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Cartoon women are inherently difficult subjects for the animator for the reason that animation demands caricature and comedy, which are concepts inconsistent with femininity, grace and sensuality. The result is that when animators create female leads, they tend to de-emphasize cartoon qualities and accentuate realistic mannerisms and behaviors.

There was a brief moment in animation history when funny and sexy female characters were encouraged though, and that era coincided roughly with World War II. Some historians, like John Costello, have argued that the war represented the true beginnings of the sexual revolution in the United States. During the early-1940s, sexual imagery gained new visibility and cultural acceptance. Young soldiers lusted after Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth pin-ups, while reading Milton Caniff’s comic Male Call and decorating their bombers with provocative nose art. Within this liberal environment, Hollywood directors and animators took advantage of the opportunity to explore creative new ways of portraying the female character in animation.

A handful of animators, notably Pat Matthews, Preston Blair, Rod Scribner, Fred Moore, and Milt Kahl, became known for their ability to handle women characters that were true cartoon creations. Still, there were limited opportunities to animate such characters, and it wasn’t uncommon for animators to use male characters in drag as a substitute for the female, such as Daffy Duck’s striptease in The Wise Quacking Duck (1943), animated by Art Babbitt.

The sexy cartoon female occasionally appeared in animation after the war, but by and large, the industry began to favor a blander and less cartoon-influenced style. By the early-1960s, the average cartoon female in Hollywood animation had become so unappealing that Rocky and Bullwinkle co-creator Bill Scott quipped, “The way women are drawn in our business today, one would assume all the artists are fags.”

The following selection of animated films illustrate some of the various approaches to the animated female character during the World War II period:

“Eatin’ on the Cuff” or The Moth who Came to Dinner (Warner Bros, Bob Clampett, 1942)

Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs (Warner Bros, Bob Clampett 1943)

Red Hot Riding Hood (MGM, Tex Avery, 1943)

Abou Ben Boogie (Walter Lantz Prod, Shamus Culhane, 1944)

Plane Daffy (Warner Bros, Frank Tashlin, 1944)

Duck Pimples (Disney, Jack Kinney, 1945)

Don’t believe everything you read—or see—online. One of the newer Google search features is to include a biography box for individuals who have entries on Wikipedia. The problem is that Google’s algorithms occasionally select random photos to include as part of these profiles. So, we end up with situations like the above in which Beauty and the Beast co-director Gary Trousdale is depicted as Disney producer Don Hahn.

Or how about director Bob McKimson substituting for director Frank Tashlin?

And I don’t even know how this one happened: Disney director Clyde Geronimi (Sleeping Beauty) is replaced by U.S. Senator John McCain.

“Animation is a young man’s game,” Chuck Jones once said. There’s no question that animation is a labor-intensive art that requires mass quantities of energy and time. While it’s true that the majority of animation directors have directed a film by the age of 30, there are also a number of well known directors who started their careers later.

Directors like Pete Docter, John Kricfalusi and Bill Plympton didn’t begin directing films until they were in their 30s. Don Bluth, Winsor McCay and Frederic Back were late bloomers who embarked on directorial careers while in their 40s. Pioneering animator Emile Cohl didn’t make his first animated film, Fantasmagorie (1908), until he was 51 years old. Of course, that wasn’t just Cohl’s first film, but it is also considered by most historians to be the first true animated cartoon that anyone ever made.

Here is a cross-selection of 30 animation directors, past and present, and the age they were when their first professional film was released to the public.

1. Don Hertzfeldt (19 years old)
   Ah, L’Amour

Today marks the centennial of Frank Tashlin, one of the most important figures in the history of American animation.

Frank who?

If Tashlin is recognized at all by the general public, it is for being the Looney Tunes animation director who ended up making cartoonish live-action films with Jerry Lewis and Jayne Mansfield.

He was so much more than that though—a restless and ambitious creative powerhouse who didn’t play by anyone’s rules and whose filmic innovations were often decades ahead of their time.

