Animation in The Pied Piper of Basin Street

One of the interesting things about the Lantz studio in the 1940's is the difference in the ability of the animators. At Disney, Warners and MGM, the animators were more consistent in their abilities. In this cartoon, you've got Disney veterans like Dick Lundy and Grim Natwick side by side with Lantz stalwarts like Les Kline and Paul Smith. There's a wide variation in animation quality in this cartoon, but Culhane has done a pretty good job of casting the animators to play to their strengths and not let their weaknesses hurt the cartoon.

Emery Hawkins has only five shots, but shot 39 may be the nicest acting shot in the film. It's got everything Hawkins is known for: strongly rhythmic drawing and posing, broad action, sharp timing, and extreme flexibility. There's a looseness to Hawkins' animation that makes his characters seem far more alive than the work by Les Kline that leads into the shot. Kline's drawings aren't nearly as appealing and his conception of movement is far simpler. You can tell there's a higher proportion of inbetweens in Kline's work than in Hawkins'. Kline's shapes don't change as radically and his poses are pretty mundane. They don't have a strong line of action.

Pat Matthews' animation is not as broad as Hawkins', but the sense of design in his drawing is strong and he's a very capable animator. His introductory scenes with the Mayor make the character of the piper seem likable and are well acted.

LaVerne Harding concentrates mostly on the Mayor character. She's got only a couple of other miscellaneous shots. Her drawing is strong and her acting is good, but her timing isn't as daring as Hawkins'.

Paul Smith's best work in this cartoon is at the end. The shots are short and there's a single, broad action taking place in each of them. Maybe I'm being unfair to him, but I wonder if he had strong character layouts to work with, as the shots look better than I would expect.

Don Williams does some pretty daring things with cropping and perspective in shot 69. Most of the time, the characters in this cartoon are at eye level, a comfortable distance away from the camera and surrounded by lots of negative space to give them a clear silhouette. In the opening shot and this one, Williams animates characters in perspective. Shot 69 is a vertical pan, but what really catches my eye is how close the mice are to the camera as they leap down the button panel and how they're drawn from a high angle. The staging in this shot is unlike any other in the cartoon. Williams also gives the mice an attractive fleshiness and follow-through during their leaps.

Dick Lundy was soon to be directing at Lantz and may only have been filling in as an animator until that happened. His work here rivals Hawkins. The lady mouse's dialogue in shot 3 is handled well and the cheese slicing in scene 4 is well-timed. Having come from Disney, there's no question that his drawing and posing are strong.

Grim Natwick has little to do here. Only five shots, and four of them are pretty short. The old woman in scene 49 resembles the old woman in the Flip the Frog shorts that Natwick worked on for the Iwerks studio. For the old woman, he uses staggered doping of drawings to get the animation to vibrate and the poses are pretty broad.

I think that Natwick's involvement in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs has skewed our perception of his career. I think that Snow White and Princess Glory from Gulliver's Travels are atypical of Natwick's work, which really tends to be quite broad and cartoony. That's true of his work at Fleischer and Iwerks in the early '30's, his work at Lantz in the '40's, his TV commercials in the '50's and even his work on Raggedy Ann and Andy in 1977.

I hope that all of the above makes sense. I find it a struggle to use words to talk about animation and one of the things I wish is that we had a better vocabulary to do it.

More on The Pied Piper of Basin Street

One of the great things about movies is that they're inexhaustable. I can watch a film that I'm thoroughly familiar with and still discover new things about it. While I've looked at this cartoon before in terms of direction and animation, it wasn't until I put the mosaics together that I saw things relating to the layouts and backgrounds.

Even at the thumbnail size, most of the shot compositions read clearly. The staging is very legible and the backgrounds are not cluttered with unnecessary detail that draws your eye away from the characters. The clearness of the compositions works well with Culhane's sense of timing. With fast shots, you want to make sure that the audience will be able to "read" a scene before it's replaced by the next one.

That's a tribute to Art Heinemann, the designer and layout artist. Heinemann had been in the Chuck Jones unit when Culhane was there as an animator and joined the Lantz studio after Culhane. Culhane thought highly of him and hired him later went he opened a studio to do TV commercials. Mike Sporn's blog has an entry about an Ajax commercial done by Culhane and Heinemann.

