Thursday, April 05, 2007

Bill Tytla - Terrytoons - drunk mouse

Bill Tytla's known for his weighty powerful style of animation, but he seems able to jump to other styles pretty easily too.

This is him drawing and animating really cute. From a Mighty Mouse cartoon.
It's probably partly inspired by his pal Art Babbitt's Country Mouse animation, but I think this is cuter.










There is a lot of great animation in Terrytoons but the studio gets overlooked by many people who love animation and my guess is because it had a bad inking and and inbetweening department.

I noticed as a kid that the animation seemed sloppier because the characters wobbled around, and I later realized it's not the animation, but the tracings. Ever see those bad color retracings of old black and white cartoons? Like Popeye and Porky Pig? Those terrible ugly tracings ruined those great cartoons. It's not that bad in Terrytoons but it makes a lot of animators and historians kind of turn away from the wonderful animation in many of them.

(They'll all say it's the bad stories, but that doesn't add up. Disney had terrible stories and people love those cartoons ... because of the animation...and they have tight finishes.)

Some great animators who worked at Terry through the years:

Carlo Vinci
Jim Tyre
Bill Tytla
Connie Rasinski
Frank Moser
Ralph Bakshi!
I think Art Babbitt may have worked there early on...
I actually love Jerry Shields (if that's the name of the guy who doesn't do overlapping action)



CLICK HERE TO SEE small VERSION! (4.8mb)





CLICK HERE TO SEE LARGE VERSION! (11mb)