slick Chick in 1944. They share the same bent-fist punches, but the Avery cartoon is far faster and funnier. Still, Avery doesn’t spend almost the first 30 seconds on personality animation.

6 comments:

  1. Emery Hawkins' animation in this one is some of my favorite as well.

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  2. The Chuckster used a similar object-shaped, character-posterior-focused, iris-out effect in Zoom at the Top (1962).

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  3. While not a laugh-out-loud outing, the end gag leading into the "iris out" is pretty amusing.

    Of course, who can't love the great animation coming out of the short-lived Davis unit? Williams, Hawkins, Davidovich and Melendez brought Davis's cartoons to vibrant and hysterical life!!!

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    1. The Davis unit had some solid and funny shorts. He breathed new life into Porky and I like his take on Daffy.

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    2. Plus, Davis' cartoons had some weird endings that beg for a rewatch just to see if it made any sense, from Porky starting a custom-made furniture store with a French lumberjack flea after the former angrily eats a con artist exterminator's desk to a cat named Heathcliff refusing to die after his bird companion tells him that he's worth more money dead than alive.

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    3. Agreed....and this one didn't even have an establishing shot,either, but afunny open title. It starts with the great Stan Freberg(?) as Elmo sinbging Rural Rhythm..a familiar SONG..!

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