Bob Clampett: Breathing Life Into Inanimate Objects

Breathing life into inanimate objects proves very popular among animators from early cartoons to features like THE BRAVE LITTLE TOASTER (1987) or CARS (2006). One does not have to look far to see that especially Bob Clampett's early black and white cartoons are full of such literally "animated" objects. As usual, most often it is not the corny gag itself but the way Clampett and his crew put it on.

While Walt Disney was fascinated in his early years by hand-drawn mechanical machines that imitated animals, most other cartoonists - especially those from Termite Terrace - indulged in providing everyday objects with life and personality as can be seen in the following pictures of an aircraft factory that is "humming" in MEET JOHN DOUGHBOY.

MEET JOHN DOUGHBOY (1941)

Animal Objects

Bob Clampett's black and white Porky cartoon POLAR PALS seems to be mainly built around variations of this basic idea. The film starts with an alarm clock coming to life next to Porky lying under a pile of bearskins. These allegedly dead blankets then come to life and we discover that these bears were just sleeping.

POLAR PALS (1939)

But when half-way into the picture the villainous fur trapper I. Killem is introduced, the theme of "animating" dead objects is reversed. First he is only imagining sea lions as fur coats...

...then he blows his prey to kingdom come:

Justice is restored in the end, when an animal finally gets back at I. Killem. First the trapper's ship is sunken and at the last minute comes alive. This, in a way, prepares the final gag.

Meanwhile the villain escapes in a kayak. In opposition to all the earlier "coming-alive" gags of this cartoon, it is not the kayak that actually assumes animal or human shape and behavior. It has simply been mistaken for a kayak and is an angry pot whale, in fact.

Rubber Guns

POLAR PALS (1939)

Guns and cannons have to be stiff and sturdy by definition or else you couldn't shoot straight. But in animation, strong forces are often expressed through violent movement. The stronger the distortion of an otherwise stable form, the more powerful a force is felt. Often the impact of a movement is measured by the amount of anticipation. It's no surprise then, that the trapper's gun is reacting like a living being to Killem's pulling of the trigger rope. What is unusual about Clampett's treatment of the action is not that we see an anticipation and an exaggerated recoil. The unusual part is the way this anticipation is animated: the cannon bends back like the arm of a shot-putter and then spits the cannonball out:
While his contemporaries most often defined physically rigid objects by animating them with almost no squash and stretch in contrast to the materiality of highly flexible human/animal bodies, Clampett even squashed anvils (as can be seen in A TALE OF TWO KITTIES, 1942), if it helped translate energy to the screen.

The way Clampett made the distortion of stable objects part of his gags can be seen in a comparison of his first cartoon PORKY'S BADTIME STORY (1937) (which unfortunately is only available on youtube in a colorized version) and Frank Tashlin's PORKY'S RAIL ROAD which was made around the same time. Animator and historian Milt Gray has written about this in a post about Clampett's use of expressive animation on John Kricfalusi's blog.

A CORNY CONCERTO (1943)

Likewise, when the faux-Disney squirrel in A CORNY CONCERTO shoots back at Bugs, Porky and the dog, the gun feels very rubbery for a moment. Since this is a direct spoof of FANTASIA (1940), the large arcs of the histrionic gestures are probably as slow and conspicuous to expose Disney's excessive use of squash and stretch. Then, the anticipation and recoil are straight in the line of shooting. Since the squashing recoil is happening very fast (just before the cut the victims), it doesn't seem as outrageous as the distortions at the beginning of the clip.

Spitting Images

While the villain's cannon may have looked like a blowtube, Porky's gun is literally spitting bullets out by the dozen. The muzzle is literally transformed into a mouth with lips and tongue:

POLAR PALS (1939)

These weird "hole-to-mouth" gags had probably started with Clampett's INJUN TROUBLE (1938, not available on disc or online anymore) which he later remade as WAGON HEELS. So technically POLAR PALS already re-uses an animation sequence from an earlier cartoon which was then re-used in a later color cartoon.

WAGON HEELS (1945)

Between the two "western" films however, "the tube mouth" as I like to call it evolved into a Clampett trademark. At the beginning of PILGRIM PORKY an anchor is sucked in by a porthole-mouth with the mouth characteristics emphasized by lips and a large tongue. This short piece of animation stands out to me because of how the animator made unexpected use of the tongue to push in the anchor.

