Cartoon Study: A Thrilling Tour Through The History of Wild Takes in Animation
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A Thrilling Tour Through The History Of Wild Takes In Animation

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Get ready to have your eyes pop out of your skull, because today we’re taking a look at some of the great wild takes throughout animation history.

First, some context: a ‘take’ refers to a character in a film visibly reacting to something. There are several variations on this, including the double-take (where a character has a delayed reaction) and the spit-take (where a character spits out their drink). The wild take, on the other hand, goes beyond reality by having characters’ eyes inflate like balloons, their jaws stretch out like rubber, or any other extraordinary visual concept the animator can devise. Here’s a perfect example of a wild take, from Tex Avery’s masterpiece Northwest Hounded Police (1946).

Wild takes weren’t always a part of the animator’s arsenal. There was no shortage of crazy expressions in animated films of the 1920s and 1930s, but not many examples of what I would consider to be a wild take. The constant flow of dreamlike surrealism in cartoons of the rubber hose era generally didn’t allow for sudden explosive reactions of surprise. That being said, Ub Iwerks gives us a primordial example of a wild take in Plane Crazy (1928), the first Mickey Mouse cartoon ever produced.

The true father of the wild take was undoubtedly Tex Avery. If you watch Avery’s early directorial efforts at Warner Bros., you can see the characters’ reactions grow more exaggerated as his style developed. These examples may seem tame by later standards, but nothing like this had been attempted before.

It was when Avery moved to MGM in 1941 that he secured his position as the master of the wild take. Avery was a firm believer in using animation to do things no human actor could ever accomplish, and that philosophy is exemplified in this gleefully impossible scene from Little Rural Riding Hood (1949).

With the release of the classic Red Hot Riding Hood (1943), in which a wolf goes gaga over a sexy nightclub performer, gigantic reactions of lust and alarm became synonymous with Avery’s style. Here are just a few of my favorite examples from his filmography.

What really makes a wild take pop is the suddenness with which a character shoots into a zany expression, and Avery took great pains to sharpen his comic timing. As he said, “I found out the eye can register an action in five frames of film. Five frames of film at twenty-four a second, so it’s roughly a fifth of a second to register something, from the screen to your eye to the brain.”

He continued, “Say we had an anvil falling, we would bring it in perhaps four or five frames before the hit, that’s all you need – Djuuuuuu… bam! It’s there, and you don’t know where in the hell it came from. It makes that gag much funnier.” Compare these reactions from the WB short Of Fox and Hounds (1940) and the MGM short Out-Foxed (1949) to see how much Avery’s timing improved in under a decade; the fox’s reaction in the earlier film is so lush and slow that it barely registers as a take, whereas the latter is instantaneous and hysterical.

Avery’s wild take magnum opus is Northwest Hounded Police (1946), in which a wolf convict attempts to escape from Sgt. McPoodle (played by Droopy), and his frenzied reactions get more absurdly outsized every time he runs into him. Wild takes like the one below get to the heart of what I love most about animation: it can bring raw emotions to the surface by depicting how something feels rather than how it literally looks. Has there ever been a more vivid portrayal of terror than this wolf’s enlarged eyeballs jutting out of his head and his tongue flapping like a diving board?

Shortly after Avery revolutionized the wild take, fellow MGM directors William Hanna and Joseph Barbera started incorporating wild takes of their own into their Tom & Jerry series. Some of these takes even give Avery a run for his money.

One of the funniest takes in the Tom & Jerry canon, and one of the funniest cartoon scenes in general, is the bee climax from Tee for Two (1945). You know exactly what’s going to happen – there’s even a drumroll leading up to it – and yet the reaction is somehow even more extreme than you expect (and perfectly paired with one of Hanna’s iconic screams). Irv Spence animated the majority of this sequence, with Ken Muse handling Tom’s howl at the end.

Following the popularity of Red Hot Riding Hood, other studios also jumped on board the wild take train. In the Walter Lantz cartoon Abou Ben Boogie (1944), directed by James “Shamus” Culhane, we’re treated to a particularly outrageous portrayal of desire animated by Les Kline (Pat Matthews animated the lovely Miss X).

I’m not sure I could pick the greatest wild take of all time, but one of the nominees would have to be Daffy Duck’s legendary eyeball take in Bob Clampett’s Book Revue (1946). For a brief moment, Daffy doesn’t simply express fear… he becomes fear. This classic Looney Tunes moment was animated by future Peanuts director Bill Melendez.

Chuck Jones – master of the subtle eyebrow wiggle and mouth twitch – is not commonly associated with eye-bulging hysterics, but he knew his way around a take. He once said, “On rare occasions, I would employ Tex Avery distortion… but only on my birthday.” It must have been Jones’s birthday when he directed these scenes:

Wild takes became a key element of the Casper the Friendly Ghost cartoons over at Famous Studios, which were packed with fear-related gags seemingly inspired by Avery cartoons like Slap-Happy Lion (zebras jumping out of their stripes, kangaroos diving into their own pouches, etc.). The timing isn’t as snappy as Avery’s, but the early entries have some funny drawings and ideas. Here are just a few examples of people losing their minds upon seeing a g-g-g-ghost.

