Posts Tagged ‘Warner Brothers’
“What keeps my heart awake is colorful silence”*…
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.
“Films are 50 percent visual and 50 percent sound. Sometimes sound even overplays the visual”*…
Though routinely credited, as above, as “Film Editor,” Tregoweth Edmond “Treg” Brown was the genius sound-effects wizard responsible for sound editing the Warner Brothers’ Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons starting in 1936…
His musique concrète artistry worked directly in conjunction with Carl Stalling‘s hyper-active left-field orchestral scores to create the soundtrack to generations of kids lives. So many of these sounds are completely ingrained into our collective pop-culture (un)consciousness. So much so, that reviewing some of the old Looney Tunes cartoons as an adult, you tend to ignore how utterly ridiculous the doinks and twangs are, for they sound totally natural in context—a testament to Brown’s flawless editing of sounds demanded by the images.
In addition to his incredible sound design which won him a Sound Effects Oscar in 1965 for The Great Race, Brown is also credited with giving legendary Warner Brothers’ voice actor Mel Blanc his big break…
More at “The Sound Effects Madman Behind the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies Cartoons.” And much more– with wonderful examples– in this short documentary (part 2 here):
email readers click here for video
* David Lynch
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As we perk up our ears, we might send melodic birthday greetings to Jerrald King “Jerry” Goldsmith; he was born on this date in 1929. One of film and television”s most accomplished composers and conductors, Goldsmith scored such noteworthy films as The Sand Pebbles, Logan’s Run, Planet of the Apes, Patton, Papillon, Chinatown, The Wind and the Lion, The Omen, The Boys from Brazil, Alien, Poltergeist, The Secret of NIMH, Gremlins, Hoosiers, Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Rudy, Air Force One, L.A. Confidential, Mulan, The Mummy, three Rambo films, and five Star Trek films– in a career during which he was nominated for six Grammy Awards, five Primetime Emmy Awards, nine Golden Globe Awards, four British Academy Film Awards, and eighteen Academy Awards. In 1976, he was awarded an Oscar for The Omen.
While presenting Goldsmith with a Career Achievement Award from the Society for the Preservation of Film Music in 1993, fellow composer Henry Mancini (Breakfast at Tiffany’s, The Pink Panther) said of Goldsmith, “… he has instilled two things in his colleagues in this town. One thing he does, he keeps us honest. And the second one is he scares the hell out of us.”
Movies for the temporally challenged…
From MovieBarCode, every frame of a film, compressed into a single image. E.g…
The Big Lebowski (1998)
A Single Man (2009)
And from “ultraculture,” via the ever-estimable Roger Ebert, “death scenes from 36 of Alfred Hitchcock’s movies, synchronized to climax in unison”…
[TotH, respectively, to Jesse Dylan and Nell Minow]
As we scale back our popcorn orders, we might recall that it was on this date in 1997 that the fledgling Warner Brothers (WB) television network aired the inaugural episode of what became its first bona-fide hit series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Buffy [when asked in their first encounter by Giles, who will become her mentor, if she knows anything about vampires]: To make you a vampire they have to suck your blood. And then you have to suck their blood. It’s like a whole big sucking thing. Mostly they’re just gonna kill you. Why am I still talking to you?
There’s a throat in my frog…
Stephen Spielberg has called it “the Citizen Kane of animated films.” It has landed squarely in the Top Ten lists of both professional animators and (IMDB) fans. It has been selected for preservation by the Library of Congress… Written by Michael Maltese, directed by Chuck Jones, starring Michigan J. Frog, it’s One Froggy Evening:
As we marvel at the glorious madness of it all, we might recall that it was on this date in 1977 that Captain Stubing and his crew first sailed on ABC’s The Love Boat. A hit for 9 seasons, the series helped popularize the “multiple parallel storyline” format, via which three separate stories set on the cruise ship ran intertwined through the hour. (An unintended by-product: notorious continuity errors, most notably in social director Julie’s outfits during boarding and debarkation, which were often inconsistent between storylines.)
The perfect food, explained…
Jeff Varasano, who learned his craft in NYC, now runs a pizzeria in Atlanta– one that, your correspondent can attest, is very, very good. While that’s rare enough, what’s rarer still, is that Varasano is willing to share. And just as Jeff is generous in the preparation of his pies, so he is forthcoming– very forthcoming– in explaining how he makes “the perfect pizza.”
Readers can visit “Jeff Varasano’s Famous New York Pizza Recipe” for everything– and your correspondent does mean everything— one could possibly want to know. (The page takes a while to load, but it’s worth the wait: at the bottom is Jeff’s list of top pizzerias around the country.)
As we reach for the crushed red pepper, we might recall that it was on this date in 1938 that “Porky’s Hare Hunt” was released. The Warner Bros. cartoon was a remake by Ben “Bugs” Hardaway and Cal Dalton of a 1936 animated short by Tex Avery, “Porky’s Duck Hunt.” The earlier toon had introduced Daffy Duck; “Porky’s Hare Hunt” was the debut of (the still-unnamed) Bugs Bunny.
While Bob Clampett created the character, Hardaway’s character sheet for (visualization of) Bugs– who became Warner’s biggest star– was chosen from among several; thus, “Bugs’ Bunny”– note the possessive apostrophe… But as the rapacious rabbit became a hit, he was emancipated from his maker; the apostrophe was dropped.
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