The lively animation in these cartoons is inseparable from the swinging soundtracks. That wild-eyed chicken scatting against a warping background is an unforgettable image. The brilliant and genuinely unsettling Fleischer short Swing You Sinners! (1930) is like a nightmare captured on film. ![]() Rubber hose cartoons are famous for their macabre imagination. ![]() There are some doozies in this print (owned by Mark Kausler) of the spooky Van Beuren cartoon The Wild Goose Chase (1933). You can also find lots of unusual character designs, particularly in cartoons involving monsters, aliens, and/or unidentifiable mutant creatures. The titular figure in Fleischer Studios’ Mysterious Mose (1930) repeatedly morphs into different characters up until the final “reveal” that makes no sense and explains nothing (which is, of course, why I love it). Inanimate objects frequently come alive and get involved in the action, as seen in the Max Fleischer short Barnacle Bill (1930), starring Bimbo.Ĭharacters can also detach their limbs or heads for the sake of a sight gag, as demonstrated by Oswald the Lucky Rabbit in Broadway Folly (1930).Ĭrazy transformations show up all over the place in these shorts. These cartoons aren’t hindered by dull concepts like realism and internal consistency. For instance, when original Looney Tunes star Bosko gets cornered by a gang of dangerous jungle animals in Congo Jazz (1930), he leads them in a peppy arrangement of “Giving It This and That.” Characters are constantly bobbing up and down to the beat and any prop or body part can be turned into a musical instrument at a moment’s notice. The world of these cartoons is infectiously charming. Look at how beautifully Nolan distorts the characters’ bodies in the Walter Lantz short Henpecked (1930). ![]() The man credited with inventing the rubber hose approach is Bill Nolan, who gave rounded flexibility to his animation in the silent Felix the Cat and Krazy Kat shorts. Certain visual motifs, like pie-cut eyes, white gloves, and two-button pants, are associated with these cartoons, but their primary characteristic is bouncy elasticity, which is on overdrive in Betty Boop’s May Party (1933). ![]() It’s overflowing with weird ideas and deliciously off-kilter visual fireworks.įor those who aren’t aware, rubber hose animation is the style seen in early sound cartoons where the characters’ bodies squash and stretch like they have no bones and their limbs flop around like noodles. If you have a sprite with 24 frames, and you're playing at 60fps, you can either do what Cuphead does and skip some frames so it looks like the sprite is animated at 24fps, or you can show 1 drawing each frame, and speed it up, so instead of running at 24fps it's running at 60fps and the same animation loop plays 2 1/2 times in a second instead of once.To whet your appetite, we’ll begin with a prime example: the Betty Boop classic Snow White (1933), which was animated from beginning to end by Roland Crandall and features a killer soundtrack by jazz legend Cab Calloway. Not to mention the fact that it all depends on how fast you want the action to take. In the case of 2d games like Cuphead it's a little different, because the rate of the animation has no bearing on how smooth the sprite actually moves across the screen. If you've played Super Smash Bros 4 on Wii U, you might have noticed that the assist trophies look "off", that's because the game is running at 60fps, and the trophies are running at 30fps in order to keep the gameplay smooth. It might be confusing because there can be different game elements running at different framerates.įor example, one trick that games use to run smooth even with a lot of elements onscreen is to lower the framerate of the animations of characters that are far away, this is sometimes noticeable and looks like they're moving in stop motion.
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