That’s art, folks! Louisiana Art and Science Museum’s Warner Bros. exhibit closes soon

Forget digital animation and PIXAR for a moment and think back to the classic Saturday morning cartoons of your childhood. Those animators weren’t trying to make their characters and settings as impressively hyper-realistic as possible; they were imagining to comic effect the physical limits of a cartoon rabbit and a short, mustachioed cowboy as they dodged and outsmarted each other.

During that golden age of American animation, the 1930s to 1960s, Warner Bros. introduced us to Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Yosemite Sam and many more iconic characters through endearing animated shorts that still hold up today.

Wrapping up this month at the Louisiana Art & Science Museum is an exhibit that looks at how those famous characters came to life through hundreds of original drafts and sketches as well as videos of the cartoons themselves.

You can see, for example, the illustrated rules Warner Bros. artists developed for certain characters, such as how to droop Bugs Bunny’s ears when he was sad or how far to stretch his arms and legs when he was surprised. The lengthy amount of time and skill it took to illustrate each scene and each character movement for just a few seconds of clever animation is mind-boggling to us today.

But it’s a reminder that while anything seemed hysterically possible in those old animated cartoons, Wile E. Coyote still had to look somewhat like himself even after he got flattened like a pancake by that Acme anvil.

“The Art of Warner Bros. Cartoons” closes July 24. The companion exhibit, “The Origins of Animation,” looking at the various tools animators used from then to today, continues through Aug. 7. lasm.org