Here’s part of a scene from Rapid Robot, a 1959 Pixie and Dixie cartoon. Jinks tells the meeces he now has an assistant to chase them. Then they spot the robot cat off camera and hug each other for support.
This is a neat drawing. I don’t know if the director or the layout artist or the animator would indicate the positions, the multiples and the grey lines, but it would take a bit of time to ink this, far more than just an eye blink on a static character drawing like the studio started doing.
More dry-brush.
The other three drawings are on twos. This is held for four frames.
And the meeces zip out of the scene.
Besides the Little Roquefort-like ears in the last drawing being a give-away, if you’ve been around the blog for some time, you’ll recognise this as the work of former Terrytooner Carlo Vinci. He loved diving exits, and his marks are all over this cartoon, such as the wide mouth on Jinks’ during dialogue and angular leg/foot positions. Warren Foster’s story ends with a mangled cat/dog robot chasing everyone else up a tree. We reviewed the cartoon some years ago in this post from a less-clean copy.
The 1959-60 season was the happy medium between the very early Hanna-Barbera efforts, which had well-done poses but used them at times too much without any in-between animation, and the efforts from 1961 on, which had a more fluid limited animation style, but relied on too many stock walks, eye blinks, facial expressions. It allowed a certain distinctiveness to each cartoon, where -- even if they were still below the efforts of the theatricals -- were above those of the cookie-cutter animation that would arrive as early as the Wally-Touche-Lippy syndicated package in 1962.
ReplyDeleteThank you for the post..always a pleasure!
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