Jerry has Tom right where he wants him in "Quiet Please!", the 1945 short where the whole gag turns on silence. Spike the bulldog has warned Tom to keep quiet so he can nap, which hands Jerry the perfect weapon: noise. Make a racket, get Tom blamed, watch Spike do the rest. Here the mouse stands his ground between the two of them, the frying pan poised, the cat bearing down, and the sleeping dog one loud clatter away from waking up furious.
This is a hand-painted limited edition cel of that scene, numbered HC30 of 30 from an original edition of 300, and it is long sold out. It was released as part of a set celebrating the Tom and Jerry shorts that took the Academy Award, "Quiet Please!" among them, and the cel takes its title from the short itself.
Editions like this exist because of how the studios treated original artwork. Once a cel had been photographed onto film, it had done its job, and most of it was destroyed. Hanna-Barbera never had the distribution that a studio like Disney enjoyed, no theme parks, no retail network built to sell the artwork on, so the cels were treated as spent stock that ate up storage and earned nothing. When the animation art market came alive in the eighties and nineties, the demand for original material met a supply that had largely been thrown away. Hand-painted limited editions were created to answer that demand: new cels, faithfully painted, from the shorts and films people grew up loving.
The signatures are the heart of this example. Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera have both signed it in their own hands, the two men who created Tom and Jerry at MGM and went on to build an empire of television animation under their joined names. A third signature, Bob Singer, sits beneath. Singer was a long-serving Hanna-Barbera artist whose career on the studio's productions ran for decades, and his hand on these limited edition cels reflects his role in the studio's later art programme. To have the two founders' autographs alongside his, on a scene from one of their Oscar-winning shorts, gives the piece its weight.
It is presented beautifully preserved, framed and matted, the gold Hanna-Barbera hand-painted limited edition seal at lower right. The Academy run of Tom and Jerry is where the pairing was at its sharpest, and this is one of those shorts, signed by the men who made it.
Estimate: £1,000 - £2,000 M
See Online Here: 127. Framed Quiet Please Hand-Painted Limited Edition No. HC30/30 Signed by Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera ### TOM AND JERRY (TV SERIES, 1940-1968)
