Mr. Klein writes that one of those experiments was a two-second piece of an explosion in “Woody Dines Out,” from 1945. He finds the frames “improvised like visual music” in what Mr. Culhane acknowledged in his autobiography, “Talking Animals and Other People,” was an Eisenstein-inspired moment.

The longest such experimental sequence was in the seven-second steamroller smash-up in “The Loose Nut,” also from 1945. And, later in that cartoon, Woody is blown into an abstract configuration that Mr. Klein, in his article, calls “the convergence of animation and Soviet montage.”

According to the obituary of Mr. Culhane in The New York Times, Mr. Culhane’s family moved to Manhattan from Massachusetts when he was a small child, and later a trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art inspired his career as an artist. He first worked with Mr. Lantz when Mr. Lantz got him a job as an office boy at the studio of J. R. Bray, where Mr. Lantz was head of animation. Mr. Culhane animated his first scene there in 1925. It was of a monkey with a hot towel.

Throughout the mid-1940s Mr. Culhane made cartoons, briefly at Warner Brothers, then at Mr. Lantz’s studio, where he was a director of some shorts that are remembered for more than their surface humor. In 1944 he collaborated with the layout artist Art Heinemann on “The Greatest Man in Siam.” In it the Fastest Man in Siam bolts past doorways that are distinctly phallic in shape and peers at another that mimics a vagina.