SOME of the best movies of the year are seven-minute cartoons called by names like All This and Rabbit Stew or The Fighting 69th 1/2, which come on as unheralded transitions in the double bill and feature the notorious Bugs Bunny, a rabbit that not only performs physical feats of a Paul Bunyan magnitude but is equally sharp with his mind. They come from Warner Brothers, are produced by Leon Schlesinger, made by Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng, Bob McKimson, and called Merrie Melodies; ten of them are being reissued this fall still as Merrie Melodies but with the addition of a Blue Ribbon.
One reason for the brightness of Merrie Melodies and for their superiority over Disney’s product is that Jones is out to make you laugh, bluntly, and, as it turns out, cold-bloodedly. This runs him against the grain of the several well-worked grooves down which the animated cartoon has traveled under the belief these grooves will never wear through. However, it no longer seems funny to see animals who talk and act like human beings, who do all sorts of ingenious tricks—most of them superhuman—who go through lives of the highest excitement and reward, but have no inner, or mental, life. The complex emotional life and three-dimensional nature of Jones-McKimson characters allow their makers to poke fun at everything in sight, or out of sight especially if it is something familiar and well loved, like McKimson’s Hiawatha, a kind person, or any bad actress’s great moments.It is an illusion of most cartoon-makers that they must have a moral, or do good, if it means only killing the villain; Warner’s crew isn’t under this illusion. The masterpiece, Inki and the Lion, is also a masterpiece of amorality—so far the other side of goodness that it is a parody of Bambi. In this version of forest life, man is the likable spear-thrower, preyed on by animals, and the king of the forest is a supernatural horror called the Myna bird, who hates man and beast alike.
The artistic method in Warner cartoons is neither in Disney’s top drawer (at his best) nor Popeye’s bottom one, but, even so, it has gone off at a tangent lately that may open up new paths to the cartoon method. It is a change from the straight, insipid realism to a sophisticated shorthand, made up of flat, stylized, posterlike representations, using a sort of Persian color of fancy tones like dusty pink. It is a much simpler style of cartoon drawing, the animation is less profuse, the details fewer, and it allows for reaching the joke and accenting it much more quickly and directly: it also gets the form out of the impossible dilemma between realism and the wacky humor.
The goal in heroes is a comic figure with a temperament and behavior as peculiarly his own as those of a Chaplin or Fields, which goal is never achieved; but it leads to several rewards, like the Myna bird, who appears in the Inki (little African boy) series. The Myna bird is like a toucan, shaped like an acorn, coal black, who moves inscrutably in an atmosphere of overwhelming supernaturalism, to the tune of Mendelssohn’s overture to Fingal’s Cave. At the end of each musical phrase, he gives one prodigious, syncopated hop, thereafter moving forward indomitably. The Myna bird is inevitably followed by a passive three-year-old individual named Inki, who loves to throw spears, and by a lion (the lion is Jones’s least successful creation—he looks like Robinson Crusoe). The famous Bugs Bunny is Avery-Jones one-animal advertisement of the moral that unadulterated torturing of your fellow men pays off.
Despite the various positions on humor (Tex Avery is a visual surrealist proving nothing is permanent, McKimson is a show-biz satirist with throw-away gags and celebrity spoofs, Friz Freleng is the least contorting, while Jones’s speciality, comic character, is unusual for the chopping up of motion and the surrealist imposition: a Robin Hood duck, whose flattened beak springs out with each repeated faux pas as a reminder of the importance of his primary ineptness), the Warner cartoonists are refreshing iconoclasts because they concentrate on so many other humor antecedents besides brutal mishaps, cultural punning, balletlike sadism. One of Jones’s key inventions is the animal who is a totally invulnerable, can’t-possibly-be-stopped adversary, a mysterious force like rain that is always surrounded by a hush that is a mixture of the awe, revelation, instinctive reverence of a soon-to-be-victim just before he is maneuvered off the cliff or into a distant puff of smoke miles away in the desert. Ridiculousness is behind every Jones gag, but it is labyrinthine in effect because of how much gentleness is mixed in along with an infinite response to one animal’s brass, hunger, manipulative power, or blinding speed. Disney’s boredom-encased drawing, Barbera’s cat-mouse drag, and the smugly “mature” Hubley works are incapable of this Warner’s lightness: that there should be no end in defining the human quality of hunger (an animal fated from birth to be a scrawny piece of meat trying to eat tin cans, blindly grabbing at flies in a hostile environment of doomful rocks) as long as the metaphorical elaboration is kept within lighter-than-air feats of quick, fractional wit. The never-stop, pushing-on insistence in Warner’s cartoons is important: having eaten some Earthquake Pills from a little bottle, the effect on the victim’s body is a tremor that has the insistence and unsolvable disaster of hiccups.
Because of the twenty-six-issues-per-year rate at which they are thought up, the Merrie Melodies are bound to vary greatly in quality. The surprising facts about them are that the good ones are masterpieces and the bad ones aren’t a total loss. For instance, the poor Rabbit Who Came to Dinner (Freleng) is given a tremendous lift when, in the midst of the inevitable and tedious chase of the rabbit by Elmer, the clock strikes twelve and Bugs breaks into one of his typical emotional upsets, roaring out Auld Lang Syne, kissing Elmer, flinging confetti in the age-old tradition of New Year’s Eve—Elmer being as easily diverted in July as in any other month.
Jones-McKimson-Freleng are in the Sennett tradition, which uses the whole sphere of man’s emotion and behavior simply as a butt for humor, no matter what it leads to. The aim is purely and simply laughter. Schlesinger’s men are rich and inventive humorists, and their smart-alecky freshness has turned what is meant to be an interval on the program into the moment when the whole audience brightens up.
September 20, 1943