How Hannah-Barbera Utilized Simple Animation to Emphasize the Dialogue, Music and Sound Effects

In an auricular video essay, filmmaker Patrick Sullivan explores how the Hanna-Barbera animation studio historically kept their animation very simple and instead emphasized aural components such dialogue, music and sound effects to illustrate the story. Per legendary cartoonist Chuck Jones, they were creating “illustrated radio”.

The difference between what we did at Warner Bros. and what’s on Saturday morning is the difference between animation and what I call illustrated radio. If you can turn off the picture and still know what’s going on, that’s illustrated radio.

via The Awesomer