Looney Tunes Backgrounds

Looney Tunes Backgrounds

Early cartoon animators at Warner Brothers of the 50’s were considered part of the golden age of American animation. As it turns out, the animators were often pretty astounding, well versed, well trained, and groundbreaking artists in their own right. They often make references to many famous and popular styles of art.

The Looney Tunes Background Instagram account has a fantastic collection of these backgrounds. I find browsing the minimalist backgrounds from the cartoons reminds me a lot of one of my favorite painters Edward Hopper. And there’s a good reason for that.

The Gaze digs into these backgrounds and does a fantastic job covering the art and artists that inspired these liminal/minimalists backgrounds such as: Edward Hopper, De Chirico, Rockwell Kent, Salvador Dali, and David Hockney.

He points out the fantastic set of design rules developed by Maurice Noble. Noble started at Disney which focused on realism. They even used rotoscoping to get movement as perfect as possible. Noble went the opposite direction when he left and joined Warner Brothers. He created a new set of design rules where the background art becomes part of the distorted and comical setup for each scene. He’s probably most famous for What’s Opera Doc? in which Elmer Fudd hunts Bugs Bunny in an lampooned opera. Hawley Pratt, Robert Gribbroek, Paul Julian, Richard Thomas and many others contributed to these fantastic artistic developments at Warner Brothers as well.

Give this video a look to see more.

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