Why do modern Looney Tunes look so worse than the original theatrical cartoon shorts?

I'm talking about the new batch of Looney Tunes cartoons released since 2020 (if I'm not mistaken) in HBO Max. The visuals, colors, character designs and backgrounds all look off, maybe even a bit cold and lifeless, "cheap" and too basic. I don't know exactly why I feel like this. Take the video below (ignore it's Watchmojo and the thumbnail, that's not the point), you'll see many classic theatrical shorts and a few new Looney Tunes in between. The difference becomes really jarring. Classic Looney Tunes was often truly gorgeous.



I also feel people undersell the classic shorts when they praise and talk about their wackiness, silliness and zaniness, or when they only try to superficially emulate that. A very surface level, superficial understanding of the comedy, the characters, the animation, everything in those cartoons. There is far, far more precision and depth to the comedy and overall aspects of the classic cartoons as a whole. Take a short such as High Diving Hare, featuring Bugs Bunny and Yosemite Sam and directed by Friz Freleng. Every time I watch it, I marvel not only at how gorgeous the colors and backgrounds are, but how the comedy gradually builds throughout the cartoon so well, and it's all so precise and sharp, to the point I can't see myself changing even a fraction of second about the timing and order of the joke. The craft is amazing.

 

Because they can. Companies with a legacy brand or symbol are more likely to try and make things "hipper" for modern consumers, and risk losing the charm of the original.

Look at about every modern update of a mascot or a logo you've known from your youth. The consistent issue always seems to be, "they've lost" whatever it is, that made them legendary in the first place.

But, they're looking at it as "protecting their brand" from irrelevance. The people who are most upset about losing what was traditional about it, usually are people who don't have as much value invested in it in the first place. They are looking at it like they were still children and seeing it the first time...but they can't even imagine themselves in the world of that same-aged child today. They really cannot relate to the current market forces that would cause that sort of drastic change.

I remember when Chuck Jones started putting his own clunky "stamp" on every Warner Brothers character out there, because he had something to gain from making them all over in his own image: the jutting jaw, the hash-line-pencil eyebrows...they were all to try and re-write history of the Clampetts and Averys, to have more of a stake in his own fortunes. And yes, it was ugly, but it always seemed like I was the only one who noticed.

And, as one of the only ones surviving with a legitimate claim to a lot of these characters in their later days...he made a lot of bank on doing that.

 

It’s really just down to hand drawn by actual artists versus computer generated graphics isn’t it?

 

discipline

 

I was going to post the same thing...

 

Try comparing some old EC comic books to anything that's been produced in the field since.

 

You can notice a slow but steady decline in background quality after about 1953-54-ish as budgets started being cut. You can pause almost any of the earlier WB cartoons prior to this and imagine the background as a framed painting that you might hang in your home. I've never felt that way about any CGI animation.

 

The simpler & actually often more stylized background art introduced in WB cartoons in that era was more a reaction to the look of the wildly popular cartoons made by UPA in that time frame than it had to do with any budget cuts.

 

Reminds me of that scene from an old Bugs Bunny, where the artist keeps drawing over him, and he says:
"Continue to draw me like this, and we'll BOTH be out of work!"

 

1953 has cartoons such as Bully For Bugs, Duck Dodgers, Robot Rabbit and so on, which look as gorgeous as ever.

There was a decline in budgeti in the mid-50s and so on. But it only became crippling around the end of the decade and start of the 60s. And Chuck Jones was often able to get around the budget limitations by using money and time from Road Runner cartoons. He and his unit had got very efficient at making Road Runner cartoons with minimal time and money, like a production line. He would save that time and money for something else. Best example being "What's Opera, Doc?", which is a truly a visual spectacle (though I'm not so much a fan of the character designs in it, mainly Bugs redesign at that point, but that fat horse is still amazing).

But the change from the lush, gorgeous backgrounds from the 40s and early 50s to more graphic and abstract ones in the mid-50s and onwards was also due to artistic pressure from the industry. UPA quickly garnered huge amounts of critical praise with cartoons such as Gerald McBoing-Boing, Rooty Toot Toot and so on. UPA firmly rejected the aesthetics of lush and/or realistic detailed backgrounds and so on. They pushed for a new approach of embracing animation as drawings, and also heavily influenced by the principles of modern graphic art. Clarity, precision and economy were their ideals, reduce everything to its essentials, developing limited animation with striking and simple designs. UPA was consciously and proudly doing serious ART and being snob about it. It's very well known how almost everyone at UPA despised anthropormophic cute animals from Disney, and also hated the humor, conflict and violence from Warner Bros. cartoons, which were very scorned and looked with disdain by the likes of Bobe Cannon, perhaps UPA's most important director.

And UPA immediately got huge critical acclaim, and all other cartoon studios felt a strong pressure to follow UPA's model. Even Disney eventually made UPA style cartoons. Studios felt that they were going to be left behind if they didn't follow UPA's approach.

