Name: Fredrick Bean "Tex" Avery
Birthdate: February 26, 1908
Birthplace: Taylor, Texas
Tex was interested in animation from an early age. He started drawing comic strips
in high school, and spent a summer studying art at the Chicago Art Institute. Avery
moved to California in the early thirties and entered the animation field as a painter
for Walter Lantz. Under Lantz, he learned the entire animation process and soon
became a storyboard artist. In 1935, Tex went to work at Warner Bros. where he
created Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, and created the personality of Bugs Bunny. He was
with Warner from 1935-1941. During this time, he created animation that was a far
cry from all the Disney imitators out there. Unlike Disney, Tex Avery's cartoons had
their own personality. A disagreement with Leon Schlesinger led Tex to quit Warner
in early 1941.
Later that year, Tex was hired by MGM producer Fred Quimby. With new creative
freedom, Tex created some of the best cartoons the world has ever seen. Tex did not
concentrate on creating lasting characters, but on slapstick gags and humorous
situations. Of all his characters, Droopy is the most popular.
In 1954, Tex left MGM right before the studio stopped making theatrical shorts. He
re-joined Walter Lantz to make only four cartoons, and making popular the Chilly
Willy character. He then joined the world of TV commercials where the Raid bug
spray ads and Frito Bandito where among his creations.
Tex Avery died in August, 1980. He left behind a legacy of timeless cartoons that will
entertain and influence young cartoonists for years to come.
Pity the poor cartoon director. In spite of the many thousands of seven-minute
theatrical cartoons that poured out of Hollywood during the heyday of the 1930s'50s, few of their creators are household words, and most are unknown except
among devotees. Animation may be unique in the way the fictional characters have
eclipsed the men — they were mostly men — who made them. Woody Woodpecker
is far more famous than his author, Walter Lantz. And even many fans would be
hard pressed to identify the artist behind such popular two-dimensional
personalities as Casper the Ghost, Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote, or Superman.
There are a couple of exceptions to this rule besides the obvious one, Walt Disney.
One is Joseph Hanna and William Barbera, who as Hanna-Barbera flooded 1960s
American television with Tom and Jerry, the Flintstones, the Jetsons, and other
baby-boomer staples. The other is Tex Avery. A contemporary of Disney's, Avery
created or developed some of the most timeless characters in cartoon history with
Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, and Droopy Dog, along with the inimitable catchphrase "What's up, doc?" And like Disney, his name has come to symbolize a distinct,
instantly recognizable, and widely merchandised style that has outlived the man
himself and continues to be an important cultural presence. Avery's influence on
animation equaled Disney's during his lifetime and continues unabated today with
two shows currently running on American television that carry his name. The Wacky
World of Tex Avery features new animation in the Avery mode, and The Tex Avery
Show replays some of the 136-odd seven-minute cartoons he created during his
heyday from 1935 to 1955 at Warner Bros., M-G-M, and Universal.
In a field teeming with talent, Avery stood out. Born in 1908 in Taylor, Texas,
Frederick "Tex" Avery was related to both Daniel Boone and the infamous Judge Roy
Bean, who allegedly assured prisoners that they would receive a fair trial before
they were hanged. In retrospect, this was a fortuitous provenance — Avery's humor
was as savage as Judge Bean's — and American history, particularly the "tall tales"
that were common in Texas, was a favorite subject he treated with suitable
irreverence. After graduating from high school in 1926, he took courses at the Art
Institute of Chicago, worked loading fruits and vegetables in the docks of Los
Angeles, and slept on the beach. His attempts to sell a comic strip to the newspapers
failed, but his sand sketches landed him a job with a minor cartoon studio doing
inking and cel painting. From there he went to Walter Lantz's unit at Universal,
where he spent five years doing "in-betweening," drawing sequential poses for a
character and generally assisting the animator, learning his art but also its limits.
By mid-1935 he had moved from Lantz to Warner Bros., where he would be a fulltime cartoon director. But it was more than the need to grow artistically that pushed
him. Money disputes with Lantz were one reason for the change. But something else
happened that Avery said "made me think animation owed me a living." Avery had
developed a reputation as a raconteur, ladies' man, and athlete. During a roughhousing session among the animators, he was hit in the eye with a paper clip and
lost half his sight. This grim event was a turning-point: by all accounts, along with
his eye he lost much of his fun-loving spirit, put on weight, and turned for solace to a
driving perfectionism that provided both inspiration and frustration during his
tenure at Warners, where he stayed from 1935 to 1942, and at M-G-M (1942-1955).
One of the challenges for Warner Bros. during this time was how to match the
success of Disney, whose "personality animation" had taken commercial animation
from stick figures and simple backdrops to credible characters and realistic imagery.
Avery joined Chuck Jones and Bob Clampett in creating a cutting-edge unit called
"Termite Terrace." From this ramshackle building on the Warners lot came Bugs
Bunny, Porky Pig, Daffy Duck, Elmer Fudd, and most of the great Warners
characters./div>
Avery, at 27, was the grand old man of the group, but his ideas about how to
transform the theatrical cartoon were more radical than those of his younger
comrades. In his pursuit of the gag, he added more jokes but cut out unnecessary
exposition, often acting out the characters' parts himself and sometimes supplying
the voices for the more buffoonish types. Above all, he steered the Warner Bros.
house style away from Disneyesque sentimentality and made cartoons that
appealed equally to adults, who appreciated Avery's speed, sarcasm, and irony, and
to kids, who liked the nonstop action. Disney's "cute and cuddly" creatures, under
Avery's guidance, were transformed into unflappable wits like Bugs Bunny,
endearing buffoons like Porky Pig, or dazzling crazies like Daffy Duck. Even the
classic fairy tale, a market that Disney had cornered, was appropriated by Avery,
who made innocent heroines like Red Riding Hood into sexy jazz babies, more than
a match for any Wolf. Avery also endeared himself to intellectuals by constantly
breaking through the artifice of the cartoon, having characters leap out of the end
credits, loudly object to the plot of the cartoon they were starring in, or speak
directly to the audience (often shown as silhouettes at the bottom of the frame).
Such unheard-of techniques pegged Avery as a modernist and suggested his affinity
with Pirandello and Brecht — not bad for a rowdy boy from Texas.
In 1941, at age 33, Avery moved to M-G-M, where his talent for sight gags, blackouts,
rabid pacing, violent humor, and sexy characters found its fullest expression. He
tried to duplicate his earlier success with characters like Bugs Bunny and Daffy
Duck, but "Screwy Squirrel" was far from endearing, even by Avery's standards.
Screwy's purpose, according to critic Greg Ford, was to "shatter audience
complacency," which he did with some of the rudest gags on record. More successful
was the series of World War II walking pin-ups that Avery created for American G.I.s
stationed abroad. Again using the fairy-tale framework that served him well at
Warners, he changed Cinderella and Red Riding Hood into gorgeous sexpots who
tantalize "the Wolf" (unnamed) and the audience with their lurid charms. These
characters were the basis for "Jessica Rabbit" in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, but
equally fun for audiences were the Wolf's reactions to Cinderella/Red's come-ons.
Avery devised a series of wild reaction gags of the Wolf that eventually caught the
attention of the censors; images like the Wolf suddenly stiffening in mid-air were
rightly interpreted as "phallic gags." The Wolf's lust was never consummated, but
you'd never know it from the sexy aura of cartoons like Swing Shift Cinderella and
Red Hot Riding Hood. Avery enjoyed equal success with Droopy Dog, a tiny,
impossibly unruffled character who barely acknowledges the brutal assaults on him
and always triumphs.
At both Warners and M-G-M, Avery ruthlessly satirized sacred cows, everything
from the capitalist concept of progress (The House of Tomorrow) to literary
classics (Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men becomes Lonesome Lenny) to Frank Sinatra
(Li'l Tinker). The sheer breadth of his targets and his exhausting perfectionism may
have influenced his move from M-G-M in 1954 to the studio of one of his earliest
collaborators, Walter Lantz at Universal. After directing only four cartoons there, he
went into animating television commercials for bug spray and corn chips, and
eventually found himself doing drudge work for former competitors Hanna-Barbera.
He was working for them when he died of a heart attack in 1980, at age 72. Part of
his decline can be blamed on historical circumstance: the theatrical cartoon was
being phased out of theatres by the 1950s. More important, though, he was simply
burned out, a term he used frequently to describe himself. His pursuit of the perfect
gag has a romantic resonance to it, since like any ideal it was bound by its nature to
fail. But like the characters, the work always outlives the author, and a bit of Avery
continues to live whenever someone says, "What's up, doc?"
A descendant of both Daniel Boone and Judge Roy Bean, Fred "Tex" Avery enjoyed
on-the-job art training when he was assigned to illustrate his high school annual
("The only guy there who could handle a pencil") Avery left his home in Dallas to
take a three-month course at the Chicago Art Institute, then headed for Hollywood,
to look for work in the animation field. Contrary to previously published reports,
Avery did not get his start at Terrytoons or Van Beuren, instead, he "met a fella who
knew a girl" in charge of inking and painting at the Walter Lantz Studio. From 1929
to 1934, Avery animated scenes for other directors, and also dabbled in gag writing.
Seeking out a better-paying job, Avery wangled a job with Warner Bros. animation
producer Leon Schlesinger after convincing Schlesinger that he'd directed two
cartoons at Lantz. He hadn't, but that didn't stop Schlesinger from appointing Avery
head of his own unit at "Termite Terrace," populated with such animation wizards
as Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett and Bob Cannon. At the time, Warners' Looney Tunes
and Merrie Melodies cartoon series were dying because the animators were
attempting to emulate industry leader Walt Disney. Reasoning that he'd never be
able to match Disney in terms of technique, Avery decided to simply concentrate on
making his cartoons funnier. During his six-year (1936-41) tenure at Warners',
Avery sped up the pace of the studio's product, stepped up the gag supply, and
sharpened and defined the personalities of such characters as Porky Pig, Daffy Duck
and especially Bugs Bunny. Many of Avery's Warners efforts--Porky's Duck Hunt,
The Shooting of Dan McGoo, All This and Rabbit Stew--are among the best cartoons
ever made. It is no exaggeration to say that Avery poured his heart and soul into his
work, not to mention his voice (that inimitable, gut-deep guffaw!) and his
idiosyncratic, off-screen catchphrases ("What's Up, Doc?", "I can't do it! I just can't
do it!" etc.) On the debit side, many of Avery's Warner cartoons are repetitious-notably his "spot gag" travelogue parodies--while his seeming fascination with the
character of Egghead (a cretinous precursor to Elmer Fudd) bogged down many an
otherwise excellent film. When producer Schlesinger insisted upon altering the
ending of Avery's 1941 Bugs Bunny effort Heckling Hare, Tex left Warners in a huff.
