ARTICLE - THAT'S ALL FOLKS!
Literally millions of single animation cels of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck should have flooded the collectors’ market over the years and driven it into mass saturation. It hasn’t, and it couldn’t. Production cels were washed and recycled, damaged, mistakes made or they were simply destroyed to make space. Today what we have left are small numbers of original animation cels, limited reproductions and a fascinating history of anarchistic creative artists. What can be better than to hang a piece of pure lunacy on your wall and reflect back to the time when your mother kept telling you to turn those cartoons off the telly? Ah! How a little bit of money and sweet revenge are good for the soul… Back in the 1930s, Jack and Harry Warner ran a very tight business empire. The making of movies was an expensive exercise, and filling their thousands of company-owned movie-houses needed an ever-increasing supply of fresh product. The animated six-minute short cartoon was the perfect introduction to the theatre program. Because Warner Bros’ core business was movies Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies spread joy and mayhem across the screens and gave the world timeless characters that were more real to generations of kids than listening to their parents’ stifling calls for getting back to reality. We can all relate to the foibles of Daffy Duck, Sylvester, Bugs Bunny, Elmer Fudd, Pepe LePew, Wile E. Coyote and many more, all trying to understand the world they inhabit. They were the Rolling Stones bad boys of the animation world versus the sweet and saccharine Beatles of the Disney Studios, only offset by Donald Duck who, in his early days, would have found a home at Warner Bros. But remember the difference: Donald wore a cute sailor outfit; Daffy Duck was…naked. The other major difference was in production values between the two organisations. When Schlesinger sold his studio to Warners in 1944, ever-tighter controls on saving production costs and shaving corners literally everywhere came to the fore. Animation art is very expensive, and as Disney sailed close to the wind for a very long time by creating picture perfect animation, Warner Bros, to save costs, came up with limited animation. The long frozen stare, the spare dialogue, the limited use of extra characters all helped to create a unique cartoon, budget-style. Financially restrictive as it must have been, it gave rise to many brilliant individual giants of animation. Directors and animators such as Chuck Jones, Friz Freling, Tex Avery and Bob Clampett (even their names sound like cartoon characters!), and the voice for nearly all the creations, the magical Mel Blanc, breathed life into drawings that made us laugh and enjoy the pure bedlam of these madcap characters. It was the spread of television that killed the Animation cels and drawings as collectables have, like many other art forms, gone through the swings of market trends. By the 1990s there were hundreds of retail outlets run by the major studios flooding the market. These have now disappeared and been replaced by private galleries catering for collectors with a sense of history and offering quality material. Warner Brothers have produced limited editions of up to 2,500 pieces that feature characters and scenes from TV shorts. This number is small for a world market, and Warner Bros licensed only a few animators and directors to release these limited editions. In Australia you can source quality animation art from $1,000 upwards, and as a fine art buyer (and animation is the only 20th century American invented art form) of cels and related material, you are collecting what you personally love; this should always be the primary reason for starting out. Keep your eye on the auction houses to check current prices on pieces, and always do your homework before you decide on a cel that’s caught your fancy. I would suggest if you are a beginner in this field of collecting, pick a theme or a particular interest in a favourite character or animator - and enjoy the ride. That’s (not) all, folks! This information appeared in Issue 27 of Antiques and Collectables for Pleasure & Profit.
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and they had no desire to compete with Walt Disney, they outsourced and purchased cartoons from
Leon Schlesinger Productions.
cinema cartoons, and the industry knew where the future lay. Warner Bros closed their in-house facilities
in 1964 and Saturday morning TV cartoons began. But what those 30-odd years gave us, in hundreds of superb cartoons with a dozen or so gems in animation storytelling, is a legacy that won Oscars (the first was for the cartoon Tweetie-Pie, which paired Sylvester the Cat with Tweetie-Pie
the canary), numerous exhibitions and the first retrospective in New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in 1985.