The backgrounds painted by Phil DeGuard, who later painted backgrounds for Jones at Warners, are done with flat colors. They are totally lacking in texture and there's no attempt to create a sense of roundness by changing the tones.

In many cartoons, there was a clash between the flatness of color on the characters and the roundness of the color in the backgrounds. Here's a still from the Tom and Jerry cartoon Tee For Two, courtesy of Kevin Langley.


Note the grass, the tree trunk, the leaves and the sky. There are lots of subtle color changes there. Then look at Tom. Every color on him is completely uniform. That's a result of the different way paper and cels take paint. You couldn't get color variation on cels unless you resorted to an airbrush, which was time consuming and difficult to control on a frame by frame basis.

This annoyed a lot of animation designers, who felt that there should be greater design continuity between the characters and the backgrounds. This was one of the main artistic goals of UPA, but the seeds were already planted at other studios and The Pied Piper of Basin Street is an example. Heinemann designed it so that the backgrounds had the same flat color treatment as the characters. (If you look at the mosaics, you will see some color variation, but that's due to video compression artifacts, not the artwork.)

Jack Kirby used to say that every comic book was an art school. The same thing is true of every animated cartoon.

The Pied Piper of Basin Street

First, thanks to Kevin Langley for posting the complete cartoon to YouTube.com.

There's a lot to talk about with this cartoon, so I think that I'll be writing about it for several days. There are interesting things here about direction, layout, and animation that deserve mention.

James (Shamus) Culhane is a director who doesn't really get the attention he deserves. Maybe that's because his work is not readily available on DVD. Culhane moved around a lot in the animation business, so he never established a reputation tied to any one studio. On top of that, he's not really associated with a particular character. Yet he directed some interesting cartoons at Fleischer, such as Popeye Meets William Tell, and his cartoons for the Lantz studio are an impressive body of work. In the '30's, the Lantz studio really couldn't touch Disney or MGM, yet when Culhane started directing, he significantly raised the quality of the Lantz cartoons to where they could hold their own against anybody.

You can read a short bio I did of Culhane here. Mark Langer also wrote a short bio. Tom Sito, who was fortunate enough to work with Culhane, has this to say about him.

Culhane's autobiography Talking Animals and Other People is a great book that covers a lot of history. As he worked for Mintz, Fleischer, Iwerks, Van Beuren, Disney, Lantz and Paramount, in addition to owning his own commercial studio, Culhane perhaps had the widest experience of anybody during his years in the business. His other book, Animation From Script to Screen, is full of very practical tips on production.

As a director, Culhane was willing to try things. In The Barber of Seville, a Woody Woodpecker cartoon from 1944, he was pretty aggressive in how he timed scenes. While Culhane admitted he had no feeling for jazz, because he studied violin he had a strong grasp of music. His Swing Symphonies, such as this cartoon, work beautifully with their soundtracks.

If you compare this cartoon to The Nifty Nineties, which I talked about earlier, you can see several differences in the approach to direction. The Nifty Nineties is willing to let animation carry large parts of the film. The cutting is fairly leisurely and animators work on continuous sections. Culhane is very interested in using cutting to keep a cartoon moving. He also cuts between characters or locations, so he doesn't have to worry too much about hook-ups. With 8 animators working on this film, that made everybody's job easier.

Eight animators is a large crew for a short, and that may be why scenes don't seem grouped logically by animator. I know from my own experience that while a director intends a particular animator to do a scene, necessity often forces the director to hand the scene to the next animator who needs work. So for instance, if you look at shots 18-23 (the numbering is mine, not the Lantz studio's), you see that 3 animators do those 6 shots, even though it would be logical for a single animator to do them all.

You can see, though, that Culhane has cast his animators. Pat Matthews, Emery Hawkins and LaVerne Harding do the personality scenes for the lead characters. Les Kline gets less important personality scenes. Dick Lundy, Don Williams and Paul Smith get the mice. Surprisingly, Grim Natwick doesn't get a lot to do in this cartoon and gets single stand-alone scenes. Paul Smith gets a lot of action scenes or scenes that require no acting.

I'll talk more about layout and animation in my next entry.