am2xAnimated Movies was launched by Olivier Mouroux in 1999. In addition to a daily news report, he also created a database of information about past, current, and upcoming films. In 2003, he took a job in the industry and had to give up his work on the site. Several fans of Animated Movies decided to take on the task of keeping the news portion of his site going, and founded what is now Animated Views.

As AV turns 15, let's take a look back at the site we descended from. Below you can explore the database Olivier compiled at Animated Movies during its existence, as it last appeared online in October 2003.

History  * Academy Awards  * Tom & Jerry




HISTORY

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer has long been a classic American icon, its distinguished reputation embodied in its renowned moniker and roaring lion trademark. Since its founding in 1924, MGM has prided itself on creating and shaping cinematic history, delighted audiences worldwide with entertainment of unparalleled distinction.  Some of the greatest animators of all time, including Tex Avery, Hanna and Barbera, contributed to its success.  But the studio's pinnacle in the 30's and 40's would be followed by its decline in the 1950's, when the animation studio was closed. Nevertheless, MGM remains today a major force in the entertainment industry, with a proud heritage, an enduring legacy, and a promising future.
 
 
Barney Bear Screwy Squirrel Droopy and Spike The Wolf

 
 

ACADEMY AWARDS

MGM Academy Award Winning Cartoons

Nominees
 

TOM AND JERRY

The birth of stars

William Hanna, an animator who had done some directing at MGM since 1937 without really impressing anyone, was coupled up with Joseph Barbera in 1939. Joe Barbera had moved to MGM, also in 1937, from Paul Terry's studio in New Rochelle to work as a story man. Hanna and Barbera somehow connected with each other and fused into a fantastic team. They complemented each other perfectly with Hanna's keen sense of timing and Barbera's creative gag writing.

Thus Tom and Jerry, the wonderful duo which were later to be called Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's "Gold Dust Twins", was born on the MGM main lot in Culver City, California in 1939 to star in the first Hanna-Barbera directed short. The debut for the two duos became Puss Gets the Boot, released February 10, 1940. The featuring characters had, however, not yet received the names we know them by. Tom was called Jasper and Jerry was merely an unnamed rodent.

"The story is told that the producer, Fred Quimby, really saw nothing special in the cat and mouse and had the new directing team doing one-shot cartoons, until Puss Gets the Boot was released and became an enormous hit. It was held over at many theaters and nominated for an Academy Award."1 Another MGM short, The Milky Way directed by Rudolf Ising, won the Oscar for Best Short Subject, Cartoon that year.

At this point Hanna and Barbera returned to the cat and mouse. They christened them Tom and Jerry, and began on the second (some would say first, as Puss Gets the Boot was intended to be a one-shot) cartoon in a series that would go on for nearly 30 years at MGM alone. The result was The Midnight Snack which was based on the same basic premise as its predecessor, but made with even better gags. The good collaboration between Hanna and Barbera was obvious in all of their works. Jack Zander recalls the working method in the early days : "Joe wrote all the stories, made all the the sketches, made all the layouts, and Bill Hanna wrote the exposure sheets. Joe could sit with a pencil, and ideas would come off the end just as fast as he could move it. He could draw a storyboard so fast that it would take two people to pin the drawings up on the board while he was making them."

Still, one must not forget the exceptional animation that was classic for Tom and Jerry during the Hanna-Barbera era. Neither should musical director Scott Bradley be forgotten, for he had the ability to add an extra dimension to these shorts. Just as he had done with every other MGM short from his very start with Harman and Ising.
In 1943 the Tom and Jerry team won its first Academy Award for The Yankee Doodle Mouse. This Oscar was the first of seven the team's cat and mouse duo would collect in only nine years. Quite an effort and a record never to be beaten.
 
 

The making of stars

If viewing the Tom and Jerry cartoons in order of release, one will notice that the speed and number of gags began to increase shortly after Tex Avery joined MGM in 1942. Avery had a way of pacing things that was unseen before. This effected Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, and after a time it became a race. Thus many of the mid-1940s Tom and Jerry cartoons stand out in the mass of shorts, with an extremely high pacing and more aggressive gags. Of course there were shorts that didn't exactly live Two Stars, Seven Oscars!up to the MGM standards, but the overall standard of Hanna an Barbera's cartoons was well above average.

