Got a Magnifying Glass?

One of the reasons Tom and Jerry won all those Oscars under Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera was because the characters were great actors. They were wonderfully expressive.

The Cat Concerto (released in 1947) is a fine example. Ken Muse turned out some fine footage of Tom as the high-brown pianist, with Irv Spence providing looney expressions when Jerry exacts revenge for having his nap inside the piano disturbed.

That brings us to Carmen Get It!.

In a way, comparing a cartoon made in the early ‘60s to one from the later ‘40s isn’t quite fair. At Warner Bros., what was being made in 1962 was pretty lacklustre compared to the cartoons from the period of Rabbit Hood or Back Alley Oproar. The later Tom and Jerrys produced by Hanna and Barbera weren’t as attractive as the ones made when they were winning Oscars (wide screens, flattened designs and a changeover of animators in the mid-‘50s didn’t help).

Still, cartoons should be entertaining. And I’m afraid the Tom and Jerrys under the eye of Gene Deitch were not.

One of a number of things that bothers me about them is what I mentioned off the top is the expressions. Deitch seems to have loved a number of things, and one of them was long shots. It’s smart to vary shots in a cartoon but the problem with Carmen Get It! and a number of other Deitch shorts is the characters spend too much time in wide shot, which eliminates any chance to give the characters expressions and let them act, as Hanna and Barbera used to do.

These are just some examples.



In the scene below, Jerry has a rose between his teeth. It’s a good idea, but Jerry is so tiny you can’t make out the rose. So what’s the point of it?



Okay, but the closer shots, you’re saying. The M-G-M animators—Ed Barge, Ray Patterson, Spence, Muse, Mike Lah—were able to make the characters act. You knew what they were thinking. What they were thinking motivated the next part of the story. Deitch’s animators simply went for goofy expressions.



And what about Tom below? I’m sorry, it’s a pretty wretched drawing. It’s more or less held for five frames. Could you picture Muse drawing something like this?



There are some good things going on with the story in this cartoon. The last scene was no surprise, but I like it anyway. But Tom and Jerry just didn’t mix well with Gene Deitch.

Deitch moved on to create a dozen cartoons starring Nudnik, a stylish little series. You won’t find long shots like those above. Nudnik’s actions and motivation are clear for the audience to see. Will Jones of the Minneapolis Star Tribune praised the Paramount-released cartoons in a column on Oct. 10, 1966, where he recommended arriving early or staying late to watch From Nudnik With Love at a local theatre. Among his “few nice words about the Nudnik cartoons,” Jones wrote:

Visually, the cartoonists who make the films indulge in the same sort of elaborate sadism that is a characteristic of the Roadrunner and the cat-chasing-mouse cartoons, but with a most important difference in point of view. It is not just one cartoon creature trying to do in another, or outwit another. It is Nudnik, simply trying to bring something pleasant into the world, who triggers the action. And it is the whole that is the sadist, rejecting Nudnik and anything he has to offer. . . .
A fellow named Gene Deitch gets credit as writer and director for the cartoons.

Deitch was praised for later films, winning the San Sebastian International Film Festival’s “Golden Seashell” in 1969 for Obri in the best short film category. (It was banned in Czechoslovakia, where it was made).

As for the aforementioned The Cat Concerto, we’ll have some words tomorrow.