Near the beginning of the cartoon, when Elmer Fudd and the fox are being duped for the first time, Daffy is all angular, thrashing arms, bulging eyes and floppy, pointed tongues, but the animation’s wonderfully fluid. Notice below how Daffy starts out looking normal, then goes into wild gestures. These are random frames. This is the work of Bill Melendez. You’ll never find anything like this in his Peanuts specials.
More random frames from Daffy conning Elmer and the fox into a foot race to get “tender, juicy me as first prize.” More random frames. I love the eye-contact as Daffy looks up at the fox.
Melendez, Emery Hawkins, Don Williams and Basil Davidovich are the credited animators. I’d love to know who the assistants were in the Davis unit.
Both Davis and Norm McCabe as No. 4 directors fared better with their Daffy cartoons overall than they did with their other efforts, in large part because the Daffy of the 1940s was built for wild, expressive animation (though Artie wasn't as lost at sea as McCabe seemed to be with his one-shots or his Porky Pig efforts).
ReplyDeleteYou could also have added my favourite gag from this cartoon. This is at the point when Elmer snarls at the fox to drop Daffy and throw up his (the fox's) paws. The latter action is done with such force that for a moment, the fox's anthropomorphic paws fly off, revealing feral fox paws.
ReplyDeleteElmer is played a bit differently in this cartoon; even though he's a bit dim, and still comes out 2nd best in some gags, he comes out a semi-winner in the end, and is a lot more aggressive.
Okay, you sent me back to review this one online. Hadn't seen it in years. Wonderfully fluid indeed. Through much of this, Daffy looks like he's made of latex. What a gem!
ReplyDeleteThis is the work of Bill Melendez. You’ll never find anything like this in his Peanuts specials.
ReplyDeleteI disagree. Bill Littlejohn contributed many loose, expressive Snoopy scenes to the specials and features over the years. I consider the "battle with the anthropomorphic lawn chair" sequence in A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving to be his masterpiece.
Great observation! I was thinking exactly the same thing! Even in the more limited animation, Melendez got some good slapstick situations out of Snoopy.
DeleteThat's besides the point. Peanuts isn't an action based comic strip. Sure there's some, but it's not the success. To make a Peanuts special with too much wild animation is like turning an action based comic strip stiff as a board. Therefore, Melendez expressed his talent through graphics. His backgrounds are irresistible and his color choices are keen. But as you say, he can get wild animation here and there.
DeleteI enjoy this one too. Elmer's line when dressing as this femme duck describing Daffy as an egotistical line makes one wonder how he'd think of Daffy ten years later, hehehheh! Art Davis's only short with Elmer.:)SC
ReplyDeleteWhat I always loved about the Davis films is that the viewer can kill the sound and find himself still laughing out loud. They simply LOOK funny!
ReplyDeleteI guess there is no sense in rehashing the What if Art Davis Had Become the "Third" WB Director game. Still...
That Davis "look" seems to live on in recent years in some of the more attractive Looney Tunes products.
Yeah, it's hard to say what would have happened, other than the unit would have been closed for the 17 months that the McKimson unit was shut down.
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