 

Rabbit Rampage. Underrated. Love the gag with the many silly hats Bugs is forced to wear.

 

Makes sense.

 

Enlightening info, thank you. I can see your point about Disney. 101 Dalmations, for instance, looks very different than Cinderella or any of the previous full-length Disney animated features, and I don't believe that Walt was cutting corners.

 

The Chuck Jones era of Tom & Jerry is easily my favorite.

 

That's your call, you're allowed that. Personally, I think his ham-handed manic approach, while in time with the era, sort of ruined what Hanna and Barbara set up. Different strokes, I suppose.

But I really have nothing against Jones' work as it applied to the changing of the times (aside from perhaps better, more subtle directors). I merely have an aversion to his trying to re-create his own share of the legacy in his own image, later on in his life.

 

And I'm the complete opposite. I can't fault the level of work but I didn't find those cartoons had the charm and invention of the early to mid 50s cartoons. Some of those are just brilliant and hilarious. And don't even get me started on the inspired lunacy of Tex Avery cartoons.

 

I briefly worked in an animation studio on Bee Caves Road in Austin, Texas in the late '80's as a cell inker tracing pencil "tweens" for TBN's 'The Watchkins"...



Note the thickness of the lines to the thinner modern digitally drawn Looney Tunes version.

I traced the pencils onto clear acetate film with a technical ink pen with a "1" thickness. We were NOT all exact in tracing every little nuance in the pencils. We all had to use the same ink pen model with the same line thickness for consistency, but every inker imbued their own "English" into the tracing by hand that weren't that precise with the pencils creating a kind of undulating movement energy you can see in the old animation that doesn't come off like "motion smoothing" at 60 frames per second in the digitally processed animation which lacks this nervous, jerky energy. It's like noise reduction verses grain in film.

I don't understand why the digital animators draw the lines so thin when I saw Ren & Stimpy animator John Kricfalusy hand draw each frame (skipping pencil tracing) with a digital brush style pen stroke directly on a digital tablet screen like a Wacom tablet in a YouTube video documentary on him. He was FAST!

 

A lost art.
It was the same with Tom & Jerry. After the brilliant spree of the Fred Quimby productions, with their superb timing, humour and graphic perfection, came all the tacky, weak versions of their capers.

 

Not necessarily. I feel it comes down to the artists themselves.

 

It’s nothing particular to Looney Tunes, it’s just a simple law of producing any work.



Back when those Cartoons were shown theatrically, they brought it much more money, plus we’re usually on a somewhat slower schedule, so quality could be very, very high.

Now, Budgets are much smaller, and for current TV you need to produce about 26, 21 minute shows for just one IP in a season. So corners have to be cut and quality suffers.

And no, it doesn’t have to do with computers, because while a computer can help in making it easier to cut corners, they can also make possible things that animators in the past couldn’t dream of.

 

I grew up on the post-1948 cartoon package that Warner leased to ABC/CBS for Saturday mornings. My college roommate didn’t like those as much and he would point to the backgrounds of the 1940s cartoons as a reason. I still like the Warner cartoons from the 50s, but boy, those background paintings from the 1940s cartoons are gorgeous. I never realized that as a kid, but I do as an adult, particularly since Warner regained rights to the earlier cartoons and restored them.

 

As Toons went into the 60's the Hanna Barbera influence stepped up the cheap look, but I have to say the Looney Tunes hit their trademark look after shedding some of the better drawn Disney look of the 30's and 40's. However, I have to give a shoutout to some of my favorite designs and interpretations of these characters, The Looney Tunes Show. Any other version of the characters just stepped up the slapstick, but this one was far funnier and better written and could be described as the Looney Tunes meet Seinfeld. I like the exaggerated look of the characters here, and this is the definitive Lola Bunny. Favorite would be the glove episode, and as far as Bugs at his most extreme that top 10 video could have included the episode where he goes major OCD and destroys his entire house just to hang a shelf. It is a crime it got canceled after 2 seasons, with the only subpar episode being the one without the main cast of characters.

 

Great example. I'm sure you became aware earlier than I, when I realized the less-consistent look even in the Disney work, once pencils and photocopying cells began to replace the hand-painted, "Nine Old Men" style of cell production. Was it during Pooh it became apparent, or maybe earlier, in Sword In The Stone. I didn't begin to understand the "why" until after high school, of course. Naturally we point our fingers of blame at television, but even IPA work had its' charm and consistent quality control, that we see creeping away once animated TV spots, Total Television, Jay Ward and Trans-Artists found their footing.

Ergonomics and expediency won out over charm in the long run. But it's too easy to lay the blame squarely at Hanna Barbara's feet, they were churning out massive amounts of programming, compare to the others. And with that pioneering expediency, also came a sharper, cleaner house style that mass production will give you out of sheer need for consistency.