In collaboration with two old Universal cronies, Jerry Fairbanks and Bob Carlysle,
Avery developed the Speaking of Animals short subjects series at Paramount, then
moved to MGM in 1942, where for the next twelve years he would turn out his finest
work. Though the set-up at MGM was more strictured than at Warners'--Avery was
given a set amount of footage for each cartoon, while producer Fred Quimby, a man
with zero sense of humor, would nitpick and bean-count over each project--Tex
produced some of the wildest, wackiest, least-inhibited cartoons in the business
while under the imprimatur of Leo the Lion. The Avery ouevre included far-out
visual puns, hyperbolic facial and physical reactions (elasticized eyeballs,
precipitously dropping jaws, bodies stiffening suggestively in mid-air at the sight of
feminine pulchritude) and "everything including the kitchen sink" payoff gags. The
mere mention of titles like Who Killed Who?, Batty Baseball, Bad Luck Blackie, Red
Hot Riding Hood and King Sized Canary are enough to send Avery's devotees into
uncontrollable paroxysms of mirth, while dyed-in-the-wool cartoon buffs still greet
one another on the street with such Averyisms as "Pretty darn long, huh?" and
"Which way did he go, George, which way did he go?" In addition to his one-shot
cartoons, Avery created such deathless characters as The Wolf, The Girl (an
impossibly sexy lass, usually known as "Red"), Droopy the Dog ("Hello, you happy
people"), and the short-lived but unforgettable Screwball Squirrel. When MGM made
noises about folding its cartoon division in 1954, Avery returned to his old boss
Walter Lantz. His five directorial efforts under the Lantz banner have their moments
(especially Crazy Mixed-Up Pup), but they lack the production finesse of the MGMs.
Retiring from theatrical films in 1955, Avery set up his own Cascade Productions for
the purpose of producing animated TV commercials. Tex's principal achievement
during his Cascade years were his classic "Raid" commercials and his "Frito
Bandito" spots. Retiring in the mid-1970s, Avery returned to the fold at the personal
invitation of his old MGM colleagues, Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera. Avery died in
1980, before his one Hanna-Barbera project, the weekly series Kwicky Koala, could
reach full fruition. The Tex Avery tradition lives on, however, not only in his vintage
cartoons but also in such recent theatrical features as Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
and such every-man-for-himself TV cartoon series as Tiny Toon Adventures and
Animaniacs. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tex_Avery
http://www.bcdb.com/bcdb/search.cgi?query=tex%20avery&bool=and&
substring=1
Disney’s Racist Fantastia:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPKpFNm3QMM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIDl8Wb1va0
http://www.cracked.com/article_15677_the-9-most-racist-disney-characters.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akAEIW3rmvQ
http://www.archive.org/details/ALL_THIS_AND_RABBIT_STEW_1941
Cross Country Detours:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cQ0sDrL8lg&p=E726FB4E122135EB&playne
xt=1&index=60
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_U-hLDPypc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVBQAZHZQME
http://www.livevideo.com/video/EE52393D0E0945D3B178C46BBC13E796/tv-oftomorrow.aspx
See notes binder for notes on Tex Avery Documentary
See notes binder for notes on Disney Documentary
Tex Avery: A Unique Legacy
Attempt to Retrieve the Past:
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxlQp8oSOsk
 Very focused on American slang
 Nostalgia important as well
 Take all slang very literally
 Give glimpse of richness of American language
 Farm of tomorrow gives glimpse into future and startling image of what
could possibly be in store for the American people
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thHRRFMsZH0
 Economical satires, most of his cartoons were satirical
 Scorns the materialism of modern America
 Texas origins led to slight racism and homophobia
 Yet he was more inspired to portray America as it was instead of changing
his cartoons to fit less stereotypical behavior
 Very influenced by old westerns
 Utilized Texas stereotype in humor as well
Facing Contemporary Politics:
 Simultaneously making fun of America’s need for survival after the
Depression and trying to give the American people confidence
 Tex influenced greatly by the Beat movement and the French surrealist
group
 This is evident in the questionable sanity of Screwy squirrel in Happy-goNutty and the Screwy Truant
 Tex focuses on America’s preoccupation with being cages up and shows us
the necessity to escape in Cellbound and The First Bad Man: parodies of
Hitchcock films
Other people that worked with Tex as part of his group:
Bob Clampett:
Robert (Bob) Clampett is one of the key figures in the history of American
animation. After short stints working as a newspaper cartoonist and, as he claims, in
merchandising for Disney, he joined the fledgling Harman-Ising (whose cartoons
were distributed by Warner Bros.) animation unit in 1931, contributing to the first
Merrie Melodie cartoon, Lady Play Your Mandolin (Frank Marsales). Over the next
five years, Clampett worked on a range of cartoons and characters, gradually
building his reputation as one of the youngest and brashest animators at the studio.
After serving as a key animator (along with Chuck Jones and several others who
would later work with Clampett) in Tex Avery's seminal unit, Clampett started
supervising his own cartoons in July 1937. His early black and white cartoons were
uneven in their conception and execution, highlighting his limitations as a fluid
animator. During the next five years, Clampett did direct several important Warners
cartoons, and he was integral to the development (if not the invention, as he often
claimed) of such characters as Porky Pig, Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny. Nevertheless,
with the exception of such cartoons as Porky in Wackyland (1938), Polar Pals (1939)
and The Film Fan (1939), Clampett's often rudimentary early work is eclipsed by
that of Avery and Frank Tashlin. It is not until 1941–42 that Clampett's cartoons
truly cohere into a dynamic and expressive “whole”. From 1942 until 1946 many of
the greatest cartoons produced at Warner Bros. were directed by Clampett. After
Warners, Clampett journeyed briefly to Screen Gems and subsequently moved into
various forms of television-based animation. Two of the programs he made for
television, Time for Beany and Beany and Cecil, largely account for his popular
reputation. This essay focuses attention on the work Clampett produced during his
greatest period of creativity, arguing that his critical reputation is now mostly based
on a scattering of cartoons made in the four-year period between 1942 and 1946.
His greatest cartoons of this era – such as Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs (1943),
Tortoise wins by a Hare (1943), A Corny Concerto (1943), Russian Rhapsody (1944),
Book Revue (1946), Kitty Kornered (1946), and The Great Piggy Bank Robbery (1946)
– are ultimately his chief legacy to the art of Hollywood animation. It is also the
cartoons he made in this period that furthest stretch the boundaries of the form (3).
In September 1938, Clampett released his eleventh cartoon for Warner Bros. This
seven-minute film, Porky in Wackyland, is in many ways both an exemplary and
typical early Clampett cartoon. The initial establishment of the story's world is both
economical and rudimentary, the real “fun” occurring once Porky traverses the
boundary line that announces, “Welcome to Wackyland: It Can Happen Here!” Such
a flimsy barrier between worlds is typical of Clampett's work at Warners, though
such a clear demarcation becomes less common in the more freewheeling and
extreme work that dots his last four years at the studio. Inspired by Lewis Carroll's
adventures of Alice in Wonderland, as well as the canvases of Picasso and Dali,
Clampett takes Porky on a journey into a surreal, abstracted landscape in which the
logic of our – and commonly Porky's – world is reversed and transcended: a rabbit
swings on his own ears; a rubber band marches by; a dog and cat are physically
conjoined; a criminal holds bars in front of his face to prove his incarceration; and
the Do-Do Porky is hunting lifts up the backdrop of the scenery to escape, zooms
into the foreground on the Warners shield, and intermittently appears to attenuate
the animation with his own pencil. He becomes one of numerous characters in
Clampett's cartoons whose “inner” psychology or nature is reflected and refracted
onto his body and surroundings.
Porky in Wackyland
Leonard Maltin has argued that “Porky in Wackyland is an eye-popping tribute to the
unlimited horizons of the animated cartoon, a perfect example of what the medium
could do with just some imagination and a lot of talent” (4), further claiming that
when Clampett “was handed the director's reins he burst forth with new and
imaginative ideas” (5). Maltin's account promotes the unfettered qualities of
Clampett's work, while also alluding to the undisciplined and manic form of his
individual cartoons. Nevertheless, Maltin's version de-emphasises the sense of
development that can also be traced across Clampett's career, as well as the short
period of intense creativity that defines his best work.
It is in the first half of the 1940s that the conditions arose that best suited Clampett's
sensibility; he found himself at a studio that was overtaken by the energy and
relative freedom of war-time production, where personnel changed frequently,
where specific moral and even visual/narrative frameworks were loosened, where
characters (such as Bugs and Daffy) were bending and taking on new forms and
shapes, and where the vaunted extremes of style that define his best work were
deemed acceptable and perhaps even necessary. By 1943, as Barry Putterman
suggests:
Now working in color and having inherited key Avery animators Robert
McKimson and Rob Scribner, Clampett was free to explore his major
preoccupation, an almost transcendentally romantic yearning to escape human
limitations through animated physical transformation (6).
It is the cartoons made in this period, and up to 1945 when he left the Warners lot,
that now define Clampett's reputation (7). Other writers, such as Michael Barrier,
have argued for a much briefer flowering of the director's genius; “If he had left the
studio in 1944 instead of 1945, it would be much more difficult to make the case for
him as a major director” (8). Of all accounts of Clampett's work at Warners, Barrier's
is the most detailed and sensitive to the actual conditions of production that he
encountered there. Although he singles Clampett out in terms of his vision and
ability to energise the cartoons he helmed, he also regards the final product (and
often its limitations) as collaborative in nature; partly blaming the variability of the
director's work on the various animators he worked with. For example, and unlike
Putterman, he regards the fluid realism of Robert McKimson's animation as
antithetical to Clampett's transformative, almost psychological rendering of
character, line and space; “With McKimson's influence receding, Clampett's cartoons
were once again satisfying as wholes” (9). Thus, Barrier charts the waxing and
waning of Clampett's career through the visual evidence he sees imprinted into the
varied styles of the cartoons, and the animators who worked on them. Clampett
himself is often regarded as a relatively rudimentary draftsman, and the success of
his cartoons dependent upon the ways in which his animators, background and
layout artists were able to interpret the extremes of his guiding illustrations and gag
ideas. Phil Monroe, an animator who worked with Clampett during World War II,
but is more well known for his work with Chuck Jones, claimed that Clampett's
“strongest point would be that when you talked to him about the story, he'd get you
enthused with his story points… He was always talking to you. He would get up and
act out something; he was very descriptive.” (10) Thus, Clampett's greatest cartoons
are defined by a freewheeling visual style, an attention to descriptive detail, and the
sense of energy and enthusiasm that Monroe describes above. This enthusiasm
extends over into his representation of specific characters, Daffy Duck in particular.
Although Daffy has a greater density of character in the work of Chuck Jones, he is
never more sympathetic or energetic than in the cartoons of Clampett. An
exuberance of character and cartoon meld into the shifting angular contortions that
guide Daffy through such classics as Draftee Daffy (1945) and Baby Bottleneck
(1946).
