Hard Landing Huck

Hanna-Barbera cartoons in the early going displayed some of the design principles you’d find in animated TV commercials and theatrical shorts of the mid-to-late 1950s. Not as stylised as, say, an MGM cartoon from the studio’s last days in 1957, but still visually modern for their time.



I can’t clip together the full background from this cartoon-between-the-cartoons starring Huckleberry Hound, but here are a couple of frames. I really like how this patio is rendered. The chairs are transparent, the grass isn’t green and the table is not in real perspective. I’ll bet you this is the work of Fernando Montealegre. Note the anchor in the window.



Here, the house isn’t painted in. It’s a simple line-drawing with geometric shapes of colour. The foliage of the tree has no outline. I gather (please correct me if I’m wrong), that Monty cut out the shape of the greenery on a cel then used a sponge to daub the paint onto the background. I guess this style became passé but I think it’s pretty attractive.

Now onto character stuff.



A proud-looking Huck. Maybe he’s proud his swimming trunks can hold themselves on their own.



Whoever wrote this telegraphs the gag, at least if you’ve seen enough cartoons. Huck stops in mid-air and looks worried. Yeah, you know there’ll be no water in the pool.

If this were done a few years later, Huck would simply drop out of the frame, there’d be a camera shake followed by a cut to Huck prone on the cement. However, we get to see the impact.



And if this scene were animated a few years later, Huck would be rigid except for his muzzle. Here, his head changes direction and he gestures as he explains to us he’s lucky there was no water in the pool because he can’t swim. This looks like Ed Love’s work.

These mini-cartoons may not be grab-your-gut hilarious, but they’re pleasant and nice enough to look at and, for 20 seconds of TV animation, that’s good enough for me.