Nelly’s Folly isn’t one of my favourite Looney Tunes cartoons. A 1961 short about a singing giraffe who hits the big time and goes through the joys and sorrows of celebrity life, it’s a pleasant enough one-shot that I’m not too into. But there’s one particular aspect I’d like to praise, which is its pretty stellar background artwork.
It would be fair to say that Philip DeGuard is legendary for his background art on countless Looney Tunes shorts, especially when working with Maurice Noble’s layouts for many toons produced by Chuck Jones’ unit. The two of them defined that angular abstracted look which often gets associated with 1950s/60s Looney Tunes, but it’s a look that I’m so used to that I’ve taken it for granted.
In Nelly’s Folly, a short I’d never seen before and one that also pushes that DeGuard/Noble style to express the main character’s emotions so vividly, I was caught off-guard and found myself taking notice. On a general level, I really dug its use of colours and silhouetted characters, creating striking shots that are mostly used to put a spotlight on Nelly’s emotions. It’s fitting idea for a character thrust into the public eye, to be emphasized beyond everyone else whilst isolating her from the world at the same time.
A cute habit of the layouts is to use very long vertical backgrounds to sell Nelly’s height, usually with other characters or elements distanced away from her. It’s a fun visual gig, but one that further reinforces the idea of making her special whilst pushing her peers and co-workers away.
There’s a montage sequence I quite like of her various musical projects depicted as album covers, accompanied by a song that changes to represent what each album’s tone. In additions to the album covers being really good in their own right, they also help to convey her shift in mood from joyful to solemn, which is important to understanding why she ends up having an affair and falling out of the limelight.
On that note, the sequence where Nelly’s falls in love with a giraffe from the zoo might be my favourite part, because the backgrounds throw away all sense of place to represent her emotions as purely and wildly as possible. I really adore that kind of thing in general, bringing a character’s feelings to light in whatever ways your medium allows, even if it’s ultimately quite brief.
Quite brief is also an apt description for this article, which is something I wrote in half an hour or thereabouts. I’ve not felt confident in my ability to write about cartoons in the way I normally do on this blog, and I want to try and change that somehow. So I thought it’d be nice to showcase this small thing, even if I don’t have terribly much to say. Hopefully that’s enough.
FrDougal9000 writes for hardcoregaming101.net as Apollo Chungus. When he isn’t writing about video games, he is cultivating his love of animation that’s only increased over the last few years as he’s explored the wide, weird and wonderful world of the medium.