The popularity of Tom and Jerry around the world is an effect of many things. One of the key things to the success was the truly believable personalities of the cat and mouse. People could identify with the characters. Not only with the the good aspects but also the bad. In addition, each of the characters possesses an incredible amount of likeability. These likable personalities shines out to the audience in a number of different ways, for all of which there was a certain processed basic idea. For example, one of the most basic ideas of the Tom and Jerry series was the chase. It was a ritual, and somehow it became clear to people that when all is said and done, Tom has no intention of actually eating Jerry. It's not the need for food and survival that's essential anymore. It's the chase it's all about. The thrill of it. Tom and Jerry are no longer a cat and mouse but two persons somehow helping each other fulfilling their needs. This underlying bond between Tom and Jerry gives all of their cartoons strength, and it has been seen from time to time that the two team up to get rid of some outside menace. It's a love-hate relationship that has proven to be both durable and irresistible at the same time.
 
 

The movies

Tom and Jerry also got to star in real movies. The first of such was the musical Anchors Aweigh starring Gene Kelly. Even though this movie was being made at MGM it was Walt Disney who was the first choice when a dancing scene with a character was planned. The story is told that when Disney heard the idea his response came quickly; "Mickey Mouse featuring in a MGM movie ? - Never !" Although Disney turned down the assignment he told Kelly that the idea was certainly feasible. Only then the idea was presented to Hanna and Barbera.

Early drawings of Tom playing with Jerry*It was a challenge, but one that all sides were equally excited about taking. First the entire scene was scheduled on a story board. Then it was shot with both Gene Kelly and the cameraman acting as if Jerry was in the scene at the time. Then Kelly was rotoscoped. Thus Jerry's every movement matches Kelly's precisely, and the outcome was superb. This sequence is one of the technically most perfect and most entertaining in the history of movie musicals. more to it, one of the most famous and unusual, too.

Years later Tom and Jerry were again wanted in the world of movies. They were then to swim with Esther Williams in Dangerous When Wet. Gene Kelly then returned in 1953 to present to Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera another idea for his next feature film Invitation to the Dance. Kelly wanted an entire segment of the film set on cartoon backgrounds. This segment, which was to be called Sinbad the Sailor, was probably the greatest challenge the animators ever got. Especially because Kelly was supposed to dance with a serpent. This caused some problems to the animator of that particular sequence, Michael Lah, as he found it was very difficult to make it look like a subject is dancing without showing arms or legs. To make things work the sequence was shot with Carol Haney imitating the serpent. Afterwards Kelly then filmed the sequence again without her. The serpent was not traced from Haney's movements, however. The animators had to rotoscope Kelly to make the sequence work, and instead used Haney's dance as a seperate film for use of reference.
 

Rising costs and lower budgets

In the 1950s things changed at the MGM cartoon department. Hanna and Barbera had introduced new characters to keep the Tom and Jerry series interesting to the audience. These characters had featured from time to time but in the 1950s they became much more ordinary. Little Nibbles, Little Quacker, Spike, and Tyke were the most important of these. The two latter got to star in their own series, which didn't receive much in audience response.

This decade also brought changes to the cartoon studios around the world, and not least MGM. Costs kept growing, and Quimby had a hard time keeping his budgets under control. Thus about once a year Hanna and Barbera would make a cartoon where most of the footage was from earlier cartoons. These clips would then typically be explained as chapters in a diary or the like. The running time was restricted to a maximum of 7 minutes where shorts of up to 11 minutes had been acceptable in the 1940s.
Commercial success can't last forever
MGM had to accept one new expense, however. Cartoons in CinemaScope became a necessity to stay competitive, and MGM released their first wide-screen cartoon in 1954. By 1956 all their animated shorts was filmed in CS. The animators adapted to this new technique with relative ease, but the in betweens and inking had to be better as the screen was so large that any flaw in the animation would become obvious. As a compensation the ink lines became heavier and completed a process of streamlining that Tom and Jerry had undergone during the last years.