Clampett's work at Warners is defined by his animation of speed and extremes. His
cartoons often mix together various genres, references to other cartoons and
popular culture, diverse styles of animation, and a varied degree of allegiance to the
chase formula that defines many Classical Hollywood cartoons. In contrast to the
work of his contemporary, colleague, and sometimes “adversary”, Chuck Jones,
Clampett was often less successful in integrating the “classical” requirements of
narrative and style into his work. As Barrier states, “He [Clampett] exercised a
director's control not as Jones did, by giving his cartoons smooth surfaces and
logical structures, but by trying to make them as outrageous as possible” (11).
Classical norms of story and style may seem unnecessary requirements for
animation, and yet the Hollywood cartoon was generally circumscribed by a set of
limits – even of gravity and perspective – akin to its live-action counterpart. As in
some live-action comedy, this form stretched to incorporate direct address to the
camera, blackout gags, and hyper-expressive performances, but was commonly
contained within the causal, linear frameworks of classical narration, a rather
regimented star system, and a series of genres often borrowed (and parodied) from
live-action cinema. This hyper-allegiance to live-action forms became the central
dynamic of Frank Tashlin's Warners cartoons in the early to mid-1940s, while Jones
and even Friz Freleng's work commonly operates in a register, tone and even style
seemingly borrowed from live-action comedy and drama (with expressions and
emotions scored to music in a fashion akin to broader forms of melodrama).
It is only in the cartoons of Clampett and his great mentor Tex Avery that the
promise and potential of animation is fully explored (although after an initial series
of deathly slow cartoons Jones did experiment with colour, forms of limited
animation and speed in the early 1940s). Avery's work at Warners (from 1936 to
'42) is both modern and old-fashioned or vaudevillian in nature. The endless gags
involving characters directly addressing the “camera”, puns on names and common
expressions, parodies of various genres (particularly travelogues), and even the
nature and form of the characters he helped create and mould (such as Bugs and
Daffy), are combinations of these two tendencies. It wasn't until Avery moved to
MGM in 1941 (his Warners' cartoons were released into 1942) that these “gags”
took on a more explicitly cinematic and philosophical tone in his work. Clampett's
early cartoons are often indebted to the innovation and form of Avery's work, but he
ultimately proved far more adept in pushing the physical boundaries and extremes
of the animated worlds he created. Nevertheless, as Greg Ford has argued,
“[Clampett] is very similar to Avery and obviously influenced by him in terms of
individual gags. But he is just not the conceptual artist that Avery is, he doesn't deal
in disciplined areas of abstraction” (12). While many writers see this as a deficiency,
this inability to conceptualise and justify abstraction, as well as self-consciousness,
is partly what gives Clampett's cartoons their enormous energy and distinctive style.
The extremity and undisciplined quality of Clampett's later Warners' cartoons can
be partly elucidated by his working method; he commonly only illustrated the
extremes of a character's expression, increasingly using this role as a means to
stretch the corporeal and gravitational boundaries of his films' worlds and his
characters' bodies. This is illustrated in such freewheeling cartoons as Baby
Bottleneck, where the bodies of Porky and Daffy are almost liquid in nature,
constantly reformulating, sharpening and flattening to demonstrate the emotional
and physical extremes the characters are going through. As a result, they are often
pure, unfettered embodiments of these states.
The increasingly hyper-expressive nature of Clampett's cartoons is also illustrated
by both his use of dynamic and unrealistic (often “spot”) colour schemes and his
choice of characters. Many of Clampett's best cartoons star Daffy, pushing this oftenvenal character into regions that few other directors had taken him. Clampett's early
cartoons with
The Daffy Doc
Daffy such as The Daffy Doc (1938) commonly follow the model set up by Avery in
which the character mainly just lives up to his name (he simply acts daffy). Thus,
this character often brings a dynamic force to cartoons which unfortunately then
just regress into manic chases. By the end of Clampett's tenure at the studio things
had changed. As Barrier notes, “The Daffy in Clampett's last few cartoons was
unmistakably sane…but he lived at the same high emotional temperature as Avery's
Daffy. He was not aggressive [unlike Clampett's Bugs], he was passionate – and his
passion was his undoing” (13). The composite or combinatory tendencies Barrier
describes are typical of the innovations of Clampett's work; he draws inspiration
from varied sources and traditions while combining them in a fashion that
emphasises the clash of tones and sensibilities.
Of all the directors who worked for the Warners cartoon outfit Clampett was
perhaps the key figure in shifting the studio toward a more frenetic, energetic and
exaggerated style in the late 1930s. Along with Tashlin's brief run of films between
1943 and 1945, Clampett's work in the 1940s is perhaps the pinnacle of Warners'
first “golden age” of animation, marking the move out from behind the shadow of
Disney and toward the occupation of the space left by Disney's increased interest in
feature film production (and due also to shifting audience tastes, perhaps).
Clampett's films of this period (particularly from 1942 when his budgets increased
and he took over Avery's production unit) illustrate the studio's shift away from
semi-“realistic” character animation and toward a more freewheeling, satiric,
explicitly topical, exaggerated but also refined style. This earlier “golden” period
benefited from the presence at the Warners' studio of four major directors (Jones,
Clampett, Tashlin and, for a time, Avery), each with identifiable styles partly forged
by the teams each worked with. It also saw the emergence and consolidation of the
team of animators, musicians (particularly Carl Stalling who arrived from Disney in
1936), voice artists (Mel Blanc arrived in 1937), background artists, and writers
who were to make Warners the pre-eminent short animation studio in the 1940s
and 1950s (commercially and in terms of critical re-evaluation) (14).
Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs
Many of Clampett's cartoons of this period are deeply parodic and self-aware of
their status as American, Hollywood-produced and animated cartoons. Thus, for
example, A Tale of Two Kitties (1942, the first Tweety cartoon in which he was
unofficially called Orson) involves a cat duo based on Abbott and Costello, Coal Black
and de Sebben Dwarfs includes sly and not so esoteric references to Citizen Kane
(Orson Welles, 1941) and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (David Hand, 1937),
What's Cookin' Doc (1944) involves Bugs in his own Academy Awards ceremony
incorporating large chunks of Freleng's Oscar-nominated Hiawatha's Rabbit Hunt
(1941), The Great Piggy Bank Robbery surreally takes-off “from” Dick Tracy, and
Kitty Kornered includes extended reference to Welles' The War of the Worlds
broadcast.
Coal Black is one of the clearest explorations and illustrations of this break with the
Disney tradition. Rather than ignore the dominance of Disney's feature production it
is a very deft, energetic and controversial parody of Snow White that illustrates the
brevity, visual rhythm and rapid-fire pacing of the studio's best work (15).
Nevertheless, it is probably more accurately viewed as a riff on rather than a parody
of Disney's film. Unlike much of the Disney studio's work, Coal Black is a raunchy,
contemporary, extreme and shockingly racist film (the racism of many Disney films
is often less up-front and more cloying). It updates the Disney story to a
contemporary war-time setting in which Queenie calls in Murder Inc. “to black out
So White”, and to stop her from stealing the zoot-suited Prince Chawmin'. This is a
cartoon widely regarded as a masterpiece in absentia, a seldom seen product of the
sexual mores and ethnic stereotyping of its time. Nevertheless, many writers
understandably go out of their way to both underline the ideological problems of
the film – especially for contemporary audiences – and its extraordinary energy and
vibrant style as a truly animated cartoon. As Terry Lindvall and Ben Fraser suggest:
Coal Black's brazenness earned the film much of its notoriety, but even as
shocking as it is for its racial content, the aesthetic and musical brilliance, the
unabashed raunchiness, and the pure cartooniness salvage it as a masterpiece for
most audiences, even some black audiences (16).
Much is often also made of the “exceptional” research that Clampett and his
animators undertook (they visited night-clubs and “drafted” African-African
musicians and actors) to provide an accurate, celebratory, authentic and
incorporative vision of urban African-American culture of the time. Along with Tin
Pan Alley Cats (1943) it highlights Clampett's fascination with African-American
street culture, its syncopation and language, pushing its potent stereotypes to the
extremes of comic absurdity.
Also, as with many of Clampett's cartoons, one can sense the direct influence of
comic books, popular music, street culture, live-action cinema and contemporary art
(especially surrealism) upon these two films. Like much of Clampett's best work,
these films are syncopated snapshots of a particular time, place and set of social
mores. So it is hardly surprising to discover that the greatest period of Clampett's
tenure at Warners coincides with the ramped-up stereotypes encouraged by the
World War II era. As Tim Onosko argues, “Clampett created an entirely new and
irreverent style of animated filmmaking more suited to the era than either Disney or
Fleischer” (17). Although Onosko's parochial account unnecessarily favours
Clampett at the expense of his Warners' colleagues, as well as Avery at MGM, it does
pinpoint the ascension of the studio to the pinnacle of Hollywood short animation
during this period and accurately regards Clampett's work as a cornerstone of this
process.
Norman F. Klein sees the emergence of the chase cartoon, and its pre-eminence at
Warners by the late 1930s, as essential to the development of the dynamism of the
short Hollywood cartoon, and its transformation in the 1940s. He places significant
emphasis on the increasing velocity of the best cartoons, regarding speed, rhythm
and an increasing visual anarchy as the key contributions of Hollywood animation to
the spirit of the times. He sees this as nothing less than a “transformation” during
which “the two cartoon masters of speed were Avery and Clampett” (18). Other
writers such as Steve Schneider argue that this transformation “instigated” by the
studio was more widespread, “by 1940, the Warner cartoons had transformed the
tone and temperament of all American short-subject animation” (19).
As Klein suggests, Clampett is one of the instigators of this transformation and a key
figure in accelerating the velocity of Hollywood animation. Such a late Clampett
cartoon as
The Great Piggy Bank Robbery
The Great Piggy Bank Robbery (his third last at Warners) revels in this juxtaposition
and juggling of forms and tones: bizarre expressive camera angles and “lighting”,
intermittent shape-bending chases, integrated and scatological dialogue, a
percussive and acoustically dynamic soundtrack, slapstick and expressionist
imagery, outlandish characters (watch out for Neon Noodle, Jukebox Jaw, Pickle
Puss and 88 Teeth) and nightmarish dream imagery. For example, the taking-off of
planes from Flat-Top's suitably endowed head has to be one of the weirdest and
most hallucinatory visuals in all animation. The film's world is all dark shadows,
neon signs and shifts of size and perspective (a key characteristic of Clampett's
work). The Great Piggy Bank Robbery is possibly Clampett's most successful
incorporation and transformation of the visual style of another source; in contrast to
his often charming but stultifying rendition of Dr. Seuss' Horton Hatches the Egg
(1942), this cartoon manages to animate and energise the frames of Gould's comicstrip, incorporating Clampett's (and Daffy's) own sensibility into its grotesque but
matter-of-fact proceduralism. In some respects it also illustrates the implied but
sadistic violence of its source. The whimsical, singsong, somewhat cerebral source
material offered by Dr. Seuss – complete with curly looking figures and objects – is
much closer to the sensibility of Chuck Jones, the pulp, staccato, visually and
physically violent popular street culture of Dick Tracy much closer to Clampett's
world (20). In keeping with this, Clampett's cartoons of this period have a macabre,
dark and malevolently violent streak, best illustrated by The Great Piggy Bank
Robbery's brilliantly animated scene of tumbling corpses falling endlessly through a
bullet-ridden door.
