4/9/2023 0 Comments Looney toons artoon smileIn 1925, Hugh Harman drew images of mice on a portrait of Walt Disney. Foxy himself is a close cousin to Disney's characters Oswald the Lucky Rabbit (1927) and Mickey Mouse (1928). “It's been great to see how many people care and have people tell me that every time a shot appears in their timeline, it makes them happy.Foxy is one of any number of early cartoon characters modeled after the successes of Paul Terry's and Otto Messmer's work in the 1910s and 1920s. “There are some followers who have also made their illustrations based on some of the backgrounds I post, and I love it when they send them to me,” he adds. Like we suspect, the joy in running accounts like these is to be able to share joy with others on the internet, an act of love that’s slowly disappearing in an age of hyper-personalised timelines and crisis-driven platforms. The posts are carefully curated into three columns: one for interior scenes, one for nature and another for urban environments. “I love when someone speculates or says they know who the uncredited artist for certain scenes are, because I haven't got that trained eye, and I also appreciate when they correct my typos, like when I write that a short was made in 1854, which happens way too often.” “I think everyone who follows the account does it because they love the art as much as I do, and the appreciation is huge,” Beñat says. This was to match the characteristics of the cartoons themselves: flat, comical and stylised. These backgrounds, far from the realistic style that early animators preferred, was a style pushed by Maurice Noble, a background artist who worked closely with Chuck Jones. “I remembered from the classic shorts, as there were for many others such as The Simpsons, but I didn't find any, so I Googled for some, then went home and captured some others, building a huge album on my phone where I go everyday to find the next one to post.” Today, he still has about four hundred stills that he has yet to post.īeñat credits the illustrators on each of these posts. I was certain there had to be a profile dedicated to all those beautiful backgrounds,” Beñat tells It’s Nice That. “I opened the account after looking on Instagram for it. Meandering cliffs joined by a tightrope doesn’t seem so comical without the wisecracking rabbit, and instead is rather grand and almost mythical. Empty city skylines with tenements tinted purple from the evening sky look a bit more melancholy. These stills take on a poetic feel without the goofy band of anthropomorphic animals. Described as “Looney Tunes without Looney Tunes,” the account curates backgrounds from the series active during the golden age of American Animation. Beñat Iturbe Hualde, a TV writer and comedian from the Basque country, does exactly this, in his account Looney Tunes Background. Occasionally, we find an account which changes how we view these images, that re-contextualise scenes that we have previously seen but did not quite appreciate. It becomes a form of collecting and archiving, breaking through the platform’s built-in grammar of gaining popularity and engagement. From accounts that document tiles that appear in film backgrounds to pictures of cats on prayer mats, the variety of content that gets posted seems to only be limited by the imagination of the accounts’ administrators. It’s curious that it has taken this long for this format to become popular, perhaps because it runs counter to vanity that’s been associated with the platform. From queer nightstands to nuns in cinema, single-function Instagram accounts have been popping up left and right.
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