Chuck Jones CARTOONS are about studying the REAL world

[Darren Dirt]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHpXle4NqWI (Every Frame A Painting -- a great series deconstructing so much of iconic pop art)

I think each of us learned a lot from the genius of Chuck Jones, not just despite the frequently physical comedy, but actually more like THROUGH it -- as kids we learned about how the world works by watching Bugs respond to bullies, or by how Wiley E Coyote persisted towards his goals despite failures, etc. But we also learned how much can be said with very few words, very subtle facial expressions, stepping ever so slightly out of the way as an attack comes your way, etc.

Also we learned that, as Douglas Adams pointed out numerous ways, life the universe and everything is pretty @%&#ing absurd sometimes. Stuff ain't always gonna happen the way you expect -- so chillax aka don't panic. (cf: Thug Notes on HHGG!)

[Mr. Analog]

There are a series of pictures from the Golden age of animation of animators using mirrors to make faces, this article is a bit crap but the images say everything:
http://www.reddiculousness.com/old-school-cartoon-animators/

In the first few generations of animators learning how to draw motion meant observing it and manifesting it through the art, later generations started aping what the originals were doing not fully understanding the concept. Even through extreme style changes good animators knew how to convey motion through observation so even with something heavily stylized still had volume and motion. They linked these human attributes to convey story and meaning even in the most abstracted terms (like UPA's Rooty Toot Toot for example)

Also consider the useage of colour in layouts, in motion pictures this was generally not a problem but TV suffered a lot for years to the point where the art was lost to most people. To be fair, cartoons produced for TV are on a virtually nonexistent budget and they started out as either black and white or colour that had to show in black and white. This lead to some the most god-awful abuses of colour in the history of art (through the 70s-80s and even into the 90s)

John Kricfalusi has a story about when he worked on the painfully bad 1980s Jetsons (the one where the colours were like orange and purple barf) he had to fight tooth and nail to return colour to something even slightly natural or... possible to look at:

One day they had an art show of all the Chinese artists' own work, and I found one artist (unfortunately whose name I can't remember) who had beautiful traditional Chinese paintings on display. I went to the head of the studio and asked him to put her on the show. After a fight, he agreed and I started working with her. I showed her Toot Whistle Plunk and Boom, some original Jetsons and some Disney cartoons and Italian fashion magazines and asked her to combine elements of those with her own style and these BGs are the first ones she came up with.

With pictures below:
http://johnkstuff.blogspot.ca/2009/10/jetsons-85-backgrounds.html

I'm happy to say that there are more and more cartoons returning to this kind of design sanity, where concepts like conveying human emotions through human expressions, exaggerating things and generally following centuries of artistic tradition when it comes to colour theory and layout are becoming more prevalent in popular entertainment

But hey, you'll always have stiff, ugly, insane, bore-fests because they are cheap to make