by Kambole Campbell

I've been watching a lot of Looney Tunes lately. Some work has taken me through about 40 or 50 odd shorts from Chuck Jones, Tex Avery, Friz Freleng, and Bob Clampett, in part to assess their style of visual comedy. For fear of overlapping with said commissioned work here, their work combined is the heart of visual comedy, filtering Keaton-like slapstick through the flexibility of the animated medium.

This isn't a preface to say this style is dead and gone: the director and animator Masaaki Yuasa has spoken plainly about the influence of Avery on his work, you can see how animation artists still pull from this particular lineage of jokes. Speaking somewhat reductively, there isn't a particularly vast gulf between the sorts of gags as seen in The Amazing/Wonderfully Weird World of Gumball or something like Smiling Friends or SpongeBob SquarePants, compared to the one I'm about to talk about: where the chosen medium of animation or style of painting is itself the joke, for its intrusiveness. 

This brings me onto Farmer Jim. The mere sight of this guy, the adoptive father of Porky Pig and Daffy Duck in new feature The Day the Earth Blew Up, had the Bonlieu audience at last year's Annecy Festival in hysterics. In a world of stretchy and (relatively) simple cartoon characters, here comes an immensely detailed painting with absolutely no flexibility, as though he's being held in place by all the paint that makes up his likeness. Daffy and Porky bounce around the frame, while Farmer Jim barely moves at all – when he does, he either hops through the frame with no limb movement or walk animation, or his hands are simply moved from one side of the frame to the other.

His very existence is a gag because he is visually incongruous with the rest of the scene, something director Peter Browngardt beautifully escalates through another subversion of the rest of the scene. As Farmer Jim inexplicably just walks, or rather, hops off into the sunset, leaving the boys without a father (in itself, a hilarious sendup of a tragic familial backstory), he suddenly turns around in incredibly smooth full animation on 1s, his likeness turning into something Disney-esque. 

There's not really a lesson in this, just a little bit of contained glee at an animation institution proving it still has the juice, to borrow a little bit of Twitter parlance. The Day the Earth Blew Up is an incredibly good time (and it should still be available to watch in UK cinemas at the time of sending, and available on home media in the US physically and digitally) – and if nothing else, Farmer Jim is worth the price of admission.

/out of frame

🤖 Kambole: Knights of Guinevere has been greenlit! The Australian studio Glitch Productions is taking their first 2D animated show to a full series, which is great news in isolation but also feels particularly uplifting in the context of the animation landscape as it is now. Independent productions of this scale working out in light of things like Adobe's near-shuttering of Flash, Warner Brothers's gutting of their own library and so on, feels real good right now. The pilot was great, can't wait for the rest. In the meantime, read Coop's wonderful summary of why we should be hungry for more of this show for a previous Re:Frame send.

🥰 Rollin: Happy Valentine's Day, everyone. May you find your very own special beam cannon, courtesy of SmallBu Animation.