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1 tish-tash in Cartoonland ................................................................... ne fruitful way of understanding Frank Tashlin’s career is to look at his peregrinations from studio to studio. While most pronounced in his live-action career, this peripatetic tendency announced itself when he was a young (and apparently restless) animator. Tashlin’s animated work organizes itself into several distinct phases: Warner Bros., 1936–1938; Screen Gems, 1941–1942; Warner Bros., 1942–1944; and an unusual one-off cartoon , funded by the Lutheran Church, from 1947. Between 1933, the date of his first cartoon as an animator, and 1945, the end of his tenure with United Artists’ animation division, Tashlin animated, directed, or supervised 59 animated films, an average of about four and a half cartoons per year.1 At Warner Bros., the humorand general aesthetic sensibilities of the Schlesinger Unit were extremely important to Tashlin’s own style. His 1930s Warners cartoons were made during a time of great experimentation for the studio, a fact that surely played a large role in his development as an animator. Tashlin’s 1940s Warners cartoons were made during a time when the studio had found surer footing, a fact that, intriguingly, also allowed for experimentation on the part of the Warners directors. The Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies that Tashlin made between 1933 and 1936 were, in several ways, important models for the evolution of the Warner Bros. house style during the years 1938–1942—the period in which the Schlesinger Unit’s collective style came into its own. Tashlin played a key role in determining the performative and phenotypic parameters of Warners’ all-important first star, Porky Pig; the evolution of Bugs Bunny, Warner Bros.’ marquee character, proceeded O t i s h - t a s h i n C a r t o o n l a n d : 17 along similar lines. Tashlin’s experimentations with visual design and sight gags (see, for instance, Figures 1.1 to 1.4, and 1.7) also seem to have been inspirational for the Warners animators of the early 1940s. Along with Tex Avery’s devil-may-care comic attitude and Friz Freleng ’s talent for storytelling, Tashlin’s character design and visual humor are almost certainly the elements of the 1930s cartoons that were of the greatest value to Jones, Clampett, and their colleagues in the early years of the 1940s. Jones’s penchant for abstract, non-comic design is, in some ways, an extension of Tashlin’s experimentation with non-gags and showy animation; Clampett’s mastery of character-based humor owes a great debt to Tashlin’s expertise in that same field.This is not to say that intra-studio influence was a one-way street or that Tashlin was a font of all things Looney; with animators as gifted as Jones, Clampett, and Freleng in the same office, it is extremely unlikely that Tashlin did not learn from them. But it is Tashlin’s style that is at issue here. With regard to the development of Tashlin’s own style, we can chart the evolution of several important tendencies from the 1930s cartoons to those of the 1940s. Tashlin made great strides in the areas of character design and performer-based humor. In such 1940s films as Puss ’n’ Booty and Porky Pig’s Feat, we see Tashlin making especially fine use of his talent for visual design. Among other achievements, Puss ’n’ Booty makes humorous use of offscreen space, and Porky Pig’s Feat uses camera movements and compositions themselves as important sources of comedy . In these regards, Tashlin stands out from Jones, Clampett, and his other Warner Bros. colleagues. Not only that, but we can identify these tendencies, among others, as key elements of Tashlin’s style that would manifest themselves, in various forms, in his live-action comedies. Though techniques such as self-reflexive and sexual humor were part and parcel of the Warner Bros. house style, Tashlin employed these devices in different ways and for different ends than did his colleagues. Tashlin was especially interested in techniques that challenged both propriety and traditional modes of viewership. While nearly all of the Warners directors employed sexual humor, Tashlin pulled it off more consistently and emphatically than his colleagues; the same is true of his gags that challenge diegetic integrity. On the whole, perhaps the thing that separatesTashlin’s style from those of the otherWarners animators is that hewas more interested in using stylistic devices forcomic [3.133.121.160] Project...

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