Flying Chicken Leg in Perspective

Cartoon directors seem to have given in to the tempation of animating little bits in perspective just for the hell of it. Bob McKimson did. He’d have characters run toward and away from the camera whether it added anything to the cartoon or not. And Rudy Ising once said Hugh Harman was “a nut” which it came to perspective animation.

The motivation in some cases might have been simply to break up the monotony of the look of the cartoons. Maybe that’s the case in Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera’s “Part Time Pal” (1947). It’s not a great cartoon—Barbera seemed to think just the idea of Tom being drunk could carry a whole short—but we get a flying chicken leg animated in perspective. Tom swats it out of Jerry’s hand.








The credited animators are Mike Lah, Ed Barge and Ken Muse. I’m not sure if this is Lah’s work here; it looks a lot more like Lah at the end of the cartoon when Tom’s banging the umbrella and climbing the stairs. A shame Irv Spence isn’t here; he would have done a great job in the scene with Tom tripping over the milk bottles.