I would have described the animation in this short but Mark Kausler tells it better. Here is some moments of the smear and important iconic peaces of The Dover Boys.
Mark Says:
"The Dover Boys is fundamentally a parody of 1890s melodrama. Nearly every cartoon studio, and even some live action, found this a rich source of material ripe for mockery. Chuck Jones took this kind of story to the next level by employing John MacLeish (sp?) to do the narration in his very dry fashion, and to use Horatio Alger type broad characters such as Tom, Dick and Larry, to be the heroes. Dan Backslide and Dora Standpipe fill out the cast as the villain and the heroine. Bobe Cannon experimented notably in this cartoon by using "stretch" inbetweens to fill in the gaps between extremes of an action, such as when Dan Backslide works on his jalopy with tire irons by stretching across a wide expanse of scenery to get his tools and quickly change a tire on his car. The fight sequence with Dora Standpipe walloping Backslide and tossing him out of the shot is handled with stretch inbetweens as well. A weakness in animation is that extremely fast motion of a character running, for instance can have a great deal of strobe, resulting in double images on the screen.Bobe Cannon and later, Manny Gould and Don Williams under Art Davis at Warners, developed stretch inbetweens or good drybrush blur effects into a new visual language. They looked great on a movie screen, and nearly eliminated the strobe layering that was a problem in older animation. The way the stretches looked on screen had a bold, graphic design which eventually led to UPA and more stylized characters and backgrounds. That's what makes The Dover Boys a curiosity, the extremely old-fashioned story, pared with the modern, super stylized look of the characters in action that Bobe Cannon drew. That makes The Dover Boys a real breakthrough in design and the approach toward animated motion on screen. "
Here are a few scences of smear art.
Photo of Bobo Cannon
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