Cartoon physics is a jocular system of laws of physics that supersedes the normal laws, used in animation for humorous effect. Normal physical laws are referential (i.e., objective, invariant), but cartoon physics are preferential (i.e., subjective, varying).
Many of the most famous American animated films, particularly those from Warner Bros. and MGM studios, unconsciously developed a relatively consistent set of such "laws" that have become regularly applied in comic animation. In a common cartoon scenario, for example, when a cartoon character runs off a cliff, gravity has no effect until the character notices and reacts.
In words attributed to Art Babbitt, an animator with the Walt Disney Studios: "Animation follows the laws of physicsâ€"unless it is funnier otherwise."
Examples
Specific reference to cartoon physics extends back at least to June 1980, when an article "O'Donnell's Laws of Cartoon Motion" appeared in Esquire. A version printed in V.18 No. 7 p.12, 1994 by the IEEE in a journal for engineers helped spread the word among the technical crowd, which has expanded and refined the idea. These laws are outlined on dozens of websites.
O'Donnell's examples include:
- Any body suspended in space will remain in space until made aware of its situation. Then the regular laws of gravity take over. This is why babies can defy gravity for elongated amounts of time. (The character walks off the edge of a cliff, remains suspended in midair, and doesn't fall until he looks down.) If this is referenced by a character in the cartoon as "Defying the law of gravity", it is often explained that the character(s) involved have "never studied law".
- Any body passing through solid matter (usually at high velocities) will leave a perforation conforming to its perimeter (the "silhouette of passage").
- Certain bodies can pass through solid walls painted to resemble tunnel entrances; others cannot. Corollary: Portable holes work.
- All principles of gravity are negated by fear (i.e., scaring someone causes him to jump impossibly high in the air).
- Any violent rearrangement of feline matter is impermanent. (In other words, cats heal fast and/or have an infinite number of lives.) Corollary: Cats can fit into unusually small spaces.
- Everything falls faster than an anvil. (A falling anvil will always land directly upon the character's head, regardless of the time gap between the body's and the anvil's respective drops.)
- Any vehicle on a path of travel is at a state of indeterminacy until an object enters a location in the path of travel. (Wolf looks both ways down the road, sees nothing, but gets run over by a bus as soon as he tries to cross.)
History of the idea
The idea that cartoons behave differently from the real world, but not randomly, is virtually as old as animation. Walt Disney, for example, spoke of the "plausible impossible" (see "The Plausible Impossible", 1956).
More recently, it has been explicitly described by some cartoon characters, including Roger Rabbit, Bonkers D. Bobcat, and Yakko, Wakko, and Dot, who say that toons are allowed to bend or break natural laws for the purposes of comedy. Doing this is extremely tricky, so toons have a natural sense of comedic timing, giving them inherently funny properties.
In Who Framed Roger Rabbit, for example, Roger is unable to escape handcuffs for most of a sequence, doing so only at the last moment. When Eddie Valiant asks, exasperated, "Do you mean to tell me you could've taken your hand out of that cuff at any time?!" Roger responds: "Not at any time! Only when it was funny!" Several aspects of cartoon physics were discussed in the film's dialogue, and the concept was a minor plot theme.
In 1993, Stephen R. Gould, then a financial training consultant, writing in New Scientist, said that "... these seemingly nonsensical phenomena can be described by logical laws similar to those in our world. Nonsensical events are by no means limited to the Looniverse. Laws that govern our own Universe often seem contrary to common sense." This theme is described by Dr. Alan Cholodenko in his article, "The Nutty Universe of Animation".
In a Garfield animated short entitled "Secrets of the Animated Cartoon", the characters Orson and Wade give demonstrations of different laws of the cartoons and show humorous examples of them.
Non-exclusivity
Cartoon physics is not limited to either cartoons or physics. For example, when a character recovers impossibly fast from a serious injury, the laws of biology rather than physics are being altered. Live-action shows and movies can also be subject to the laws of cartoon physics, explaining why, for example, The Three Stooges did not go blind from all the eye-poking, or the burglars in Home Alone series survive life-threatening booby traps.
Printed cartoons have their own family of cartoon physics "laws" and conventions.
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