In this assignment, I looked into an article that explains how the studio Hanna-Barbera used sounds effectively paired up with limited animation to build narrative for their animated worlds, also how they created a brand to make their work stand out from the rest of the animations at their peak. This article is called Hanna-Barbera’s Cacophony: Sound Effects and the Production of Movement by Patrick Sullivan. The author goes over roughly a brief history of the studio and how they picked up using limited animation to dominate television animation taking up nearly 2/3 of the shows airing. Sadly, for this studio, a lot of scholarly attention was drawn away from it as more, this was due to mainly all of the attention drawn to Disney’s work as it dominated the film work while Hanna-Barbera dominated TV. Therefore, less attention was drawn to the sound and music part in animation, this all was introduced in the start of the presentation by Amy.
Amy had also mention how Chuck Jones, someone who had previously used a lot of limited animation, critiqued Hanna-Barbera for their use of limited animation describing it as ‘illustrated radio’ which was really funny to me, it feels like he was just butt hurt that some other company was more successful with limited animation. From critiques, Hanna-Barbera has also been acknowledged for their use of talented voice acting to push the narrative along.
From here the article breaks into 3 different section which are, building a library, limited animation and producing movement. Throughout these 3 points, it becomes extremely repetitive connecting that ‘sound and music help avoid the audience’s full attention the stillness in limited animation,’ or simply flipping the statement around to ‘limited animation movement is driven by the use of sound and music’ but always able to link it back to how the studio uses the techniques successfully.
The article does educate the reader on the difference on using performance-based sound/music to library of sounds which Odhran in my group paid most attention to as he was presenting the points in this section. Briefly from my understanding in this piece, Performance-based is where they record the music and animate movement exactly the rhythm in comparison to library of sounds, this is where animation is created and then sound effects added on. It’s clear that Hanna-Barbera uses building a library, they’ve created an audio branding for themselves as they use the same sounds over and over again through all their episodes, shows and series.
The next section which was talking about the difference in full animation and limited animation. I had a deeper look in this section, I was the one who picked to talk about it in our presentation. I thought this area of the article was going to be a little bias and bring in Japanese animation which uses a lot of the limited animation techniques to create beautiful pieces of work but instead, it was overall much more educational explaining the difference between full and limited animation. Full animation usually goes for 24 original draws per second which is the same as film, therefore suitable for displaying in cinemas in contrast to limited. Limited avoids 24 original draws as they could hold some frames from 2,3,4 or even 5 times longer. It also lists the techniques known as are stop-images, pull-cels, repetition, sectioning, reusing cels, and short shot length that create a stillness in the animation. All of these techniques which Hannah Barbera has engaged with.
How Hanna-Barbera would use stop image mainly for crashes and other collisions, only leaving in the background in view and creating a ‘shake’ of the camera and a burst of percussion render the off-screen crash. The other techniques of pull-cels, repetition, and sectioning all change movement within the image. With pull-cels, movement in the image emerges, such as a changing relationship between the background and foreground. Though both full and limited animation use looping, the difference is that limited animation by Hanna Barbera would loop the background, often having the characters pass the same landscape over and over again. Sectioning is where the animators would only move a small element of the character, the most notable example of this occurs during dialogue. Characters’ mouths and heads move while the body, arms, and legs remain completely static, causing characters to move awkwardly.
EXAMPLE OF LIMITED ANIMATION
The following section was presented by Aaron in my group, this last point in the article just combines the two points from before and explain the terms Mickey Mousing to Trajectory Mimesis. Mickey mousing in short term is basically where an action is paired up with an instrumental sound, the sound does not have to be realistic paired up to the movement in the animation, there is tight synchronization between movement and/or cutting and the beat. Trajectory Mimesis on the other hand is similar but the sounds used are much more ‘whacky’ and comedic, paired with the limited animation, they’re able to overlap sounds to make it very distracting. The main different is that Mickey mousing have rhythm and Mimesis really doesn’t as long as it pushes the movement being displayed on screen.
Overall, my opinion on the article itself was it was pretty educational, it would’ve been interested in seeing more of the author’s personal opinions on what they liked more in each section or more into the charms of the different technique. But again, the topic is about Hanna-Barbera and their use of sound effects for their work. As well, working as a group for this assignment went really well, everyone communicated and stayed on topic for most of the meetings allowing us to get through this easily and not bump heads at all. I’m happy with the teamwork but unsure if the work I’ve displayed is correct or anywhere as good as it needs to be. If I were to redo this assignment again, it’d probably just remake the slides to look much nicer. It wasn’t the top of my priority as I was pretty deep in reading the article and making sure I understood what each section was talking about.
REFERENCES USED FOR MY RESEARCH:
Hanna B, Ito T (1996) A Cast of Friends. Dallas, TX: Taylor Publishing Company.
Sound Ideas (1995) Hanna-Barbera Sound Effects Roundtable (CD Booklet). Richmond Hill, Canada, Sound Ideas, np.
Steinberg M (2006) Immobile sections and trans-series movement: Astroboy and the emergence of anime. Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 1(2): 190–206.
Bashara D (2019) Cartoon Vision: UPA Animation and Postwar Aesthetics. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Scheider S (1988) That’s All Folks! The Art of Warner Bros. Animation. New York, NY: Henry Holt & Co.