Not Enough Overlays

We’ve talked before about how directors at Warner Bros. used overlay cels with scenery placed over top of the animation and panned at a different rate than the background painting to give a sense of three dimensions. Tex Avery, in particular, liked to open his cartoon with one of those kinds of setting pans.

Frank Tashlin decides to go nuts with overlays in Little Pancho Vanilla, released October 8, 1938. Here, you see three senoritas carrying fruit and singing, while going behind some overlays.



They make a 180-degree turn from behind a rock. Suddenly, there’s a whole new set of overlays for them to walk behind.



1930s Warners cartoons have the weirdest camera movement. At the start of this scene, Tashlin has the camera truck in and down. You can see the camera is not steady. Then the camera starts panning to the left and pulling back. At the end of the scene, the camera stops, then it trucks down and in a bit to get a shot of the senoritas’ feet, then moves up.

You know, I wish I could get into Tashlin’s cartoons but, for the most part, I can’t. They’re populated (at least in the ‘30s) with huge-eyed characters. This one is full of unlikable characters. Pancho mumbles most of the time. The girls ridicule him. The mama wants to repress her son to be a child forever. The bull has little personality. Nothing really funny happens in Tedd Pierce’s story.

Bob McKimson is the credited animator. I couldn’t tell you who else was in the unit at the time. This is the second-last cartoon of Tashlin’s before he left for Disney. Bob Bentley and Joe D'Igalo were in his unit but they were soon animating in Miami for Max and Dave Fleischer. McKimson became “chief animator” at the Schlesinger studio in August 1939. Tashlin moved from Disney to Columbia back to Warners before finally reaching his goal of going into live action.