The perfunctory, self-consciously “artificial” and over-played (in great pontificating
Daffy style) narrative frame of The Great Piggy Bank Robbery highlights another
dominant aspect of the Clampett cartoon. Clampett's films invariably burst out from
their rather flimsy framing stories and into a heightened dream or nightmare state
that collapses the established cartoony logic of time and space. All it takes is for
Elmer to fall asleep (The Big Snooze, 1946) or Daffy to accidentally punch himself in
the head (The Great Piggy Bank Robbery), to unleash the wild splash of vibrant, often
primary colours, abstracted backgrounds and multiplying figures or golems that
energise Clampett's best work. Also, Clampett's greatest films create plastic
universes that bend, extend and literally explode to accommodate the deranged
fantasies of their protagonists. Thus, in Tin Pan Alley Cats the wild swinging jive of
the Kit Kat Club elevates (“send me outta dis world”) the Fats Waller-like feline
protagonist into a surreal landscape straight out of Porky in Wackyland. In Bacall to
Arms (1946), the over-ripe sexual fantasies of the film's wolf protagonist, as he sits
watching a monochrome parody of “Bogey Gocart” and “Laurie Becool” in Howard
Hawks' To Have and Have Not (1944, called To Have To Have To Have… here), ignite
and relax the space between the audience and the cinema screen. It becomes
difficult to demarcate the boundaries between spectator and spectacle, film and film
world, as the characters become caught up in the fantasies that unfold within and in
front of them – and Bogey tries to light Becool's cigarette with a oxyacetylene torch.
In a manner more common to the work of Avery, characters on screen directly
address the audience, the wolf erotically “Bogarts” Becool's discarded “cinematic”
cigarette, and, in its final moments, Gocart shoots the wolf. This odd, rubbery play of
textuality, back and forth between the diegetic and the non-diegetic, is a key to
Clampett's curiously ill-defined universe. His films often present a conventional and
“believable” cartoon world, if a little “elastic”, that is subsequently bypassed by
psychosis, the subconscious, a dream, excessive revelry or just a plain bonk on the
head to reveal the extraordinary Clampett universe beyond.
Nevertheless, this penchant for parody, pastiche, hyperbolic quotation and hypedup energy is characteristic of much Warners animation during this period and
earlier. For example, Frank Tashlin's The Case of the Stuttering Pig (made in 1937
and his ninth cartoon for the studio) is a remarkable take-off of the Universal horror
films of James Whale and creates a genuinely spooky cartoonisation of Hollywood
gothic. Like another Tashlin film, Porky Pig's Feat (1943), it relies upon an
imaginative and well-articulated appropriation of live-action technique (dissolves,
expressive camera angles, point-of-view shots, etc). The visual fields of Tashlin's
cartoons are often extraordinarily imaginative and flamboyant; for example, the inflight passage of the hapless hotel manager through off-screen space is reflected, in
turn, within the eyes of both Porky and Daffy. Much has been written about the
cartoon nature of Tashlin's feature film work (particularly with Jerry Lewis) but
little about his attempts to bring the toolbox, grammar and “logic” of live-action
cinema to animation (to think of the cartoon as film and then film as cartoon). Thus,
Tashlin's cartoons are alive with a self-awareness of the form, its possibilities and
materiality, and its explicit relation to live-action cinema. In the process a symbiotic
relationship, which is now often difficult to keep in mind when watching the
animated short subject, is forged and insisted on between many of his cartoons and
the live-action feature. Not surprisingly, it is often in Tashlin cartoons that one most
recognises the “genuine” star power of these animated characters. With its Bugs
Bunny cameo, Porky Pig's Feat anticipates Jones' self-consciously genre-bending star
extravaganzas of the 1950s (The Scarlet Pumpernickel [1950], Rabbit Fire [1951],
Beanstalk Bunny [1955] etc.).
On the whole, Clampett's style of animation is commonly more extreme and less
restricted than Tashlin's. Such comparisons to the style of other Warners directors
helps pinpoint what is both distinctive and generic about Clampett's work. In many
ways, Clampett was often the least successful storyteller at Warners, creating manic
and uneven worlds that might only be intermittently entertaining or where “gags
are so close to being irrelevant” (21). As Klein suggests, this has much to do with the
kind of unworldly space that Clampett creates:
The space in Clampett-land is very identifiable, different than Tashlin – the long
crane shots and cinematic cuts; different than Avery, who emphasized the edges
of the frame (flat versus deep). Clampett's “eye-view” is more like a staged set,
perhaps even shallower, and hovers very much at the ground level, like a wacky
set of roads made for stretching around corners. Clampett characters and objects
have a peculiar elasticity: they stretch and snap quickly into position; like springloaded caterpillars (22).
Thus, Clampett's space is purpose-built to express and contain the characters; its
backgrounds are less cluttered and more abstracted than is common in Warners'
cartoons of this period.
A gangster bunny in Tortoise wins by a Hare
After his departure from Warners in 1945, Clampett initially took over as creative
head of production at the newly formed Columbia Cartoons. Warners itself moved
onto its next era, consolidating its emphasis on character animation, narrative form
and a trusty star system. Whereas the period of Clampett's best work is partly
defined by experimentation, constant shifts in personnel, and the relative “moral”
and “sexual” freedom of the war years, the ten years following his departure from
Warners witnesses the consolidation of animation units (clustered around only
three directors – Jones, Freleng and McKimson – after Arthur Davis' brief tenure in
charge of Clampett's unit), formats and characters. In the first half of the 1940s,
Bugs Bunny's character, and even animation, varied quite widely between the
different directors and animators. Despite his visual consolidation in Clampett's
cartoons (and the importance of Robert McKimson's model sheets of 1940 and
1943), Bugs' broader character takes his “proper” shape and sensibility from the
work of Jones, Freleng and Tashlin during this period. The laconic bunny was widely
experimented on in the early 1940s, and took on a decidedly misanthropic edge in
such Clampett cartoons as Tortoise wins by a Hare and The Old Grey Hare (1944).
By the late 1940s, Warners' cartoons confirmed a more consistent and rational
world, moving some distance from the uneasy and unkempt style and energy of
Clampett's late cartoons. It is not surprising that Jones became increasingly – and in
some cases understandably – antagonistic towards Clampett and the many claims he
made for his own pre-eminence as an instigator and innovator within the studio.
Such antagonism has also forced many writers on Classical Hollywood animation to
take sides, and provide evidence for the perceived superiority of a particular
director's sensibility and style. For example, in promoting Jones, Patrick McGilligan
lambasts his adversary's crass commercialism:
Clampett is an inveterate self-promoter and has been barnstorming college
campuses and television talk-shows for a decade, behaving like a cure-all
salesman for himself; to hear him tell it, he was instrumental in nearly everything
that happened at the Warner Brothers cartoon factory, short of sharpening the
pencils (23).
Such a hostile response is certainly related to, and partly generated by, the many,
often surreptitious, claims made by Clampett about his role in inventing characters,
creating things like merchandising (he claims to have “manufactured” the first
Mickey Mouse doll), and as an ideas man for other directors, but I think it is also
consistent with the very different animated worlds the two directors created. Jones'
often wonderful cartoons of the 1950s, are much more concerned with the logic of
character and world built over a string of cartoons, of “human” emotions and
expressions that draw the audience into the pathos or existential nightmare of a
situation. Jones' characters are of their world, and its clearly defined boundaries (his
cartoons are often least successful when Bugs or Daffy step out of character), while
the boundary between character and world is often much more flexible in
Clampett's work.
Thus, Jones' cartoons maintain a much more consistent sense of character. When his
characters break from their conventional manners and genres, it is normally within
the framework of an explicit performance, an homage or pastiche of a particular
form. See, for example, Bugs and Elmer Fudd in the seven-minute condensation of
Wagner's Ring Cycle, What's Opera, Doc? (1957), or the wonderful string of genre
pastiches starring Daffy and Porky in the 1950s, including Dripalong Daffy (1951),
Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2 Century (1953) and Rocket Squad (1956). Jones'
cartoons, such as Rabbit Rampage (1955) and Bug' Bonnets (1956), are much less
successful when attempting to alter the “nature” or psychology of his favourite
characters, particularly Bugs. Clampett's best cartoons often dramatise (and
animate) this process of alteration.
In fact, Clampett is most successful with characters such as Daffy whose expressive
subjectivity seeps over into the world that surrounds them. As Barrier states: “as a
dramatist he excelled at showing characters in conflict not with one another, but
with their own emotions” (24). This is partly why some of Clampett's Bugs cartoons
(such as Falling Hare, 1943) are so uneven and hard to take; the director turns the
most controlled of characters into a shallow pit of neurotic obsessions. McGilligan
sees this contrast of directorial styles as underlining the limitations of Clampett's
cinema: “Jones parlayed his gimmicks into a concept; Clampett was satisfied with
the clever gimmickry” (25). He takes this further and chastises what he sees as the
ultimate conservativeness of Clampett's supporters: “Like Porky, Clampett is
incorrigibly mainstream. When his admirers laud his stark hallucinatory animation,
his moral vision, and his vaunted tastelessness, they are really appealing to the
fashionably hip culture of Now” (26). McGilligan's withering analysis of what he sees
as the rather “juvenile” terrain of Clampett's work does hold some weight, but it
does not account for the genuinely hallucinatory visuals, surreal juxtapositions and
unsettling “humour” that percolate throughout his cartoons. McGilligan's directorial
comparison also relies on a conventional contrast between Jones' intellectual and
philosophical nature and gormless Clampett's more commercial, promotional and
corporeal disposition.
Clampett can be regarded as an inventor of forms. Jones definitely had some of this
invention – and a much greater moral humour and complexity – but is at his best as
refiner of forms. As stated earlier, Clampett's departure from Warners after 15
years, allowed for the consolidation of the animation units and their much more
regimented styles, but also led him into an exploration of emerging forms. He had
long been interested in the combination of different types of animation, puppetry
and live-action, and after a brief stint as the creative head of Columbia Cartoons, he
moved into television production. Even during his time at Warners, Clampett had
experimented with merchandising (for both Warners and Disney), object animation,
adventure serial and comic book adaptation. His subsequent work in the newly
emergent form of television allowed him to further his interest in garish
exaggeration, economical forms of limited animation, and the slightly unsettling
combination of painted backdrops, puppetry and masked actors. Clampett's initial
foray into television was the massively successful Time for Beany, a show that
promoted his name and “genius” in a much more widespread fashion than the
largely anonymous reception of his Warners cartoons at the time (accentuated by
the re-release of many of the cartoons of this period without production credits).
