O'Donnell's Laws of Cartoon MotionReprinted from June '80 Esquire. No copyright infringement intended. |
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| I. | Any body suspended in space will remain
in space until made aware of its situation. |
| Daffy Duck steps off a cliff, expecting further pastureland. He loiters in midair, soliloquizing flippantly, until he chances to look down. At this point, the familiar principle of 32 feet per second per second takes over. | |
| II. | Any body in motion will tend to remain
in motion until solid matter intervenes suddenly. |
| Whether shot from a cannon or in hot pursuit on foot, cartoon characters are so absolute in their momentum that only a telephone pole or an outsize boulder retards their forward motion absolutely. Sir Isaac Newton called this sudden termination of motion the stooge's surcease. | |
| III. | Any body passing through solid matter will
leave a perforation conforming to its perimeter. |
| Also called the silhouette of passage, this phenomenon is the specialty of victims of directed-pressure explosions and of reckless cowards who are so eager to escape that they exit directly through the wall of a house, leaving a cookie-cutout-perfect hole. The threat of skunks or matrimony often catalyzes this reaction. | |
| IV. | The time required for an object to fall
twenty stories is greater than or equal to the time it takes for whoever
knocked it off the ledge to spiral down twenty flights to attempt to capture
it unbroken. |
| Such an object is inevitably priceless, the attempt to capture it inevitably unsuccessful. | |
| V. | All principles of gravity are negated by
fear. |
| Psychic forces are sufficient in most bodies for a shock to propel them directly away from the Earth's surface. A spooky noise or an adversary's signature sound will induce motion upward, usually to the cradle of a chandelier, a treetop, or the crewst of a flagpole. The feet of a character who is running or the wheels of a speeding auto need never touch the ground, especially when in flight. | |
| VI. | As speed increases, objects can be in several
places at once. |
| This is particularly true of tooth-and-claw fights, in which a character's head may be glimpsed emerging for the cloud of altercation at several places simultaneously. This effect is common as well among bodies that are spinning or being throttled. A "wacky" character has the option of self-replication only at manic high speeds and may ricochet off walls to achieve the velocity required. | |
| VII. | Certain bodies can pass through solid walls
painted to resemble tunnel entrances; others cannot. |
| This trompe l'oeil inconsistency has baffled generations, but at least it is known that whoever paints the entrance on a wall's surface to trick an opponent will be unable to pursue him through this theoretical space. The painter is flattened against the wall when he attempts to follow into the painting. This is ultimately a problem of art, not of science. | |
| VIII. | Any violent rearrangement of feline matter
is impermanent. |
| Cartoon cats possess even more deaths than the traditional nine lives might comfortably afford. They can be decimated, spliced, splayed, accordion-pleated, spindled, or disassembled, but they cannot be destroyed. After a few moments of blinking self-pity, they reinflate, elongate, snap back, or solidify. | |
| IX. | For every vengeance there is an equal and
opposite revengeance. |
| This is one law of animated cartoon motion that also applies to the physical world at large. For that reason, we need the relief of watching it happen to a duck instead. | |
| X. | Everything falls faster than an anvil. |
| Examples too numerous to mention from the Road Runner cartoons. | |
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