The brilliantly off-kilter Terrytoons animator Jim Tyer had his own version of the wild take, known as the “shrink take,” in which a character would briefly get smaller as a build-up to an outlandish expression. As you can see in this Tyer scene from Sick Sick Sidney (1958), the shrink gives the inevitable freakout an extra punch.

Wild takes don’t only show up in American cartoons. This doozy of a wild take, from the Yugoslavian cartoon Inspektor Maska: Citizen IM-5 (1962), suggests that Zagreb Film director Boris Kolar was looking to Warner Bros. and MGM cartoons for inspiration.

During the heyday of theatrical animated shorts, executive meddling was minimal, as most producers of the time were too lazy or indifferent to interfere. That all changed in the television era, when tv executives started micromanaging animated series every step of the way, systematically stamping out silly eccentricities like wild takes. A CBS memo (which animator Tom Minton identifies as being from 1978) expressly forbids animated distortions of this kind, stating, “The networks will NOT ACCEPT any wild takes on characters! This means that any reaction where the body comes apart, becomes distorted, eyes pop out, and the chin drops to the floor, etc. will NOT be accepted. Please DON’T DO IT!!!” This mild scream from a 1977 episode of The Robonic Stooges is about as extreme as you were allowed to go on tv in the 1970s.

The lone example of a true wild take from this era randomly appears out of nowhere in Filmation’s 1979-1980 series The New Adventures of Mighty Mouse and Heckle & Jeckle, from an episode titled “Movie Mouse.” Eddie Fitzgerald storyboarded this scene and got in trouble with the producers, who claimed that it couldn’t be animated. Animator Kent Butterworth insisted that it could, and he spent a week working on it to prove it. The scene miraculously wound up in the finished episode, and it’s a welcome oasis of weirdness in an otherwise straightforward tv cartoon. Nothing like this had been done in a commercial American cartoon in decades, and it would be years before anything like it would be attempted again.

Coincidentally, the cartoon that brought wild takes back to the mainstream was a different, totally unrelated Mighty Mouse revival (although Fitzgerald and Butterworth worked on this series as well): Ralph Bakshi’s Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures, which premiered in 1987. According to Thad Komorowski’s book Sick Little Monkeys, the artists on the show never saw a single note from CBS or Standards and Practices because Bakshi refused to pass them along; in fact, it’s believed that he burned them. Having a filmmaker with Bakshi’s clout around to fight the network for them gave the young staff of future animation legends free reign to try out subversively cartoony gags of the kind that had been banned from tv for years. The results sometimes lacked polish, but made up for it in energy.

After Mighty Mouse paved the way, several other tv series of the late Eighties also started using wild takes (Garfield and Friends, The New Adventures of Beany & Cecil, Beetlejuice, etc.). Wild takes even became a running gag in the Scooby-Doo spin-off A Pup Named Scooby-Doo, and old-timers Bill Hanna and Joseph Barbera were happy to get a chance to use them again. Series developer Tom Ruegger thanked the two by saying, “Special kudos to Bill Hanna for directing the first episode, and to Joe Barbera for teaching me that we needed to use equally wild sound effects whenever we created ‘Tex Avery’-style wild takes (‘That’s the way Tex did it.’).” Here’s a clip from that first episode, “A Bicycle Built for Boo,” which debuted in 1988.

Rubbery series like Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures and A Pup Named Scooby-Doo made a ripple in the industry, but the major comeback for classic cartoon slapstick was the groundbreaking hybrid feature Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988). Animation director Richard Williams looked to cartoons of the 1940s as a guide for drawing Roger’s insane histrionics, only with even more loopy dimensionality added on.

Wild takes are even identified as a common animation trope in the 1990 Tiny Toon Adventures episode “Wild Takes Class,” in which Bugs Bunny teaches the next generation of cartoon characters the art of going saucer-eyed at an oncoming anvil.

The animation in The Simpsons is usually more deadpan than the examples we’ve looked at so far, but the early Simpsons shorts that appeared on The Tracey Ullman Show are full of deliciously scribbly takes. David Silverman primarily animated these gems, and he became the go-to artist behind Homer’s “rants, freak-outs, and heart attacks” throughout the series.

When the gleefully deranged Nicktoon The Ren & Stimpy Show was thrust onto an unsuspecting populace in 1991, the floodgates really opened for wild takes on tv. And the show didn’t waste any time getting to the good stuff: this ballistic sequence comes from the pilot episode, “Big House Blues.” Kelly Armstrong animated the kiss, while Bob Jaques took over for Ren’s scream.