This promotion of Clampett's name and authorship was furthered in the cellanimated version of
Beany and Cecil
Beany and Cecil produced in the early 1960s; even the theme song contained
reference to Clampett's authorship, and his cartoon-image appeared in the opening
credits (also adding fuel to Jones animosity, I'd assume). The success and wide
circulation of these two programs tended to obscure Clampett's work at Warners,
but also allowed him the airtime and publicity to promote his own role in the
creation of characters like Daffy and Bugs. During this time Clampett also produced
other television pilots including: a game-show combining live-action children and
puppets; a bizarre juxtaposition of live-action human heads and animated
backgrounds and bodies; and animated series featuring new characters or
established personalities such as Edgar Bergen and Judy Canova. Each of these
prospective programs continued the impure and combinatory qualities of much of
Clampett's work at Warners (27).
Although individual episodes of both Time for Beany and Beany and Cecil do reach
close to the manic heights and expressive visual realms of Clampett's best Warners
work, these two programs have, on the whole, dated considerably. Time for Beany is
fascinating for its insight into early live television, but its humour is often explicitly
juvenile and scatological, and like its later cell-animated counterpart, visually less
dynamic than the Warners cartoons (inevitable, considering the budgets and timeframes Clampett was working with).
Clampett was always an energetic and inventive filmmaker, but his promotion to the
pantheon of “Great Directors” is actually predicated on a small number of cartoons
produced between 1942 and 1946. He is an important and interesting figure at
other points, but it is only intermittently during this period that his work takes on a
combinatory, expressive and experiential form that exemplifies the peak of
Hollywood animation. His status in this regard, runs parallel to that of writerdirector Preston Sturges (28). Manny Farber and W. S. Poster, in their exemplary
account of Sturges' career, pinpoint the defining characteristic of the director's work
as “speed”, linking this to the rapid modernisation of the United States, and the
changing bodily and mental states required to keep pace with it (29). Like Clampett,
Sturges' career is defined by an endless shifting between genres and tones, as well
as a seemingly limitless inventiveness and recombination of forms. Jones largely
remained within the realm of cell-animation throughout his career, both Sturges and
Clampett moved between mediums and innovations. Jones' body of work spans
almost 50 years; Sturges and Clampett's wired energy was largely dissipated after
an explosion of cinematic creativity in the first half of the 1940s. The increasingly
manic speed that Farber and Poster see as the defining innovation of Sturges' work
is also found in Clampett's cartoons: “he [Sturges] presented a speed-ridden society
through a multiple focus rather than the single, stationary lens of the pioneers” (30).
Nevertheless, what Farber and Poster saw as a “smoothly travelling vehicle going at
high speed going through fields, towns, homes and even other vehicles” (31),
careens out of control in Clampett's work, threatening to transcend the limits of the
Hollywood cartoon. This characteristic is described by many writers in terms of a
palpably rubbery, elastic or transformative quality found in his work. This velocity
is visualised in the way that characters' movements outstrip their backgrounds, the
prominence given to mass-producing machines (“I'm multiplyin'”, Bugs declares in
The Big Snooze), and the flexibility and rubberiness of the characters' bodies and
faces. In an early cartoon like The Daffy Doc, an iron lung is required to justify the
expanding and contracting body parts of the characters as the end irises in, while
such extremes of expression are the defining parameters of all the animation and its
often blurred or distorted backgrounds that pulsates throughout late cartoons like
Baby Bottleneck and The Great Piggy Bank Robbery.
Ultimately, the great legacy of Clampett's career lies in the cartoons he made at
Warners (particularly from 1942) and the peculiar, unruly energy and “spasticelastic style” they exude (32). His best cartoons are seldom well structured, leading
several critics to claim an overall unsatisfactory quality to what they concede are
intermittently extraordinary cartoons. Nevertheless, I would rather follow Barrier's
more helpful lead in suggesting that:
There is something almost threatening about Clampett's cartoons from this
period [1944–46] because the director seems to be letting slip into them so many
things – bizarre gags, childish obsessions, sadistic urges – that more methodical
directors would have excluded. His cartoons can make audiences uneasy, as few
cartoons can (33).
Thus, his work is defined by an openness to situations and ideas, and his cartoons
rarely conclude in a dramatically satisfying manner. In many of them the characters
are yanked out of their dream-state or reverie, the world knocked out of kilter in the
opening moments perfunctorily put back in alignment. For example, The Big Snooze
concludes with a rapid return to the status quo (of Bugs tricking Elmer) as both
“characters” tumultuously descend from the clouds (another Clampett staple) and
enter into their dozing bodies. A surprising number of Clampett's cartoons also
conclude with weak, vaudeville-style gags – see, for example, the black-faced Gocart
at the end of Bacall to Arms who recalls the plentiful references to Rochester and
Jack Benny in the cartoons of this period – suggesting that the classical
requirements of narrative closure are not well-suited to his work.
With the departure of Clampett in 1945–46 the first Golden era of Warners
animation ended; the final string of works he directed at the studio stands at the
pinnacle of his career. By this time Tashlin had already moved toward live-action
cinema as a writer, and Avery was gainfully employed producing his best work at
MGM. Many of Clampett's best cartoons work as topical parodies of and references
to contemporary cultural artefacts (so many war references) and as timeless
comedies illustrative of the best and most transgressive traditions of the Warners
studio. They are also cartoons that have moved past the cute, animistic and
“realistic” logic of the Disney cartoon. This brief period of Warners animation (from
the late 1930s to 1946) produced some of the most sustained, freewheeling and
bizarre examples of anti and post-Disney animation to come out of Hollywood.
Welcome to Clampett-land, check your Mickey Mouse ears at the door.
Interview with Clampett:
http://www.michaelbarrier.com/Funnyworld/Clampett/interview_bob_clampett.ht
m
The first week I was at the studio, a meeting of the entire staff was called to shore up
the story for Merrie Melodie No. 2 [Smile, Darn Ya, Smile!]. It revolved around a
streetcar, and they needed a fresh and novel way to gag up the usual singing chorus.
Nothing much came out of the meeting, but riding home on the streetcar, I hit on an
idea. I submitted a sequence in which the streetcar's advertising cards—the Smith
Brothers, Dutch Cleanser girl, and other famous trademark figures—came to life and
satirized the song. My idea was used, and made a tremendous hit in the theaters. A
critic called it the first original Warner Bros. cartoon formula, as distinguished from
Disney. We followed it with magazine covers, grocery store labels, and on and on.
After that, Hugh kept calling me in from animation for story meetings, and
encouraged me to turn in ideas.
Letter of Correspondence between Chuck Jones and Tex Avery:
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2009/10/unadulterated-hogwash.html
How to Train an Animator by Walt Disney:
http://www.lettersofnote.com/2010/06/how-to-train-animator-by-waltdisney.html
Remember to look at dynamic between Clampett and Jones and Avery
Animation Archive: http://www.animationarchive.org/
ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive / 2114 W Burbank Bl. Burbank, CA 91506 /
818.842.4691 / Office Hours: Tuesday through Friday 1pm to 9pm
List of Merrie Melodies Cartoons:
http://www.erictb.info/ltmm.html
Harmon and Ising:
http://www.cartoonbrew.com/classic/harman-ising-vd-film.html
 Started with Disney, then went bankrupt, animation was used as filler
 Left Disney to work for Mintz, continued making Oswald cartoons
 Bosco the talk ink kid, first talking animations, started Loony Toons with
Warner Brothers
 Had merrie melodies in regular offices while Loony toons were just in a
shack: “Termite Terrace”


Part of new attitude crystallized around 1940, with the creations of Bugs
Bunny, Woody the Woodpecker, and Tom and Jerry
Helped create studios rather than the characters themselves
Interview with Harmon:
http://www.michaelbarrier.com/Interviews/Harman/interview_hugh_harman.htm
Hugh Harman: Walt About Mice and Men
Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising are virtual unknowns in the world of cartoon
animation today, even among animation fans, yet this creative partnership was one
of the most influential forces in animation history. They began as collaborators with
Walt Disney in 1922 and it can be asserted both never really extricated themselves
from all the mousetraps around them. Progress was initially slow in the early years
since they had no previous references to live action animation and no instructors to
teach them. Harman and Ising borrowed some early animation of Paul Terry
through a film exchange and cut and edited Terry’s film, keeping part to study and
returning the rest in a now edited and more polished form. Their first attempt to
launch their own studio failed and they returned to Disney to produce the Oswald
the Lucky Rabbit series among other projects.
It was during this time that Harman and Ising refined a style of cartoon drawing
that would become associated and synonymous with the Disney style. However,
after leaving Disney again in 1928 their contribution would become progressively
discredited. They had drawn some sketches of mice around a photo of Disney which
was later appropriated and crystallized by Disney Studios as Mickey Mouse. Also
their contribution on Oswald the Rabbit as producers showed that the animated
rabbit bore striking similarities to the re-engineered and re-baptised version of
Oswald as he morphed into the iconic and now luckier Mickey.
OSWALD THE LUCKY RABBIT
Harman and Ising created the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoon series for
Warner Brothers. They also continued with the Bosko character (influenced by the
minstrel theater of the time) which again showed a distinctive style easily
distinguishable from their less accomplished peers. Granted, Bosko and Oswald
went against the grain of any politically correct standard. These cartoons were
absurdly violent, careening, raucous affairs but highly entertaining and energetic.
Eventually,Bosko and other similar characters were censored off the air. In the
early 30′s cartoons were seen as a form of escapism and have to be seen within the
context of the cultural development of the U.S. Their career was marked by budget
disputes with the large studios and in the case of Walt Disney, a jealous professional
envy on the part of Disney bordering on the unethical.
Harman and Ising were artists who saw the animated medium as an art form but
the studio owners wanted profit and production. MGM and Warner Brothers
wanted to invest more in the cinematic advances of the time such as Technicolor
and less on artistic salaries. The two- strip technology replaced the original black
and white and was able to register variations of blue and orange and the ”process
three” saw sound on film for the first time with more vivid and vibrant colors. This
was followed by a process four which was three -strip technicolor providing even
more saturated levels of color resulting in a more surrealistic effect on the film such
as in Walt Disney’s ”Fantasia” and ”Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”. However,
the costs were exhorbitant for the time in terms of shooting, processing and often
repairing the film.
HARMAN & ISING (L TO R)
They eventually worked as freelancers. Harman did win an Oscar in 1940 for Peace
on Earth, a pacifist cartoon which received a citation from the Nobel Prize Jury. But
the duo seemed to lack the funding necessary to tackle projects of their interest such
as full length feature films.
