(Roughly) Daily

From Matthijs Van Mierlo‘s The Gaze, via Laughing Squid, an appreciation of the evocative background art in Looney Tunes cartoons…

When you strip Looney Tunes from all its characters and movement and  music, you discover this hidden dimension filled  with beautiful images that are abandoned, silent,  and kind of creepy sometimes. It’s the complete opposite of what Looney Tunes is. Filled with life and very loud. These background images are liminal spaces. Spaces that are usually filled with life, but are now dead silent…

Layout designers come up with the designs and the lighting and the camera angles for each shot of the cartoon, and those  initial designs are then used by the background artists to create the actual backdrops. These  artists are the unsung heroes of the Golden Age of American animation. An age that ran from  the 1930s up until the early 70s…

One of the things [iconic background artist Maurice Noble] quickly threw out the door was a style of realism that was often used at Disney. …He said that if  you have characters that are mainly lines and flat color, you should follow the same approach in your backgrounds. And if your characters are caricatures of reality, your background art should  be a caricature as well. For instance by adding lots of exaggerated imperfections or by using  stretched out and distorted perspectives…

More at “The Quietly Elegant Background Art of Looney Tunes” via @LaughingSquid.

See also the Instagram feed looneytunesbackgrounds.

* Claude Monet

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As we set the scene, we might recall that it was on this date in 2008 that Disney released Pixar’s WALL-E. Directed by Andrew Stanton, who co-wrote with Jim Reardon, the tale of a maintenance robot who falls in love won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature (with five additional Oscar nominations), Hugo Award for Best Long Form Dramatic Presentation, the final Nebula Award for Best Script, and the Saturn Award for Best Animated Film. In 2021, WALL-E became the second Pixar film (after Toy Story) to be selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.

While WALL-E was (like all of Pixar’s films) animated entirely by computer, the convention of developing character animation and background art separately survives from the days of cel animation. In a way that echoes the thought that went into the aesthetic of Looney Tunes backgrounds, Pixar artists consulted with cinematographer Roger Deakins and effects genius Dennis Muren to set the tone of backgrounds in WALL-E– settling on the mix of handheld imperfections and unfocused backgrounds that contain the action.

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