The Ren & Stimpy staff was always coming up with clever new ways for their characters to go bananas. This bit from “Robin Höek,” directed by John Kricfalusi, is a particularly original spin on the traditional wild take.

Maybe the wildest of all wild takes is this insane face-melting bit from the Ren & Stimpy episode “In the Army,” directed by Bob Camp. This scene sums up what the show was all about: it’s bizarre, it’s gross, and it’s uproariously funny in its excessiveness.

I promise I’ll move on from the Ren & Stimpy clips after this, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention this unforgettably weird moment (animated by Bob Jaques) from “Man’s Best Friend.” Nickelodeon refused to run this episode for its disturbing content, although whether it’s more disturbing than anything else on the show is up for debate.

The influence of Ren & Stimpy spread far and wide, and wild takes became a regular occurrence on Nineties animated series like Rocko’s Modern Life and Courage the Cowardly Dog. Here are just a few examples of takes from tv shows of the 1990s and early 2000s.

One of the unsung masters of the wild take is Pat Ventura, who directed several gut-busting shorts for the Cartoon Network anthology series What a Cartoon!, but was criminally never given his own tv series. Ventura’s work is testament to how much mileage you can get out of “limited” animation if you approach it creatively; with timing this razor-sharp and poses this hilariously over-the-top, the lack of inbetweens becomes an asset rather than a drawback.

Wild takes aren’t as common now as they were in the Nineties, but you can still find them if you’re looking. James Sugrue’s terrific pilot for the comedy-fantasy series Bluehilda is almost entirely composed of wild takes, establishing our leading lady as a rubbery ball of restless cartoon energy.

SpongeBob Squarepants has been on the air since 1999, and yet the talented artists who work on the show still manage to come up with unique and funny expressions for the characters. Look at the incredible variety of takes they wring out of Squidward in this standout sequence from “Jolly Lodgers.” This episode was directed by Adam Paloian, while underground cartoonist Kaz wrote and drew the initial storyboards.

The classic Disney shorts weren’t as heavy on wild takes as the WB and MGM cartoons, but the more recent Paul Rudish-produced Mickey Mouse shorts are full of them. There are some particularly good ones in the macabre 2013 episode “Ghoul Friend,” directed by Spongebob alum Aaron Springer.

In addition to animated shorts and tv series, wild takes have found their way into animated feature films as well. Here are a few examples:

Even live-action movies have occasionally gotten in on the act, although usually with the addition of animated effects. There’s a very cartoony take in Tim Burton’s 2024 hit Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, which was impressively achieved through on-set puppetry.

Anime artists have developed their own twist on the wild take, in which semi-realistic characters will transform into simpler, cuter versions of themselves to express exaggerated rage, fear, innocence, etc. This is usually referred to as “chibi” (Japanese slang for “small”) or sometimes “super deformation.” The pirate adventure series One Piece has aired over a thousand episodes since 1999, and the chibi interludes in the show have gone increasingly berserk over time.

Video games have also used wild takes, most notably the 2023 indie platform game Pizza Tower, developed by Tour de Pizza. The game’s look successfully blends Super Nintendo-style pixel art with Nineties Nicktoon-inspired quirkiness.

Speaking of games, Netflix’s unique interactive film Cat Burglar (2022) – in which the viewer answers trivia questions in order to sneak a feline criminal past a security guard canine – channels the screwball approach of classic theatrical cartoons with mallets, bombs, and wild takes. Creator Charlie Booker intended the film to be an homage to the “timeless, surreal anarchy” of Tex Avery’s work.

In stop-motion films, pulling off a wild take requires a process called replacement animation, in which an object is switched out with another object between frames. A wild take might involve creating an entirely new head for each frame of animation, or at least creating new eyes and mouths. There’s an excellent take in this cycle from Max Winston’s mind-bending 2023 short Daffy in Wackyland, the first ever stop-motion Looney Tunes cartoon.

You don’t often see wild takes in computer-animated features, which is a shame, although there is something close to one in Hotel Transylvania: Transformania (2022), directed by Derek Drymon and Jennifer Kluska. For a split-second, you can see Johnny sprout gigantic Ren & Stimpy-esque eyes.

There’s no limit to how far you can go when you’re dealing with animated characters. In the wonderful 2014 short Driving, cartoonist Nate Theis warps his stylized characters into near-abstraction as they explode with road rage. Look at the amount of sight gags Theis spins out of bending these designs until they break.

Perhaps the most well-known of all wild takes is the classic image of a character’s jaw literally dropping to the floor in shock. It’s such an iconic visual that it feels like it must’ve existed since the dawn of time, but the earliest example I’m aware of is from the Tom & Jerry cartoon Quiet Please! (1945). Here are a few jaw drops throughout history:

Well, that’s all for me, but how about you? What are your favorite wild takes? Let us know in the comments below. Here’s one more Avery take to finish things off.

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