It was naive and somewhat vulgar at the time to label Harman and Ising as Disney
copycats. They were refined artists attempting to make quality, arty work of an
enduring nature. If they did not exist we would never have known Walt Disney
Studios . According to Harman, Disney’s greatest strength was as a promotor
without equal who nonetheless lacked the ideas for stories and story telling that a
Chaplin would have created. Harman felt Disney’s ability to market his work as
”Americana” and as a cultural export product, far overshadowed his other
considerable accomplishments. Harman and Ising are credited with creating the
first instance of synchronized speech in a cartoon in the late 1920′s.
Harman was especially influenced by Sergei Eisenstein and his theory of the
juxtaposition of images . This theory was applied very deliberately to animated films
like ”The Old Mill Pond” and ”Swing Wedding”. By juxtaposing the composition of
the scenes relative to each other and relative to the music the filmmaker allows
himself to tell multiple stories and this is the secret of ”Mill Pond”.
Harman was also working in partnership with Orson Welles on a juvenile film in
1944 that would have combined both animation and Welles in the lead role. The
film, ”The Little Prince”, never was produced due to serious illness on the part of
Welles while the joint project was only partially completed. Several years later
Ingmar Bergman would insert some limited animation in his own work. However
this Harman short,”The Blue Danube” shows some nice cinematic flourishes that
went beyond standard cartoons of the day.It was one of Harmon’s favorites.
Chuck Jones: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpOPyjmB8SI
 This was the first time chuck had gone against his Disney Background
 First use of stylized animation, against Disney realism
 During the World War II years, Jones worked closely with Theodor Geisel
(also known as Dr. Seuss) to create the Private Snafu series of Army

educational cartoons. Private Snafu comically educated soldiers on topics like
spies and laziness in a more risque way than general audiences would have
been used to at the time.
http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/jon1int-1
CHUCK JONES, MASTER OF CHARACTER ANIMATION
Chuck Jones can be plausibly described as the most influential individual in the
history of animated film. There are other possible candidates for this title,
particularly Walt Disney, whose role in developing full animation as integrated
industrial/marketing process was certainly decisive for the history of commercial
cartoons, providing a nearly universal model (even for those, like Jones himself, who
would eventually reproduce the Disney style only in order to parody it). Soon it will
also be evident that John Lasseter, the unrivalled pioneer of CGI characterisation,
should also be considered for this title. There are yet other possibilities in various
contexts (Cohl, McCay, McLaren, Tezuka, Groening). As a creator of globally
recognised, intimately recalled, yet highly specific cartoon characters, however,
Jones probably has no peer. As directed by Jones, I suspect Daffy and Bugs could
punch out Mickey and Donald in any brawl over lasting popular loveability - even if,
when this almost happens in Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Zemeckis and Williams,
1988), it seems to be more the Avery version of these characters that is at stake.
Duck Amuck
The continuing international currency of Jones' work may be directly observed, to
cite just one item of evidence, in the fact that Marvin the Martian, numerically a
marginal member of the Warner Brothers universe, seems to have invaded more
young human bodies in the last few decades (by way of T-shirts) than any other
single icon of global youth marketing. It is not primarily on our chests, however, but
in our hearts, that Marvin threatens to live forever, despite having appeared in (to
my knowledge) a mere three cartoons. On one level, a Jones character is just a flat
and superficial thing, like any animated drawing, but it somehow finds a unique
response in the depths of human memory, precisely, I think, in the way it lives with
the impossibility of its own life. Daffy, in fact, is never more himself than at the
moment that Jones lets Bugs rub out Daffy's world altogether in the famously
'deconstructive' (even Leonard Maltin puts it that way!) Duck Amuck (1953):
What I want to say is that Daffy can live and struggle on in an empty screen, without
setting and without sound, just as well as with a lot of arbitrary props. He remains
Daffy. (1)
Jones was not, of course, the pure author of his own fate, no matter how he toyed
with the lives of his characters. As he constantly acknowledged, there was a lot of
luck involved, as well as quite a lot guidance through osmosis. Above all, Jones was a
true child of Hollywood. Although born elsewhere, he was brought up on the Sunset
strip, where he was able to absorb fundamental lessons in comic timing from the
nearby Chaplin studios, and it was there too, within the protecting yet notoriously
porous confines of 'termite terrace', that most of his beloved characters would come
to life.
What's Opera, Doc?
Having gone through the phases of animatic initiation, starting as a cel washer for
Ub Iwerks (another candidate for our 'most important' title) and learning to animate
under Tex Avery, Jones eventually began to direct his own cartoons at Warner
Brother's unkempt animation division (initially a separate company known simply
as Leon Schlesinger Productions). Here it is important to note the strange and
paradoxical role played by Leon Schlesinger in the history of cartoons. As head
honcho of the Warners animation department, Schlesinger nurtured the careers of
at least four highly distinguished and distinct auteurs of animation: Freleng, Avery,
Clampett, and Jones himself. He did so, however, through the rigorous practice of
complete indifference to the art of cartoons, which he viewed purely and simply as a
business. Where the Disney style was shaped by the all-reaching (if rarely actually
drawing) hands of Walt Disney, the Warner Bros. 'counter-style' owes everything to
the disinterest and utter disengagement of Schlesinger. The crew at Termite Terrace
discovered they could get away with trying anything (including more than one
parody of the boss himself). By not giving a hoot, Schlesinger evidently created one
of the most inspiring environments in which commercial cartoonists have ever had
the privilege to work.
The question facing all cartoonists in the late 1930s, Fleischer Studios as well as
Warner Bros., was a straightforward one: how to respond to the Disney style of full
animation, pioneered at first in such seven-minute classics as The Three Little Pigs
(Disney, 1933), the still stunningly colourful Band Concert (Disney, 1935), and the
multiplaning The Old Mill (Disney, 1937), and finally be definitively established in
the feature-length Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (Disney, 1937). For the
Fleischers it would soon mean the obsolescence of their all-moving, all-pulsating
rubber-pipe style of cartoon characterisation (having long ago invented the
rotoscope, they would eventually develop a kind of integrated cinematic-animatic
'hyper-realism' of their own). It was left to the artists at Warner Brothers, however,
(particularly Tex Avery) to intuit that the very technical and moral 'perfection' of
Disney's style called out for some kind of direct and militantly disrespectful action in
response. The Warner Bros. style became inseparably a parody of Disney's aesthetic,
narrative, and moral proprieties. The rules of squash and stretch would not be
ignored, but made to serve quite different purposes. The bodies of Bugs and Daffy
are no longer jointless, they suggest mass, gravity, skeletal structure. But different
things are transpiring in these forests. Bambi delivers a weighty lesson on the
finality of death and the need for duty; Bugs just keeps on sending Daffy's beak
spinning ineffectually around his head, before the whole natural order is inverted
and both of these anthropomorphised animals directly address the audience "be
vewy, vewy qwiet .... we're hunting Elmers" (Jones' Rabbit Fire, 1951).
Sniffles Takes a Trip
Initially, however, Jones, much more than any of his colleagues, allowed himself to
be seduced by the techniques and moods of Disney cartoons. His early Sniffles
cartoons, with their rounded, innocuous forms and their pastoral, pastel tones,
suggest a kind of voluntary apprenticeship in the disciplines of unrestrained
'Disneyism'. Thankfully, the 'fidelity' displayed by the young Jones is soon deflected
under the influence of the pointed exaggerations, sexual aggressions and doubletakes of Avery, as well as the elaborate psychodramas and animated gedanken
experiments of Clampett. If the explosive, accelerated, ballistic style of Tex Avery
could be described as a species of commercial 'futurism', and the deliriously
introspective, speculative worlds evoked by Clampett are forms of mass
'surrealism', Jones' characterisations probably demand a more literary analogy
(interestingly, the young Charles M. was withdrawn from high school and sent to
Chounard Art Institute precisely because his literary tastes were far in advance of
his classmates). There is more than a touch of Kafka and the ever-persecuted 'K' in
the almost anonymously named 'Chuck Jones'. In the universes created by each of
these two figures of international modernity, each unrivalled in his own field of
experimentation, characters constantly seem to be summoned forth in order to
manifest and testify to nothing but the already ordained futility of their actions.
There will certainly not be room to enumerate the many elements of Jones'
irreducible style as an animatic auteur, let alone the implications of the 'whole' that
emerges through and across all the singular experiments in characterisation that
comprise his life's work. Any such definitive analysis, however, would need to
respond, at the very least, both to his at once 'avant garde' and hard-headedly
commercial use of abstracted, deliberately over-stylised backgrounds and
movements, and to the logical circularity which repeatedly dictates the emotional
lives of his characters.
In Aristo Cat (1943), a cartoon that is, sadly, rarely seen on Australian television
screens, Jones turns the background architecture into a direct and intense
externalisation of a character's degenerating mental state. The lines of the wallpaper
become the prisons bars of his inner madness, he is persecuted by design. At the
level of economising movement, Jones is often misleadingly said to have invented
'limited animation' in The Dover Boys (1942), through the use of 'smear drawings' to
evoke speed and sudden movement. If 'limited animation' refers to the standardised
and abbreviated techniques of television cartoons (probably 'invented' by Hanna
and Barbera for the very appropriately named Ruff and Ready show), then nothing
could be further from the truth. Jones deliberately 'limits' animation here at one
level, but for an entirely comic-aesthetic purpose. In one character, the decision not
to 'fully animate' the body successfully evokes the form-stretching eagerness of a
teenage boy. The character seems to go into a kind of 'warp drive' through the sheer
power of enthusiasm, making space itself bend to his will. Far from limiting
animation in any impoverishing sense, Jones here explores the full palette of
animated possibilities, including those which do not involve 'full animation' in the
technical sense.
Duck Dodgers in the 24½ Century
Another Jones cartoon that displays the virtues of extreme stylisation - this time one
that Australian viewers should know very well - is Duck Dodgers in the 24½ Century
(1953), especially in the gleaming, floating, plasticised constructions of the space
port (an experiment in design taken even further when Bugs and Marvin fight over a
'space modulator' in another cartoon). It is perhaps this virtue of simplified space
which Porky celebrates when he dismisses Daffy's torturous computations using a
space-navigo compass, pointing out that 'planet X' is just one letter in a plainly
visible alphabet structuring the entire galaxy. There is something very instructive
here, also, in the tightly integrated series of futilities and inversions that determines
Daffy's trajectory throughout the adventure. Who could ever forget the successfully
disintegration-proof vest that just happens to leave Daffy's entire bodily substance
pouring out of its interior like so much moondust out of a sieve, or Daffy's not-sosurprised exclamation when his 'disintegrating pistol' does the only thing the laws
of Jones' Kafkaesque syntax could possibly allow? (Viewers interested in Jonesian
semiotics may wish to further research the question of pronoun trouble.) But Daffy
isn't alone in his ever-ironic fate, he just happens to strain against it with a manic
and loveable stupidity matched by few other characters (except, to be sure, Wil.E
Coyote). It is not just the duck, after all, who ends up clinging to a root in empty
space at the end of Duck Dodgers, but Marvin and Porky, too. It is left to Porky to
pronounce the telling 'b-b-b-big deal' that provides this cartoon's parting note.
