Chuck Jones' Cartoons

What I really like about animation from the 60s is that a lot of it was very experimental and the narrative was often driven by a musical rhythm. Warner Bros. released a series of cartoons called "Merry Melodies" which fell under the brand "Looney Tunes". A lot of those were very inventive from an animation viewpoint, and gave us a bunch of very memorable characters such as Buggs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Tweety and Sylvester and so on. The only thing that I didn't like much about them is that sometimes the narrative fell into the "cartoon cliche" trap. Especially, when a situation was resolved with the use of dynamite or an anvil falling on someone's head and thus achieving a comedic moment. Personally, that is a formula that has become too predictable and I much prefer something that doesn't have to rely on violence for comedy.

Chuck Jones was a very famous animator at Warner Bros. and he was one of the most experimental at the studio. The plots are very unusual and the characters are very well animated. It is also interesting to note how transitions are used to switch from one scene to another. I like how unpredictable the cartoons are, as they have a  certain surreal feel to them.

Here are some of my favorite of his cartoons.

Iconic Title Designers: Maurice Binder

What Saul Bass was to America, Maurice Binder was to England. Binder was another brilliant and iconic designer, best known for his James Bond titles. He created the infamous diafragm with bullet shot followed by a prologue sequence, that we still identify with James Bond today. His other signature motif in the James Bond franchise is the use of the silhouettes of the female body in each of the title sequences. It seems that Binder went further than just designing movie titles. When you think about it, he designed the packaging and a movie brand image that still lives on today and that is very facinating for me.

However, Binder's design work was not just limited to James Bond. He concocted some brilliant designs for films such as "Charade" (1963), "Two for the Road" (1967) and "Arabesque" (1966), to name a few.

Binder's style was effective because it was always very conceptual and employed a lot of different graphic experimentations, such as the use of texture, film overlay etc. He was also great at using colour. His visual experiments are particularly fun to compare to the current Photoshop era. The design process today is mainly digital whereas before it was largely manual.

Like Saul Bass, he liked to use geometric shapes that came together into a very rhythmic motion sequence. Here is some of his body of work.

I couldn't find the "Two for the Road" sequence on YouTube but I managed to find it on facebook. Here is the link:

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=1097281038257&ref=mf

Iconic Title Designers: Saul Bass

Saul Bass was a graphic designer who became known as somewhat of a founding father of the movie title sequence. He had a unique geometric style with crisp shapes (often created out of paper) that logically came together into a balanced composition. The style was very minimal, yet modern. Simple, yet sophisticated. 

Over the course of his 40 year career he designed for high profile directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, and Martin Scorsese.

Here are some of my favorite titles of his and some of his most famous body of work.