PILGRIM PORKY (1940)

Whenever this mouth tranformation happens to an inanimate object, we can clearly see the tongue. In the lackluster army cartoon MEET JOHN DOUGHBOY the spitting gun is turned into an airplane called "spitfire":

MEET JOHN DOUGHBOY (1941)

Later on, the narrator talks about a most potent cannon. Immediately before, two soldiers are forgetting to shoot because they are comparing sticks with the words "mine is longer". It comes as no surprise that the cannon is shooting stiffly and only flags after shooting several loads off.

MEET JOHN DOUGHBOY (1941)

It is only then that the exhausted tube turns into a mouth with its tongue panting like that of a dog. This panting is re-used in a more obvious environment in CRAZY CRUISE: a carnivorous plant is portrayed as a mouth that encloses a bumblebee. The insect is so determined to resist its fate that the plant is getting exhausted, spits it out and resign breathing heavily.

CRAZY CRUISE (1942)

Transfer of Function
Unlike all the objects we have seen so far, Horton already has a mouth. But since the water is finally rising above his head, the mouth's function to deliver dialogue is transferred to Horton's trunk which then continues to rhyme in accurate lip-sync.

HORTON HATCHES THE EGG (1942)

A few years later, Porky's dialogue is enunciated by a tea kettle tat is stuck on his head. Since delivering dialogue is rather exhausting for a kettle that is not used to it, the shot ends with the now familiar tongue action.

KITTY KORNERED (1946)

Bob Clampett has often been accused of completely arbitrary gags and stories. And even though he did not care if a joke was trite or even tasteless, all of his (later) films seem to come from a surprisingly coherent world that simply followed its own set of rules. Sacrificing materiality references to express strong forces and equipping rigid tubes with mouths were only two of them.

Bob Clampett: Horton Hatches The Egg - 5 Years of Colorful Animation Expressions

Five years ago to this day, I have written my first blog post. In the meantime I have gathered 425 followers and 300'000 site views. Looking back I realize that 2008 was also my most productive year as far as substantial content goes. Since my very first movie review on Colorful Animation Expressions was about Blue Sky's HORTON HEARS A WHO (2008), what would be better suited to commemorate the occasion than a post about Clampett's HORTON HATCHES THE EGG (1942)?

To my knowledge HORTON HATCHES THE EGG (the first Horton story written in 1940) is the first animated adaptation of a book by Ted Geisel with whom Clampett worked together the following year on some of the SNAFU shorts.

On the surface Clampett's HORTON is the visually most faithful Dr. Seuss adaptation - practically "faithful one hundred percent". The ten minute short (with only a few lines of dialogue added) takes roughly the same time as reading the book from cover to cover.

However, HORTON HATCHES THE EGG also serves as a perfect introduction to a whole variety of Bob Clampett characteristics some of which I will elaborate on in future posts. Rather than breaking it up into three shorter parts I have decided to publish this overview in one single entry that can be linked to more easily.

Composition
Color
Clampett's promotion to color cartoons triggered mainly production-related progress. He wasn't really able to handle color as a means of expression in ways comparable to what Chuck Jones did with Maurice Noble and Philipp DeGuard. But HORTON has always stood out to me as one of the very few Clampett cartoons with good color design most of which were made right after he inherited Avery's color unit including background painter Johnny Johnsen. Johnsen however was soon replaced by Michael Sasanoff who allegedly painted these uncredited HORTON backgrounds.

As a prime example of pink - green color relations I will soon examine these backgrounds in more detail. For now, just look at how different amounts of garish and warm yellow are used to balance the pink - green complementary contrast:

With a few notable exceptions the only instance of Clampett using color as a storytelling device is when faces turn green due to sickness or anger or white/pale due to shyness or fear:

Framing
Some of the fixed camera setups are composed with the frame edges in mind. We do not just happen to see an excerpt of a larger environment. In fact, sometimes it looks as if this world only exists within this particular frame. These compositions that were - largely inspired by the confined space of a theater - still popular in 1940s live-action films often resemble the compositions of semi-modern paintings.