An adequate study of the complex processes of cross-fertilisation and mutual
modulation that led to the 'parallel yet differentiated development' of such
seemingly eternal characters as Bugs and Daffy at Termite Terrace is yet to be
carried out. Whatever the secret of the special chemistry that prevailed for a time at
Warners, however, it was evidently not to be found by Jones at MGM (a transition
earlier made with great success by Avery), when he was conscripted to direct the
already successful Tom and Jerry series. This sojourn proved to be neither happy nor
fruitful.
Rabbit of Seville
More than once, Jones testified that he wouldn't even know how to begin making
films 'for children', or, indeed, for any anticipated market. He could only animate for
himself. He was quite candid in admitting that each of the characters invented purely
by him (such as Pepe Le Pew, Marvin the Martian, Wil.E.Coyote and the
Roadrunner), as well as each of the characters inherited and developed by him in
new directions (Daffy, Bugs, Elmer, Porky), embodied either some despicable
neurosis or some impossibly noble aspiration extracted from his own experience. In
Tex Avery's hands, by contrast, Daffy and Bugs seemed like differently outfitted
vehicles for the release of one, all-consuming, tumescent life force. Directed by
Jones, these same characters become perfectly and permanently opposed
personality types. Bugs becomes the initially reluctant agent of a gracefully vengeful
justice, one that is paradoxically enforced through the suspension of all apparent
laws; Daffy becomes an ego in search of a character, a figure of futility, a virtual
tissue of 'issues'.
Like the rest of us, Chuck Jones, the man, was born at a definite date into a mortal
body; one destined to die at an equally definite time and place. Unlike most of us,
however, Chuck Jones, the animator, was able to isolate and revivify selected aspects
of his personality, endowing them with a completely different, elasticised, effectively
immortal kind of life:
As you develop any character, you are, of course, looking into a mirror, a reflection of
yourself, your ambitions and hopes, your realizations and fears. [....] You see, that's the
whole wonder of animation directing. If you're not something you want to be, or are
something you don't want to be, you can through drawing, through action, create a
character who will take care of the matter. (2)
Jones' characters were thus designed knowingly as virtual avatars of his own
unknown life: their possibility was usually found in some intimate impossibility he
would discover within himself, some fragment of himself that he would see escaping
himself in the mirror. Do I risk stretching things too far (like some naive native dog
tugging on an Acme rubber band), if I say that the whole 'family' of these characters
seemed to constitute a kind of personalised universe for Jones, and that this
universe effectively 'took care' of matter itself for him, displacing his passions from
the level of merely 'real' or 'physical' existence? Every animator is, at least
potentially, a cosmocrator, a master of his own virtual universe, an all-powerful
creator-destroyer, and Jones seems to have been particularly (and ironically) aware
of this (and not only in Duck Amuck, when Bugs the cartoon-director invisibly plays
out his worst tendencies upon the flat body of poor Daffy the cartoon-actor).

Any fair treatment of Jones' work would need to account for the input of his
most lastingly sympatico writer, Mike Maltese. Any such treatment of the
development of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck as characters would need to
recognise the often unexpected and formative role played by the voice artist,
Mel Blanc (especially in the case of Bugs). Finally, any adequate analysis of
the development of the Warner Brothers' style as a whole would need to
underline the singular musical inventions of Carl Stalling.
Chuck Jones Archive:
http://www.chuckjones.org/archives/index.php
Chuck Jones Interview:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnk228Ti3WI
Chuck Jones Obituary:
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/24/nyregion/chuck-jones-animator-of-bugsand-daffy-dies-at-89.html?pagewanted=3
Chuck Jones Interview:
http://www.michaelbarrier.com/Funnyworld/Jones/interview_chuck_jones.htm
Friz Freleng:
sadore 'Friz' Freleng was one of the pioneers of modern animation and the creator
of more than 300 cartoons featuring Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Speedy Gonzales,
Tweety Pie and most notably Yosemite Sam among other classic Looney Tunes
characters for Warner Bros.
Five of his cartoons were awarded Academy Awards over a twenty-year period
(winning the only Oscar for Bugs Bunny-Knighty Knight Bugs.) After leaving Warner
Bros. in 1962, Freleng founded his own production company, DePatie-Freleng
Enterprises where he created the Pink Panther.
Although Freleng helped give life to a menagerie of Warner Bros. characters, he
became the personification of Yosemite Sam. He even admitted to serving as the
inspiration for the gun-slinging, brazen Sam. "I have the same temperament," he told
the Associated Press. "I'm small, and I used to have a red mustache." Chuck Jones
said, "We would tease Friz that if he ever exploded the result would be similar to
what Sam did when he was angry."
Freleng, along with Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett, Robert McKimson and Tex Avery,
became the driving force of Warner Bros.' legendary Termite Terrace, the raucous,
irreverent group of animators whose sly wit and technical and artistic gifts created a
unique identity for Warner Bros.' cartoon characters.
For a self-described iconoclast, Freleng was honored by some very respectable
organizations: the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, the Motion Picture
Screen Cartoonist's Guild, the British Film Institute and the International Animated
Film Society. In 1985 the Museum of Modern Art honored both Friz Freleng and
Chuck Jones at a major film and art retrospective that set attendance records for the
institution that remain unbroken 28 years later.
In 1980, Freleng returned to Warner Bros. to direct television specials and
compilation features. They are 1981's Looney, Looney, Looney Bugs Bunny Movie,
1982's 1001 Rabbit Tales and 1983's Daffy Duck's Fantastic Island. In the nearly
eight years since his death (May 26, 1995), production artwork from three of his
late films has continued to be sought out by discerning collectors of animation art.
Let’s deal with the hard part up front and get it of the way. Friz Freleng will always
suffer by comparison with his more prodigiously gifted colleagues: Tex Avery, Bob
Clampett, and Chuck Jones. I’m not going to shy away from the fact that he wasn’t as
good as those three illustrious directors. But that’s okay. Avery, Clampett and Jones
are pretty far clear of the pack when it comes to the great Hollywood cartoon
directors. Noting that Freleng wasn’t their equal doesn’t get you anywhere: it’s just
what happens when you make comparisons to the incomparable. Freleng deserves
to be acknowledged for what he did, not downplayed because of the exceptional
company he kept.
That’s particularly the case if we argue, as I think we can, that the others probably
needed someone like Friz around. After all, it’s hard to believe that Freleng’s
proximity to so much greatness was purely coincidental. I’m not suggesting he was a
hidden hand behind the others – the films show that he was a follower, not a leader,
of the more pioneering directors that he worked with – but certainly he was the
backbone of the Warners studio, the one constant through its entire golden era. He
was there as lead artist for the inaugural Warner directors, Hugh Harman and
Rudolf Ising, when the first Looney Tune was released in 1930; and he was there as
head of DePatie-Freleng studio that produced some of the studio’s last cartoons. In
between that inauspicious beginning and rather sad finish, Friz plugged away for
three decades, directing more Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies than any other
director, by a comfortable margin. As Steve Schneider put it in his book That’s All
Folks, if anyone was Warner Bros cartoons, it was Freleng. He was the linchpin of the
studio, giving it a much-needed stability, and it is hard to believe that such able
support didn’t help to foster the achievements of his even more talented colleagues.
Freleng’s longevity means that filmography is a cross-section of the wider Warners
canon. When the studio’s films were twee faux-Disney musicals, so were his;
likewise, when they had descended into largely unredeemed formula outings, his
had too. Yet in between those periods, when the studio was at the top of its game,
Freleng’s work lifted with it. Freleng never had a period of consistent brilliance in
the way that Clampett did from about 1942 to 1946, or as Jones did from about
1948 to 1954. Instead, Freleng peppered his best cartoons throughout his career.
And while there is perhaps not a single cartoon on Freleng’s resume that matches,
say, The Great Piggy Bank Robbery or Rabbit of Seville, there is still an
embarrassment of riches.
I would say the first really great Freleng cartoon would be his wonderful musical
take on a construction site from 1941, Rhapsody in Rivets, and the second is another
musical cartoon, Pigs in a Polka, from 1943. Also that year is the enchanting yet very
funny Jack Wabbit and the Beanstalk, while 1944 saw another fairy-tale effort with
Little Red Riding Rabbit. Several more of the most fondly remembered Bugs Bunny
cartoons followed in 1946: Baseball Bugs, Racketeer Rabbit, and Rhapsody Rabbit.
1948 sees Bugs Bunny Rides Again, while in 1949 we have the deceptively simple
High Diving Hare and the exuberantly brutal Mouse Mazurka. Golden Yeggs, from
1950, sees the early 1950s Daffy at his most appealing. In 1951 he produced one of
the classic Sylvester shorts with Canned Feud, as well as one of the slyest Bugs /
Yosemite pictures, the election themed Ballot Box Bunny. In 1952 there’s the hugely
under-recognised Cracked Quack, in which Daffy hides out in Porky’s house to
escape the winter migration. And while the creeping decline that set in to all the
Warner directors’ work in the mid 1950s dragged Freleng down particularly badly
in this period, he managed to produce perhaps his single most enjoyable film in
1957 with The Three Little Bops.
This very limited selection of Freleng’s best work highlight one of the most noted of
his strengths as a director: his knack for musical cartoons. The precise timing
allowed in animation allows for particularly satisfying melding of image and music,
a fact that the Disney studio exploited for aesthetic effect in the Silly Symphonies
and ultimately in the grand showpiece Fantasia. But it was in the Warners cartoons
that the strength of music in selling cartoon gags really came to the fore, and Freleng
was especially adept at harnessing this effect. One of the earliest critical
appreciations of the Warner cartoons was James Agee’s 1946 piece on Rhapsody
Rabbit, in which he praised the way it used “brutality keyed into the spirit of the
music to reach greater subtlety than I have ever seen brutality reach before.” Which
seems to be Agee’s way of noting the extra “punch” that the gags get from the
pairing with the music in a film like this. Yet it goes beyond that. If I can read my
own views into Agee’s a little further, I’d argue that the subtlety Agee talks of comes
from the way Freleng uses the high spirits of the music to inform the character of
Bugs Bunny. One of the classic Bugs Bunny moments is his jubilant, on-all fours
bounce down his piano’s keyboard in this film, orchestrated to the climax of Liszt’s
second Hungarian Rhapsody. It is the fusion of the music’s exuberance with Bug’s
own temperament that takes the unpleasant edge off what is, otherwise, a fairly
villainous Bugs in this cartoon.
