Here’s a fantastic treasure trove of images from the Golden Age MGM animation studio, the studio that produced Tom & Jerry and Droopy shorts.
The thing that I love most about these photos—and what makes them so different from any modern form of 2D animation production—is the tactility of the work. The energy of classic Hollywood cartoons originated firstly with the intense manual labor required to produce the films.
Every step of animation production required some level of physical exertion or interaction with a physical object, from jumping on a desk to act out a scene and mixing paints with a blender to searching through boxes of sound effects and making facial expressions at a desk.