In 1957 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's cartoon department was closed down without prior notice to the employees. Directors and animators oversaw the finishing touches of the cartoons that had been in mid-production when the news were told. "We didn’t have anything to do," recalls Bill Hanna. "We saw the rest of our cartoons through, but we knew they weren’t going to pick them up."

Bill and Joe then offered their idea to make low-cost television to MGM. It is told that Metro production executive Eddie Mannix claimed there was no future in television cartoons and therefore dismissed the thought. The duo then formed their own production company, created Ruff and Ready, and sold them to Screen Gems, a division of Columbia Pictures, the budget then being only 1/15 of the minimum budget at MGM ! Thus giving birth to limited animation.
 

Second thoughts

In the early 1960s it was felt there was a renaissance of interest for cartoons. Some people like to connect this as a reaction to the success Hanna and Barbera had gotten with their cartoons on television. MGM decided that Tom and Jerry might after all still be worth money on the screen. Gene Deitch, an American cartoon director, was assigned to the task of making thirteen new shorts during 1961 and 1962. He had recently moved himself and studio to Prague, and his Czechoslovakian animators had only six Tom and Jerry cartoons to use in getting to know the new characters in hand.

The animation itself is actually quite good, considering the very low budgets. The characters running across the screen still doesn't seem like Tom and Jerry, however. There is no humor, no comedy, and no characterization in these shorts. Tom and Jerry seems like charicatures of themselves, and worst of all is the soundtrack. The music sounds hollow and weighs down the cartoon as a whole, as does the sound effects. For instance, Tom getting swept off his feet would result in a sound much like one you'd get if kicking a bucket of metal ! One imagines people having quite the lot of fun doing the sounds banging pots and pans and breaking glass.

Gene Deitch had at no time had any illusions about the job, and once told David Rider of Films and Filming magazine, "The reason Metro did them had nothing to do with bringing Tom and Jerry to life. They simply wanted to cash in on their popularity as cheaply as possible. Any qualities the finished pictures have is strictly the result of the personal craftsmanship of the artists."5 Although these cartoons were much below normal standard, they proved to MGM that Tom and Jerry were still stars, and that cartoons were still a source to money.
 

The final years

Tom and Jerry greeting their creatorsIn 1963, When Warner Brothers shut down their cartoon department, director Chuck Jones and producer Les Goldman formed their own company called Sib-Tower 12 Productions5. After doing a few projects of their own they were contacted by MGM who offered them a contract. Jones redesigned both Tom and Jerry to make them suitable for his sort of cartoon making. Tom was given big eyebrows and some other smaller restructuring was made in order to make it easier to give him looks of frustration. Jerry was given larger ears and larger, more winsome, eyes for cuteness. The shorts that was made by Jones was without a doubt the best of the 1960s, but still never reached the standard of the Hanna-Barbera era. One of the most obvious reasons for this is that Jones had no intention of using the formula consisting of a chase and lots of violence that Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera had created. Jones wanted to work with Tom and Jerry as he'd done with the characters at Warner's. Unfortunately Tom and Jerry just doesn't seem to support that type of comedy, and thus many of Jones' T&J cartoons merely became one long series of poses and gestures.

After 34 Tom and Jerry cartoons and 2 one-shots, MGM stopped production in 1967 by not renewing Chuck Jones' contract, as it was the general thought at MGM that there was no future in theatrical shorts.
 

Post MGM

In 1975, Hanna and Barbera, the creators of Tom and Jerry. came up with the idea of casting the cat and mouse duo in a new series for Saturday morning television. Network executives feared, however, that the violence in the cartoons would make the series banned by parents. So, it was decided that Tom and Jerry had always been backstage buddies, and that they in this new series was to be friends on stage as well. They would now solve mysteries and help others in friendly competition.

In 1989, a new Hanna-Barbera Saturday morning television series was produced. It was called Tom & Jerry Kids, and featured Tom and Jerry as children.
 
 
 



Animated Movies original content © Olivier Mouroux