Tashlin and Davis - Stylized Timing - Plane Daffy
Great timing in animation is extremely hard to do, and it’s even harder to make it unique.
The thing that’s always stood out to me in Frank Tashlin’s 1940s cartoons is how stylized the movement is. Daffy in particular always moved beautifully.
In other directors’ cartoons, characters snapping from pose to pose looks cheap with a lot of brush blurs, and in the case of Freleng and McKimson’s shorts, badly drawn. The animation in Tashlin’s shorts is unique and unlike any other director’s in the history of Warners.
Lots of animation in Tashlin’s shorts seem to use leftover drawings, but it’s pieced together so well it looks more like it’s intentional than an error. In my opinion, Tashlin was as every bit exaggerated (or ‘cartoony’) as Clampett, only Tashlin was more sophisticated, while Clampett took a more sophomorphic approach to it (that is not a bad thing).
Art Davis seemed to be Tashlin’s favorite animator, or at least his best one, as he is behind all of those great scenes of sophisticated ‘cartooniness’. These techniques are seen nowhere in Davis’ own films of the late 40s, nor in his animation for Friz, so it goes to show you what a great director and a great animator are capable of when they are working at their full potential.
These two clips are from one of my all-time favorite cartoons, Plane Daffy (1944). Look at how beautiful Daffy is in these scenes! Go out and buy the new Looney Tunes set, because it’s worth it just for this cartoon, and the other Tashlin shorts, alone.
For a bird, that female is kinda sexy. ;)
The standout in the first clip is Daffy’s “Something new has been added”, as it feels like he momentarily becomes a different person after kissing the lady a second time.
I liked the twist in the second clip, where the other Axis members kill themselves instead of Hitler.
Wow, Those Tashlin scenes show plenty cartoonishness and exxageration. Especially Daffy’s jumping up and down yelling “Woo Hoo!” in the second clip (one of the best Daffy “Woo Hoo!” dances), but I guess you can’t compliment Tashlin without getting it from Leonard Maltin, or Jerry Beck, or Michael Barrier, or whoever.
I think it’s funny (and strange) how Daffy’s voice changes long enough to say “Something new had been added! Woo Hoo!”. The voice still sounds like Mel Blanc, but Daffy’s not lisping.
Tashlin’s cartoons are the cream of the crop. He’s one of the most underrated geniuses in film history.
A lecturer I know said that “when there’s war art stops”, however, the best American cartoons where made during World War II.
I think the reason that Daffy sounds different there is that they switched to a Jerry Colonna voice. “Something new has been added” is a Colonna-ism. Not sure if Mel was doing the imitation or if they brought in someone else for that line.
I would like the timing from this cartoon. In the first clip, it’s very stylised yes. I like the Woo-Hoo sound at the end.
Great work
Also, has anyone noticed the way Daffy is drawn in Tashlin’s cartoons? He seemed to prefer the duck to have a particular way his eyes and beak were stretched.
Right from the beginning of his secnod stint with Warners, Tashlin decided to experiment with a type of limited animation for comic effect that Jones would expand on in his cartoons of the 1950s. If anything, some of the stuff Tashlin did with Daffy highlights the poses even more than Jones would with his later work, while the angles he and Davis employed follow the Avery credo of totally breaking down the fourth wall and letting the audience know that what they’re watching on screen has no connection with the type of reality the folks over at Disney were trying to perfect.
In the same way Jones and Clampett were kind of the ying and yang for Tex’s styles in the 1930s, Tashlin’s 40s cartoons employ traits most commonly associated with both those directors, in going from angular, stiff poses where what animation there is bears no relation to what an actual person could do, to frantic motions at breakneck speeds no person could match, either, but with the pattern of action far more controlled and point-to-point direct than what a Clampett-Scribner character would do.