Tashlin’s reputation has been bashed routinely by film critics, both while he was alive (“Tashlin has become sympathetically obsolete without ever becoming fashionable”—Andrew Sarris) and after he died in 1972 (“Tashlin remained the safe, cold-blooded side of bad taste, never came to terms with the full-length form or the live-action image, but never sensed the pungent onslaught in cartoon that, say, Gillray or Ralph Bakshi have achieved.”—David Thomson). Even online, it sometimes feels that he gets no respect; the editors of the Looney Tunes Wiki can’t identify Tashlin well enough to put up an actual photo of him on his biographical entry.

Still, Tashlin’s work persists and the impact of his unconventional, exaggerated style of cinema continues to reverberate throughout contemporary film. To celebrate Tashlin’s 100th birthday, Cartoon Brew presents 15 reasons why Frank Tashlin is worthy of appreciation. To learn more about him, visit Tish Tash: A Blog Tribute to Frank Tashlin and pick up a copy of Ethan de Seife’s recent book Tashlinesque: The Hollywood Comedies of Frank Tashlin.

1. He named his buffoonish newspaper comic character Van Boring as a dig toward his former boss, Amadee J. Van Beuren, who ran Van Beuren Studios.

2. He knew that Porky Pig was a chump and loved to make fun of him.

3. He once claimed that when he worked at Disney, one of his favorite things to do was throw Clarence Nash, the voice of Donald Duck, out of the window.

Tashlin told historian Michael Barrier in 1971:

They didn’t know what to do with a fellow by the name of “Ducky” Nash—Clarence Nash, he was the voice of Donald Duck—because when they weren’t recording Donald Duck, what do you do with the fellow who’s the voice of Donald Duck? Ducky had an office in this building, a little tiny office where he would come over and go to sleep. These were hillside places, and the ground beneath his window was maybe twelve feet. Roy Williams, this big fellow, and I, when Ducky was asleep—and he slept just like a duck, he made funny sounds—in this big wicker chair, we would take this chair, with him in it, and we would hold it out the window, and drop him. This chair would hit, and because it was wicker, it sort of had a recoil, you know, the legs went out like this. He’d start quacking away down there, and he’d come up, dragging this chair with him. This happened many times, and it was a high point of humor—you know, you want to talk about low humor, that’s what we thought was funny.

4. He directed the most elegant, cinematically modern black-&-white cartoons in the history of animation.

5. His eclectic career is full of detours into different areas of film, like when he made the stop motion films The Lady Said No (1946) and The Way of Peace (1947).

Tashlin scholar Ethan de Seife has written extensively about The Lady Said No.

6. He played an important role in kickstarting the ‘cartoon modern’ era.

When Tashlin became the head of Columbia’s Screen Gem studios in 1941, he transformed it into a haven for artists who wanted to create modern-looking animation. Zachary Schwartz, who became a founder of United Productions of America, said of Tashlin, “He was an inspirational man to work for.” Another animation modernist, John Hubley, said of his experience, “Under Tashlin, we tried some very experimental things; none of them quite got off the ground, but there was a lot of ground broken. We were doing crazy things that were anti the classic Disney approach.” The visual experimentation continued for a couple years after Tashlin’s departure from Columbia, such as in this 1943 short Professor Small and Mr. Tall:

7. He invented the Fox and Crow.

The Fox and the Grapes, the first cartoon that Tashlin directed with these characters, featured a novel blackout-gag structure that served as a model for many later cartoons, including Chuck Jones’ Coyote and Roadrunner series.

8. He invented his own system of cartooning called SCOT ART.

Tashlin’s how-to cartoon book proclaimed that anybody could create original cartoons if they could draw S(quares), C(ircles), O(vals) and T(riangles). You can find the entire book HERE.

9. Jean-Luc Godard loves him:

Says Godard:

According to Georges Sadoul, Frank Tashlin is a second-rank director because he has never done a remake of You Can’t Take It With You or The Awful Truth. According to me, my colleague errs in mistaking a closed door for an open one. In fifteen years’ time, people will realize that The Girl Can’t Help It served then—today, that is—as a fountain of youth from which the cinema now—in the future, that is—has drawn fresh inspiration….Tashlin indulges a riot of poetic fancies where charm and comic invention alternate in a constant felicity of expression….Frank Tashlin has not renovated the Hollywood comedy. He has done better. There is not a difference in degree between Hollywood or Bust and It Happened One Night, between The Girl Can’t Help It and Design For Living, but a difference in kind. Tashlin, in other words, has not renewed but created. And henceforth, when you talk about a comedy, don’t say ‘It’s Chaplinesque’; say, loud and clear, ‘It’s Tashlinesque’.

