Tex Avery's cartoons combine high-speed slapstick and vaudevillian characterization with existential surrealism, which called for extreme technical and stylistic precision. In particular, the cartoons feature richly-detailed background paintings (until the style was deliberately streamlined in the 1950s) that belie the ridiculous story-lines and somehow make everything even funnier.
You won't see anything like this in any Warner Bros. Merrie Melodies/Looney Tunes short (especially Chuck Jones' stuff, which is always extremely stylized and subdued). MGM's Fred Quimby gave Avery higher budgets than he'd been allowed at Warner's, and Avery hired at least two former Disney artists (who were part of a late-1930s mass labor exodus from Disney) who worked on the backgrounds.
Now that I've finally got the legendary Intégrale Tex Avery (see my earlier post) I can finally see the incredible vast landscapes in Avery's animators' imaginations. And so can you (since I spent some time extracting the backgrounds, starting with my favorite Avery cityscapes).
These are backgrounds from Northwest Hounded Police (1946), Hound Hunters (1947) and Ventriloquist Cat (1950), all of which take place in the sort of anonymous mid-size metropolis you see in cartoons and comic strips. (Click images for much bigger full-size versions.)
http://www.jordanorlando.com/texaverycityscapes
And yes, Kilroy was here.
2 comments:
Once again it's taken me days to comment but I've been quick-ogling these since the 4th. So beautiful.
The high shot from the top of the schoolhouse and the one with the zoo are my favorites. Looking at them I feel like some frantic cat will zoom into frame any second.
Some of the images are just frames before the action starts (or after it finishes) like you said, but most of them involved some surgery, taking out the characters by finding other frames where they're somewhere else and patching them together etc.
I agree that they're beautiful. The "idea" of the city (which is all you need for the insane action) is so vividly clear, since the idea is fully painted (or "fully rendered") in this lush way.
I'm going to look at more specific cities next (when Avery overtly means New York or L.A.) and some of the incredible yawning, plunging vertiginous depths of skyscraper urbanity that Avery's stuff gets into.
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