Bob Clampett, you cheater.

I promise I'm working on my paper. I just took a quick break. I was on a great animation blog by Thad Komorowski (www.thadkomorowski.com), and I saw this interesting video that he made recently. The music is all done by Raymond Scott (the drummer happens to be the father of composer John Williams).

"Going over the studio’s filmography, Clampett was primarily the only director at Warners to reuse animation on a regular basis. (Only Friz Freleng surpasses him in reuses, which to be expected given that most of them happened when Freleng was directing in the early 30s, when it was a common practice at all studios to reuse animation to save money in the Depression.) One common fact shared in a lot of the Warner animator interviews is that Clampett was always a cartoon or two behind for the studio. Keeping that in mind, it wasn’t laziness, just hacking out to play catch-up. If budget was the villain, the other directors would have reused as often too.

There didn’t seem to be a scene in the Warner catalog that Clampett couldn’t reuse, whether it be redrawing a big-lipped Stepin Fetchit as Elmer Fudd, tracing over a Harman-Ising fowl couple with Daffy and his wife, or just dropping in badly traced footage from one of Freleng’s late 30s pictures without caring about continuity (about the most polar opposite cartoon you can think of compared with Bob Clampett).

In his defense, sloppy reuse and editing aside, Clampett’s cartoons are some of the funniest, most beautifully animated, and just plain best ones anywhere. Then again, you can say that for just about any of the directors. Without the sloppy reuse and editing."



I thought that was fascinating. Equally as fascinating is the rest of Thad's blog, which you should definitely check out. In addition to classic cartoons, he talks a great deal about classic movies and man, does he know his stuff.

Ok. Back to Kierkegaard.