He looks truly grotesque, far more off-model than in the other Deitch shorts. Our view stays in the room by the basement door and we see Jerry come out of a mouse hole. Tom is clearly terrified and runs away to another room. The owner yells at Tom to never go down there. Tom's owner seemed even angrier than in his other appearances the first scene is him stomping on Tom's tail in a very realistic and painful looking way because Tom is sleeping by the basement door. His owner was the fat, angry guy from other Deitch shorts. The short was called 'Tom's Basement.' It opened with Tom in a typical Tom and Jerry house. Desperate to get out of his contract, Deitch made one more Tom and Jerry short that few have ever seen. What many people don't know is that Deitch was originally signed on to make more than the thirteen episodes the public has access to.

Some have speculated that Deitch didn't like the concept behind Tom and Jerry and was pressured into making them, and wanted to make the people who watched his take on it feel bad for liking the concept. Jones integrates the opera into the action just as beautifully as he did in Looney TunesВ classics like What's Opera, Doc? and Rabbit of Seville.The thirteen Tom and Jerry shorts made by the Czechoslovakian director Gene Deitch are infamous for their poor quality and rather disturbing nature, featuring badly done sound effects and animation and having a more realistic feel to the violence. This was ideal for Jones' command of animated 'acting,' which is at its best in The Cat Above and the Mouse Below, which casts Tom as an opera singer ('Signor Thomasino Catti-Cazzaza') whose performance wakes up Jerry under the floorboards. Both characters got dilated pupils and visible eyelashes, and Tom gained heavier eyebrows and longer cheek whiskers that made him look like a cross between the Grinch and Wile E. He added a clever new title sequence where the MGM lion dissolved into Tom. Jones had developed a unique personal style, and he recreated Tom and Jerry in his image. A studio without an animator and an animator without a studio - these two problems took care of each other, and Jones moved to MGM, where he created new classics like How the Grinch Stole Christmas! and over 30 Tom and Jerry cartoons. Meanwhile, the great Looney Tunes director Chuck Jones was out of work when Warner Brothers shuttered their animation studio.

Fortunately, all that attention to detail serves the comedy beautifully, from the splatter of the lemon juice Jerry spits in a hungry fish's face to the incongruously dainty way Tom tees up a plank to batter Spike, pinky out, to his self-satisfied grin as he kicks the dog off the dock. It's similarly artful with the unmoving backgrounds, painted in eye-popping watercolors that would sadly go out of style just a few years later.Д«ut a cartoon like this could be painted by Rembrandt himself, and it still wouldn't matter if it wasn't funny. There are painstaking details in every water droplet that follows Tom and Jerry splashing around, and the animators make the grass froth up like a river as Tom accidentally drags the sleeping Spike along on his fishing line. And the animation here is absolutely incredible. Meanwhile, Tom has to evade Spike, the guard dog for the fenced-off fishing hole. This one's a four-hander, with Tom using Jerry as bait for his early-morning fishing, meaning Jerry has to fight off both Tom and a hungry, toothy pike.

Best tom and jerry episodes