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.
Emery Hawkins' animation in this one is some of my favorite as well.
ReplyDeleteThe Chuckster used a similar object-shaped, character-posterior-focused, iris-out effect in Zoom at the Top (1962).
ReplyDeleteWhile not a laugh-out-loud outing, the end gag leading into the "iris out" is pretty amusing.
ReplyDeleteOf 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!!!
The Davis unit had some solid and funny shorts. He breathed new life into Porky and I like his take on Daffy.
DeletePlus, 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.
DeleteAgreed....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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