In the frame above the background is arranged to encircle Horton's huge back (with a circle of its own). Even the clouds are painted following this circular pattern. If this were a pan, the clouds couldn't possible be composed that way because if you extended them they would point vertically into the ground.

The same principle can be seen in some of Ferdinand Hodler's landscape paintings where the clouds often frame a mountain or a lake rather unnaturally:

More often however, the foreground is used as a framing device. It also invokes depth within the picture by contrast of size and lightness.

Silhouettes:
Darkened silhouettes as framing devices and "quasi over shoulder shots" are a device Clampett seemed to be fond of during this transitional phase. In the image on the right the animals soon leave the frame and we are left with the strongest of all "foreground-along-frame-edges" compositions of the film.

Characters
Clampett Characters
While most of the animals are based on Dr. Seuss' original designs, now and then there is a character who seems to have fallen out of an earlier Clampett cartoon. Most obviously miscast is the big-eared mouse from FARM FROLICS (1941) that kept "heeeearing things".

The large ears make no sense in HORTON (left) but belong to a paranoid mouse in FARM FROLICS.

The three hunters on the other hand are already part of the original book but their design is pure Looney Tunes. As always, one of them is extremely tiny and they all have widely different facial features. In addition, they are sneaking with the same exaggerated butt motion as Clampett's hounds in pursuit of Bugs Bunny:

Animal Suit
In many Clampett cartoons - and Looney Tunes in general - the anthropomorphized animals look like humans wearing an animal suit. This is certainly the case with Daffy and it is also quite obvious in these drawings of Mayzie, the lazy bird:

Hollywood pop references
Obviously not in the book are the allusions to some of the era's most well-known stars. Mayzie is going through her Katherine Hepburn impersonation routine twice...

"reh'ly I won't!" - "reh'ly I will!"

...while Clampett's popular suicide gag is performed by a Peter Lorre fish:

Animation
Twinning
Against Disney's mantra to not use visual "twins", symmetrical arm motions are a very distinctive trait of Clampett's cartoon acting. This can be seen in both Bob McKimson's and Rod Sribner's widely different animation.

Perspective
In medium close-ups, Clampett's animators favored forced perspective to indicate depth and proximity to the fictitious camera:

The characters' awareness of performing for an audience is often highlighted by explicitly addressing the audience and thus breaking the fourth wall:

Specific Expressions
Clampett seemed to favor exaggerated facial proportions. He like to have vertically elongated eyes and horizontally expanding mouths and cheeks. Even faced with well-rounded Dr. Seuss designs he managed to sneak in his relished broad smiles and large teeth on any kind of animal:

Especially in sadly or angrily distorted faces we see a lot of form-defining details like wrinkles and overlapping flesh:

The next to last scene of the film contains a good example of the acting style that defined Clampett's string of groundbreaking masterpieces from a TALE OF TWO KITTIES (1942) to THE GREAT PIGGY BANK ROBBERY (made in 1945 but released in 1946). As the incredibly well constructed and wrinkly Mayzie close-up suggests, this is probably Rod Scribner's work. Just look at the free-flowing proportions and the many specific expressions conveyed by sophisticated distortions of her beak!

Distinctive Locomotion: Silly Walks
Within Clampett's universe, Horton fits into the tradition of silly characters ranging from wacky ducks to shy buzzards who are often characterized by distinctive walks. Horton is introduced bouncing happily to a popular nonsense song. Not only is the animation suggesting a very light elephant (his huge body is not dragging him to the ground), Horton's hind legs are also skipping half as fast as his forelegs. Although there is no sign of exaggerated distortion like in Mayzie's acting scene above, Horton feels rather rubbery and silly just by the way his looser parts overlap:

Distinctive Locomotion: Specific Flight CyclesWhile one could get away with having the cone eating Mayzie simply move one wing instead of two, the animator infused this scene with personality and entertainment by having her struggle with the unnatural motion. It takes 36 different drawings to complete the cycle. Some of the later flapping animation is even exposed on ones.

Tubes With Tongues
When Horton refuses to budge even when the whole frame is flooded, his trunk is assuming the mouth's lip sync completely with overlong tongue. While intuitively this makes sense with an elephant, in a Clampett cartoon any kind of tube - especially guns - can be animated with the flexibility of a human mouth. This odd phenomenon is definitely worth a closer look!

For today, that's all, folks!