What a Lion

Ed Love employed a little trick in the 1950s at Hanna-Barbera to make the animation look fuller. He’d animate different parts of a character, with two frames per drawing. But he’d animate one part in one frame, and a different part in the next frame (while holding the first part). That meant each frame looked different, like full animation.

Kind of the same thing is being done in this scene from the Captain and the Kids short What a Lion! (1938). The difference is there are two characters. The Captain moves in one frame, the lion moves in the second, the Captain moves in the third and so on. This means there’s constant movement, even though each character doesn’t always move.

Here are some consecutive frames to give you an idea. It also shows how unexaggerated takes were before Tex Avery started pushing them and other directors copied him. First, the take. Bill Hanna directed this cartoon (Ed Love has nothing to do wth it), and holds the Captain staring at Hans and Fritz off-screen for nine frames. The anticipation works like this three times: (1) Captain. (2) Lion. (3) Hold. The ninth frame is the first one below. The next drawing is held for two frames and the third drawing is held for a frame.



The take contracts and we’ll give you the next six frames. You can see how the characters alternative movement.



As the lion’s movement is ever so slight, let me slow down the animation so you can get a better look at it.



This is the last cartoon Hanna directed until he was paired with Joe Barbera in 1939 to create Puss Gets The Boot, technically under the supervision of Rudy Ising. Barbera remarked that Ising “didn’t want anything to do with it” and “deliberately removed himself from involvement in the film.” But that’s a story for another time.

Just as Joe and Bill weren’t given screen credit on Puss, none of Hanna’s artists got screen credit for What a Lion!.