A Look at “I Tawt I Taw a Puddy Tat”

The entire 2011 short I Tawt I Taw a Puddy Tat has been posted to YouTube, in 3D yet. You can turn the effect off fortunately, given the likelihood that you don’t have a pair of special specs handy.

The short of it: I really liked this.

It’s insanely difficult to match the directorial genius of Friz Freleng, or the sheer appeal and mastery of work by the likes of Virgil Ross, Art Davis, and Hawley Pratt even in hand-drawn, traditional animation. This doesn’t meet those standards, naturally, but it’s probably the best attempt at emulating the 1940s/1950s style we all know and love in CG.

The rendering and rigging on these new shorts is nothing short of fantastic, and the crew has obviously gone to great lengths to push CG model to the extremes drawn animation could. Multiples, smears, distortions, fluidity, pliability, going off model to the utmost extreme and snapping right back are fully present, and all done very well. A lot of the animation of Sylvester is actually well-acted and articulated (particularly around the 02:56 mark). Some of the jokes, timing, and, yes, poses were quite funny too. With this and the advent of ‘cartoonier’ CG features in recent years, it seems to have finally sunken into the heads of certain parties in the computer animation community that, yes, if you’re going to do funny animation, you can’t homogenize everything.

Matthew O’Callaghan, the director, does seem to have an obsession with fur and texture. It killed the look of the Road Runner in those shorts, and it’s a little distracting seeing fuzz on Tweety as if he was a baby chick out of one of those paint-by-number CG movies (re: all of them) that I refuse to see, given I’m not a toddler nor the parent of one.

Aside from the aerial camera moves, which read as cheats in a way the faster cutting in the original shorts never did, there’s also a few moments that just don’t work well at all. Freleng was a subscriber to the “less is more” theory more than the other directors were, and it always worked beautifully. The scene of Tweety pushing the cabinet onto Sylvester carries on for far too long and seems like something out of Roger Rabbit more than Looney Tunes. Ditto the scene with Sylvester getting hit by the truck. That bit of painfulness is obviously there to give the shot some background action (God forbid Tweety sing for ten seconds uninterrupted, the kids might fall asleep), but being able to see the cat’s body roll after the collision even at a distance is simply unpleasant.

The old Mel Blanc Capitol Record, from which the soundtrack is derived, not only gives life to these characters, but practically writes the acting and actions by itself. It’s hard to imagine this short working if they went in and had the singing rerecorded by modern voice actors. Blanc was an anomaly in the voiceover business in that he was, really, an actor, and gave the characters true personality.

Unlike in other studios’ cartoons, when the difference between the great animators and great character animators was highly evident and the scene lived or died based on the animator’s skill, Warners had the benefit of a strong actor like Blanc to help mask similar changes. It didn’t matter if it was Ross, Davis, Chiniquy, Perez, or Champin doing the scene in one of Freleng’s pictures because the voiceover was so rich in itself. Sylvester and Tweety still stayed Sylvester and Tweety. It obviously did a great deal to protect this new cartoon from utter failure too.

The cartoon was a nifty novelty and I obviously spent way more time and energy than needed to write about it. But it probably goes without saying that anything new with these characters that doesn’t make me want to gouge my eyes out with its hopeless lameness is something worth crowing about.