ART

THE ART OF WARNER BROS. CARTOONS

by Valerie Reinhold

Photographer: Ari Karttunen / EMMA - Espoo Museum of Modern Art

Selections explores the enduring legacy of a studio whose beloved cartoon characters helped shape American comedy

Caricatures scribbled everywhere. Firecrackers tossed WE WROTE CARTOONS FOR in peopled rooms. An alarm system letting everyone GROWNUPS, THAT WAS THE SECRET know the boss was coming — just so everyone could run back to work. The artists of the Warner Bros. cartoon studio were notorious for their practical jokes “We wrote cartoons for grownups, that was the secret,” and spirit of camaraderie. said longtime Warner story-man Michael Maltese.

All the in-house fun paid off. The cartoons produced In addition to developing the first “adult” sensibility by Warner Bros., among them the academy-award in Hollywood animation, the Warner cartoonists also winning “Merrie Melodies” and “Looney Tunes,” are embraced the kinds of freedoms – often using bizarre, now widely considered the finest, funniest and most surreal, free-associative images – that were put to culturally-significant animated shorts to come from rest with the rise of Disney’s literalism. In the Warner Hollywood’s Golden Age. cartoons, mental maturity was coupled with a youthful ebullience, which insisted that, come what may, Warner artists were innovative in innumerable ways. anything goes. For inspiration, they looked close to home: elsewhere on the Warner lot, Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney were starring in the live-action films that were the studio’s signature in the 1930s and 1940s. The opposite page: Bugs opposite page background: cartoon division, with deliberate intent, picked up Bunny, copyright © Model Sheet of Bugs Bunny, 2015 Warner Bros., 1943, drawn by Robert on the snappy and street-smart tough-guy attitudes courtesy of Steve McKimson. Copyright © 2015 Schneider collection Warner Bros., courtesy of cultivated on the sound stages right next door. Steve Schneider collection

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If it’s true that in comedy it’s all in the timing, then here the Warner directors excelled above all others. Warner cartoons are often little miracles of crispness and concision.

The stronger directors – Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett, Friz Freleng, Tex Avery – imposed their visions and personalities on their films to a above: Cel of Wile E. Coyote with below: GEE WHIZ-z-z-z – Animation Background, c. 1955. Copyright Drawings of Wile E. Coyote, 1956. degree that makes them unmistakably the product © 2015 Warner Bros., courtesy Copyright © 2015 Warner Bros., of Steve Schneider collection courtesy of Steve Schneider collection of an individual sensibility. All are now considered unrivaled titans in animation history.

The Warner studio employed up to two hundred artists, Under their hands, cartoon stars like Bugs Bunny, divided into units headed by directors, who guided Tweety, Sylvester the Cat, Road Runner, Wile E. Coyote, the efforts of all the artists working with them. These The Tasmanian Devil, Daffy Duck, Pepé Le Pew and would include four or five animators; as many assistant Yosemite Sam – to name a few – came to life. The animators; a “layout” artist, who conceived each leading Warner players were endowed with complex, cartoon’s overall design and colour scheme, drew in richly nuanced psyches, a key advance in the realm pencil the elaborate settings in which the animated of cartoon character, previously limited to one- action took place, and planned camera movements; dimensional character types. Thus, Bugs Bunny was and a “background” artist, who rendered the layout witty and self-assured and always in control, as well as artist’s scenic sketches in paint. a master of the one-liner.

This involved a vast amount of work, for the Warner The Warner characters could also be deeply conflicted: cartoons were made in “full animation” – using many how else to explain a desert coyote’s unquenchable thousands of drawings for each short, to endow their – yes, even neurotic – need to punish himself in the characters’ movements with grace and subtlety and pursuit of a scrawny, oblivious bird that it has become flowing expressiveness. unavoidably clear he will never be able to nab?

Rabbit Hood, cel of Bugs Bunny, 1949, Copyright © 2015 Warner Bros., courtesy of Steve Schneider collection

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At once vintage and ageless Americana, the Warner characters are still internationally known celebrities and smile-bringers, the cornerstones of what amounts to a library of modern folklore. “Looney Tunes” and “Merrie Melodies” have infiltrated the fabric of our lives.

Steve Schneider understood early the importance of cartoons in folk culture and, in the 1970s, started to build what became the largest collection of original Warner Bros. cartoon art. Recognition came in September 1985, when Warner became the first animation That’s all Folks, Copyright © studio to be given a full-scale retrospective by New 2015 Warner Bros., courtesy of Steve Schneider collection York´s Museum of Modern Art – for which Schneider provided 95% of the work on display. For four-and-half months, the ultra-prestigious MoMA opened some of its august gallery space to drawings of stuttering pigs and libidinous skunks.

Critical response was rapturous: Time magazine called the Warner cartoonists “some of the top film artists and Schneider’s collection has been on tour ever since. pleasure givers of the past half-century... What the front It shows how the Warner cartoons are an important office dismissed as program filler and kid stuff was, in and joyous corner of contemporary cultural history, reality, the greatest sustained burst of American movie as rich and rewarding in their way as any part of comedy.” And TV Guide, the American pop-culture cinema. The brand of humour hatched at Warner’s bible, said: “The best of these cartoons are as funny, still has repercussions in film, television and other above: Tweet and below: Lumber Sour, Cel of Tweety and Jack-Rabbit, 1954, and as enduring, as the film comedy of Chaplin and contemporary art forms. Sylvester, c. 1955, with Drawing, Cel, and Background. Copyright Background. Copyright Keaton, Capra and Sturges. They are classics.” © 2015 Warner Bros., © 2015 Warner Bros., courtesy of Steve courtesy of Steve And that’s not all, folks! Schneider collection Schneider collection

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