Babs Bunniwalski OverSmith

Here's a nice piece of animation from a source where you don't always expect to see good animation: early '90s TV.

This is from the Tiny Toon Adventures episode "Thirteensomething," animated by the now-defunct StarToons in Chicago; Startoons' founder, Jon McClenahan, directed the episode and animated this sequence (which includes a very long uninterrupted shot of Babs Bunny), with clean-up and inbetweening by Mary Hanley. On a TV budget and schedule, of course, it's not "classic" animation, but it has a lot of character and precise, funny acting, like all McClenahan's stuff for his own studio and, earlier, for Kennedy Cartoons. It does a good job of referencing a movie (When Harry Met Sally without ripping it off.

The set-up for the scene is that Babs has become a success on a prime-time TV show by pretending to be a human; feeling lonesome, she calls up Buster, who is going to pieces without her.



I just like calling attention to this scene because it is a strong piece of TV animation and it's not often that we can single out the animator in a television cartoon (I think some of the animators at overseas studios do surprisingly good work on short notice, but they don't really get credit for it).