Hanna-Barbera
William Hanna and Joseph Barbera spent the 1940s and 1950s making Tom and Jerry shorts at MGM — lavish, expensive, seven times an Academy Award winner — and then MGM closed the cartoon unit and they had to invent a cheaper way to work. What they came up with is limited animation: hold the body still, animate only the mouth, reuse backgrounds, let dialogue carry what movement used to.
About Hanna-Barbera
William Hanna and Joseph Barbera spent the 1940s and 1950s making Tom and Jerry shorts at MGM — lavish, expensive, seven times an Academy Award winner — and then MGM closed the cartoon unit and they had to invent a cheaper way to work. What they came up with is limited animation: hold the body still, animate only the mouth, reuse backgrounds, let dialogue carry what movement used to. It was made for television budgets and it changed the entire industry, because it made a weekly half-hour cartoon economically possible for the first time. Everything that followed came out of that constraint — The Flintstones in prime time in 1960, then Yogi Bear, The Jetsons, Scooby-Doo and forty years of Saturday mornings.
Limited animation was a budget measure first and a house style second; it is the reason weekly television cartoons became possible at all.
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Key eras
| Era | Years | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| MGM shorts | 1940–1957 | Tom and Jerry, made before the studio existed under their own name. |
| Limited animation for television | 1957–1969 | The Flintstones, Yogi Bear and The Jetsons. |
| Saturday mornings | 1969–1990s | Scooby-Doo and the long run of weekend children's television. |