10. John Waters loves him:

11. He allowed Chuck Jones to adapt his illustrated book The Bear That Wasn’t into an animated short, and when Jones ruined the film, he never spoke to him again.

12. He married Mary Costa, who was the voice of Princess Aurora in Disney’s Sleeping Beauty.

13. He created an amazing graphic novel called The World That Isn’t.

This bleak yet perceptive commentary on modern American life is as relevant today as when it was first published over sixty years ago. Tashlin uses the cartoon medium to expose the follies of humankind, including religious intolerance, environmental destruction, political corruption, tabloid trash, celebrity worship, and xenophobia. In his cautionary tale, mankind finds peace only after destroying himself through nuclear apocalypse and starting over again.

14. He was a leg man.

This one hardly needs explanation.

15. He pushed live-action farther than anyone before him and anticipated the creative possibilities of today’s CG-infused live-action filmmaking.

And neither does this.

Golden Age animator Phil Monroe (1916-1988) is rarely discussed, even amongst animation cognoscenti, which is unfortunate because he had an amazing career. Over the course of his career, he animated for an honor roll of legendary directors including Bob Clampett, John Hubley, Chuck Jones, Pete Burness, Friz Freleng, and Frank Tashlin. Animation historian Michael Barrier has posted a never-before-published 1976 interview with Phil Monroe that he and Milton Gray conducted.

The interview delves into details that may appeal to only a small portion of our twenty thousand-plus daily readers, but if you appreciate classic Warner Bros. shorts and animation history in general, the interview is guaranteed to blow your mind. There’s even a great story about how Monroe got Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng to square dance with one another, even though “they were barely on speaking terms.” Barrier conducted a follow-up interview with Monroe in 1987, which he promises to publish online soon.

Cartoon Brew | Permalink | No comment | Post tags: Bob Clampett, Chuck Jones, Frank Tashlin, Friz Freleng, John Hubley, Michael Barrier, Pete Burness, Phil Monroe, Warner Bros.

Frank Tashlin’s extremely rare 1952 cartooning booklet How to Draw Cartoons has been posted online in its entirety. In the book, Tashlin promotes his SCOT Art technique, which simplifies every cartoon character into squares (S), circles (C), ovals (O) and triangles (T).

Tashlin’s idiosyncratic style is geared more toward print cartoonists than animators, owing to Tashlin’s beginnings as a newspaper cartoonist. Even though his old-school cartooning style was already on its way out when the book was published in 1952, somehow the style looks artful in his confident hands. Throughout the book, Tashlin uses examples from his own illustrated books, including The World That Isn’t, which still holds up as a masterpiece of graphic art commentary.

Not to take this too far off-topic, but if you’re interested in learning more about Tashlin, I’d also recommend this Michael Barrier interview, which was conducted just one year before Tashlin passed away.

Tashlin has never been properly given his due as an animation director, mostly because his career as a live-action director eclipsed his earlier work. But he was easily among the most forward-thinking, singular and influential animation directors of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Below is a fine example of his innovative directorial style—the 1943 Warner Bros. short Puss n’ Booty.

Cartoon Brew | Permalink | No comment | Post tags: Frank Tashlin, Puss n' Booty, Warner Bros.

Cartoonist-animator-filmmaker Frank Tashlin drew a comic strip, Van Boring (He Never Says a Word), for the Los Angeles Times between 1934 and 1936. A Facebook page devoted to the strip has started posting the pantomime panel, one-per-day, exactly 76 years from their original publication dates.

Written under the pseudonym “Tish-Tash”, the character was inspired by Tashlin’s former animation boss, Amadee J. Van Beuren. It’s well worth joining Facebook to “Like” this page.