Appreciating the Brushstrokes: Pre-Computer Animation and the Human Touch

One era's trash is another era's treasure. This becomes truer the deeper we get into the era of computers and automated, technology-assisted production.

I've been thinking about this because of the existence of the nostalgia cable network MeTV Toons. It runs nothing but older animation—mainly stuff produced between the 1940s and the 1990s for movie theaters, broadcast networks and cable; a mix of short subjects that used to run in front of feature films and half-hour shows with single stories or a lot of brief segments.

The channel has become the default thing for our family to put on the main television in the house. At first, it was mainly a soothing, familiar choice to put on programs I watched when I was a kid or when I watched my younger brother as a kid. There were the 1970s Saturday morning network shows like "Super Friends," "Bugs Bunny and Friends," "The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle and Friends," or "Scooby-Doo," or ones that typically ran five days a week on local stations after school, like "Speed Racer" and "Inspector Gadget." Nobody I knew of wrote about this stuff critically. The only time I ever saw any of it mentioned in newspapers or magazines was in editorials complaining about the garbage on TV polluting kids' minds and lowering their standards.

But the more we put these shows on, the more I found myself actually looking at them, actively rather than passively, and appreciating them as examples of handmade popular art.

Let's be upfront: This piece does not argue that a disrespected type of entertainment is actually a work of genius. Aside from the Warner Bros. and Rocky and Bullwinkle and older Popeye and Tom and Jerry cartoons they show, and possibly "Speed Racer," which had a dynamic and poker-faced sort of commitment to its own absurdity, most of this stuff was considered cheap and forgettable for a reason. It was product. That any personality managed to get into it at all was a tiny miracle, considering the financial and logistical limitations placed on it by bosses.

Every "Scooby-Doo" plot was basically the same, and most of the "Super Friends" plots were variations on something very familiar. The stakes were low. Characters rarely died, even on the more "serious" adventures. There wasn't a lot of thought put into the storytelling. You can detect an overall decline in craft in American animation from the 1940s through the 1980s: the drawings became less surprising and expressive, the movements less smooth, and background elements were blatantly re-used or simply repeated (like when Scooby and Shaggy would run from a ghost in a haunted mansion and pass the same doors and furniture ten times).

This was not the animators' fault: they were working with the increasingly limited budgets and compacted timetables they had been given by their employers, who for the most part were more interested in selling ads and making money than in making something memorable. The executives of Hanna-Barbera studios who were responsible for most, though not all, of the cheap, mediocre, slapped-together Saturday morning 'toons of my youth, as well as supposedly "adult" cartoons that ran in prime time, like "The Flintstones" and "The Jetsons," as well as most of the artists who worked on them, are long gone. I bet they would be surprised to find out that their work was still being re-run a half-century later.

Despite all this, I can honestly say there isn't a single one of these animated works that I don't respect on some basic level, just because they are evidently the product of human artists working with their brains and hands. I never used to think about that in relation to this type of material, but now I think about it all the time.

Generative AI did not exist until recently, so it was not possible to type prompts into a computer and have it spit out some eerily lifeless slop that was "scraped" (i.e. plagiarized without compensation) from artists around the world and throughout time. Even when it was crap, somebody had to actually make it. Some of them put their hearts into it. The rest put their backs into it. It's hard work doing 12 drawings for every second of screen time.

As a result, during recent re-watches, I found myself appreciating elements that escaped my attention when I was younger, like the fact that all of the backgrounds in Scooby Doo were drawn in a caricatured, exaggerated manner familiar to anybody who has visited the Haunted Mansion at Disney World, or that when you watch even the substandard Road Runner cartoons from the 1970s, you're still getting the experience of being inside the mind of the great director Chuck Jones, who put more personality into even the most rudimentary character drawings and desert landscapes than most modern photorealistic Disney features can manage on a nine-figure budget.

All of these cartoons had a style, and it wasn't that soulless, puked-out texture that all Gen AI visuals have in common. Just like handwriting (another nearly lost art form) if you watched enough of these shows, you could tell the different signatures apart. You got to the point where you could tell Hanna-Barbera from Filmation from Terrytoons, or Warner Bros. from MGM from the Walt Disney shorts, at a glance, from the other side of a room. Every member of the Scooby-Doo gang had their own distinctive body language and way of running. The renderings in the first season of the adventure series "Jonny Quest" are gorgeous, with thick, dynamic lines and hard shadows reminiscent of film noir. Shaggy's baffled or frightened reactions are genuinely amusing even today. Even a less memorable animated character like Captain Caveman or Snagglepuss had a life force of some sort. They didn't seem to have been spit out of an algorithm.

I like to picture the animators at their drafting boards in some office in Los Angeles or New York (or, later, somewhere in Korea or Japan or Belgium, because a lot of the work started getting outsourced in the '8os) and actually using pencils or pens or paintbrushes to figure out a rough idea of what was going to eventually be finalized and aired. There were wastebaskets full of crumpled-up paper near every desk. You can sense the human touch even in the worst or most rushed material. It's a reminder of what we're in the process of losing as technology strives to eliminate not just labor, but thought itself.