(courtesy The Gaze/YouTube (c) Warner Bros. Discovery)
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When you strip Looney Tunes from all its characters and movement and music, you discover this hidden dimension filled with beautiful images that are abandoned, silent, and kind of creepy sometimes. It’s the complete opposite of what Looney Tunes is. Filled with life and very loud. These background images are liminal spaces. Spaces that are usually filled with life, but are now dead silent. (courtesy The Gaze via Laughing Squid)
If you watched even one of the beyond superlative Looney Tunes cartoons, which ran from April 19, 1930, to July 26, 1969 and were created by Leon Schlesinger, Hugh Harman and Rudolf Ising, you will be wonderfully familiar with how manically comedic they are and the way you simply can’t look away from the inspired dialogue and perfectly realised characters.
Each and every cartoon is a work of art, but then notes The Gaze, so is the artwork that forms the backdrop for the cartoons.
In fact, the YouTuber goes so far as to assert, and he’s not wrong, that if you stripped away all the foreground frenetic fun, the artwork is and of itself worthy of admiration and note.
Many of the artists who worked on these backgrounds were inspired by great artists of the past and thought look and hard about the artwork should be the way with The Gaze noting that iconic ex-Disney artist, Maurice Noble, said that “if your characters are caricatures of reality, your background art should be a caricature as well.”
With that kind of philosophy and enduring love of art influencing their work, it’s no wonder that Looney Tunes is almost as memorable as fantastically good stories that take place in front of it.