Freleng’s musical sense is not limited to his overtly musical cartoons, though. His
strongest trait as a director is his instinct for timing, which is fundamentally musical
in nature, even when the overt synchronisation with a musical piece isn’t present, or
at least not as obvious. One reason I think it is easy to underestimate Freleng’s
strength as a director is that we tend to focus on the purely visual aspect of a
director’s style, and Freleng’s composition and shot design were always the most
pedestrian of the major Warner directors. Yet the timing, rhythm and editing of his
cartoons – aspects that animation directors have much more control over than their
live-action counterparts - is impeccable. Freleng’s cartoons often feature gags that
are only jokes because of the timing. In High Diving Hare, for example, one sequence
underscores Bugs’ complete control over Yosemite Sam by stripping the actual jokes
out and simply showing Sam climb the high diving platform and fall repeatedly: the
escalating pace of Sam’s ascents and falls creates the gag out of nothing. Similarly,
one of Freleng’s favourite gags (turning up in Ballot Box Bunny and Show Biz Bugs,
amongst others) involves a booby-trapped piano set to explode on a certain note of
“Those Endearing Young Charms.” The joke here works so well because of the
repetition of the “off” note that repeatedly causes the trap to fail. Because the
musical sequence cues us to want to hear that final note played, the urge of the
perpetrating character to intervene and play it properly is psychologically much
more effective.
One difficulty with trying to note the great Freleng cartoons is the number he made
that are relatively undistinguished overall, but which have individual sequences of
great inspiration. Most of his Tweety and Sylvester cartoons fall into this category,
being generally pedestrian but lifted by Freleng’s handling of Sylvester. While
Freleng’s conception of Tweety turned the character into a pale, unsatisfying
imitation of Bob Clampett’s original, his Sylvester is constantly a joy to watch. I note
that some, like John Kricfalusi (here), have taken to deriding Freleng’s Sylvester,
preferring the occasional use of the character in Clampett or Jones’ cartoons, or even
Robert McKimson’s lacklustre efforts. Yet I can’t think of a character in the Warner
cartoons as consistently empathetic as Freleng’s Sylvester. Freleng’s poses for the
character might be much less self-consciously funny, but his Sylvester benefited
from not being over-designed, feeling real and likable in a way that the other
directors’ Sylvesters didn’t. (One of my all-time favourite pieces of animation is
Sylvester prancing along the top of a fence, singing his theme song “Miaow,” at the
start of the otherwise undistinguished Tweety’s Circus. It is a moment that shows
Sylvester at his most irresistibly free-spirited and cat-like, perfectly illustrating
Freleng’s affinity for the character.)
Similarly, I’d argue that Freleng’s take on Bugs Bunny was particularly vital in that
character’s development. In the early 1940s, as all the Warner directors jumped on
the Bugs Bunny bandwagon and tried to flesh out the basic template laid by Tex
Avery’s A Wild Hare, it was not the bigger names at the studio that immediately saw
the direction to take the character. Avery always struggled with creating likable lead
characters, and it showed in his few shorts with Bugs before he left the studio.
Similarly, Clampett’s Bugs was, for the most part, too brash (his Bugs Bunny
cartoons have always struck me as amongst the weakest of his 1940s films). Jones
was moving in the right direction with some of his early Bugs shorts, but was still
maturing as a director and would do his best work with the character later in the
decade. Freleng, however, by about 1943 to 1944 had absolutely nailed Bugs.
Freleng’s Bugs has an innocent, childlike quality that makes the character much
more engaging. It was a more moderate version of the infantilism Freleng brought to
Tweety, and while it basically ruined the latter character, it was vital to the
formation of Bugs as an appealing, fully-rounded character. The classic Bugs of
Jones’ shorts of the late 1940s and early 1950s is unimaginable without the
influence of Freleng’s Bugs of the mid 1940s. And to the extent that Jones started to
lose a handle on the character later in the 1950s, it is largely because he started to
conceive the character as an adult sophisticate: in other words, shifting the
character away from the qualities Freleng’s Bugs had epitomised.
The down-to-earth nature of Freleng’s Bugs is reflected in the distinct lack of
pretension of Freleng’s work more generally, and this is key to both the weaknesses
and appeals of his cartoons. Compared to the lofty ambitions and obvious striving
for greatness of Clampet and Jones’ best cartoons, Freleng’s can look a little pallid.
I’m sure Freleng took great pride in his work, but you also sense that at the time, he
probably didn’t see his cartoons as significant artistic achievements in the way that
Jones or Clampett seemed to. But if this meant his shorts didn’t have quite the high
aspirations of his colleagues’ films, it also helped give his best films an easy charm
that their work sometimes lacked. For example, in the late 1950s Jones produced
two of his best known musical cartoons: the uber-cartoon What’s Opera Doc? and
the simpler Baton Bunny, something of a riff on the basic template of Rhapsody
Rabbit (as well as Jones’ earlier Long-Haired Hare). Both are fine cartoons, but for
sheer enjoyment, neither can really compete with Freleng’s much more effortless,
jazzy The Three Little Bops. Where in What’s Opera Doc? Jones is at his most
ambitious, and straining against his budget to produce something really spectacular,
Freleng’s picture shows him accepting the budgetary constraints that closed in on
the studio in its later years, and just having fun.
It is perhaps the archetypal Freleng picture: unapologetically gag-based, impeccably
timed, swept along by its music, and with an irresistible joie de vivre. While I’m all
for taking cartoons seriously and appreciating their artistry, The Three Little Bops is
about as straightforwardly enjoyable a cartoon as has ever been made. Freleng’s
best work is amongst the most fun of the Warner canon to watch, and I think that is
his great achievement.
Interview: http://www.animationarchive.org/2006/04/biography-john-kinterviews-bill-joe.html
1946 Article on Friz Freleng
Probably the best special feature on the fourth Looney Tunes Golden Collection is a
new documentary on Friz Freleng, which includes lots of archival interview footage
of Freleng (as well as one of his top animators, Virgil Ross). In honor of that, I'd like
to re-post something I already posted on a message board a while back: while
searching through Newspaperarchive.com, I found a 1946 article on Freleng in his
hometown newspaper, the Kansas City Star. It doesn't say a whole lot that you
wouldn't know from watching the documentary, but it's just interesting and
surprising that it exists at all, since the Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies directors
didn't usually get press coverage at the time they were making these cartoons.
Spelling mistakes or factual mistakes are from the original:
Kansas City Star, August 20, 1946
FUN IN A VISITOR'S PEN
Isadore Freleng, Cartoon Creator, Returns “Home.”
A Director, for Warner Bros. Studio, the Master of Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig and Daffy
Duck Renews Friendship Here.
One of a half-dozen cartoonists who left Kansas City in the early '20s to become
animators and producers of pen and ink motion pictures, Isadore (Fritz [sic])
Freleng, returned to his “home town” this week for a visit.
As a director in the Warner Brothers cartoon studio, Freleng created the popular
“Looney Tune” series and now controls the antics of such “Merry Melodies”
characters and Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig and Daffy Duck.
When Freleng lived here at 4543 Mercier street, he attended Westport high school.
Some of his cartoons appeared in school publications during his 1919 to 1923 high
school career. To earn pocket money he caddied at the Kansas City Country club and
recalls that one of his fellow mashie-toters was now-famous professional golfer Jug
McSpaden.
“After school I worked at Armour & Co. as a visitor's guide for a while, then went out
to United Film Service, Inc., at 2449 Charlotte street as an animator.”
It was here that Freleng became acquainted with Walt Disney, creator of Mickey
Mouse; U.B. Iwerks, creator of “Flip the Frog”; Fred Harmon, originator of the “Red
Ryder” strip; Hugh Harmon, his brother, who, with Rudy Ising, another United man,
later made the “Harmon-Ising” musical cartoons.
Disney was the first of the Kansas City group to strike out for Hollywood. Later, the
others followed, all becoming Disney animators. In 1931, Freleng became associated
with Warner Brothers, where he has been ever since.
Another Kansas Citian in the Warner office is Carl Stalling, musical director of the
animated cartoon section, who formerly played the organ at the Isis theater here.
“Bugs Bunny, the most popular character of 'Merry Melodies,' was created as a
combined result of several directors and artists,” Freleng said. “I began Porky Pig in
a 'bit' part in my third picture. He's jumped to stardom since.”
Musicals, of the “Rhapsody in Rivets” and “Three Pigs in a Polka” type, whre the
action of the characters is timed to the exact note of some well-known piece of
music instead of to a set rhythmic tempo, are a Freleng innovation.
Friends at the Warner studio term Freleng the original “worry wart” because of his
pessimistic view of each new picture. The slightly-built, balding, blue-eyed man
assures everyone that “this is my worst, and probably last, cartoon.” So far, the
strips happily have proved Freleng wrong.
Leon Schlesigner:
http://www.cartoonresearch.com/
http://www.cartoonbrew.com/wp-content/uploads/wwii_bugs_logo_ltr.jpg
Hanna-Barbera:
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanna-Barbera
 http://www.bcdb.com/cartoons/Hanna-Barbera_Studios/
 http://www.hbshows.com/
 http://www.animationarchive.org/labels/hanna%20barbera.html
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwpxfJbG9Xw
 http://www.scribd.com/document_collections/2343264
One Ham’s Family:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M0R1h1LZa8Y
Making fun of Disney, disneyfied mother and father characters while child is very
naughty, complete opposite of Disney, deconstruct characters to emphasize their
weakness, naïveté and lack of realism,
Screwball Squirrel:
The disneyesque character sammy the squirrel gets beat up because he can’t survive
reality, reminds audience that these characters escaped from a fantasy world not
aggressive enough to survive
Little Tinker:
Deals with women’s sexuality and arousal as well as men’s. Portrays different
version of sexuality that is not masogenistic but father similar to that of the men’s
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWJUC5rYJWI
Walt Disney Little Red Riding Hood 1922:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9j9JUHRUCE
very liberal actually. But in the end the evil mother wins out, grandma turns back
into her ugly self, and everything goes back the way it should. Focus on Jazz because
very popular during the period.
Tex Avery Gold Diggers of 49’ 1935:
http://video.yandex.ru/users/destirh/view/274/
hard to find this one because it was banned when it came out in 1935. Probably
because of the extremely racist portrayal of Chinese men at the Laundromat then
changed into blacks once smoke covered their faces. Makes a point to cover the kind
of relentless search for wealth in society, in the form of gold digging. Then extols the
values of love, and ultimately points out the useless nature of the wealth search,
because in the end all they were doing was searching for his lunch. Possible
comment on the oil industry as well, showing it as poison for the car with the classic
XXX markings.
Earlier cartoons were more kitschy like Porky the Village Smithy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=951OspjBSzA
Or plane dimpy. Not as funny because less deviation from the norm of Disney stuff.
The Bear’s Tale:
http://www.thewb.com/shows/looney-tunes/the-bears-tale/ad37f1b4-d7fc-4c1795ef-0f4963fb3b9d
mixing of several different cartoons, goldilocks and red riding hood
the girls really take control
a little racist portrayal of the black father bear
Cinderella Meets Fella:
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x9bv7v_cinderella-meets-fella_shortfilms
Prince charming not that attractive
Fairy godmother drunken and a little crazed
Cinderella assertive: talks to policemen and yells at them, gives her own shoe to
prince charming
Inevitably they leave the film altogether to enter reality