Mannie Melodies

For years, you’ve read or heard about Manny Farber’s praise for Warner Bros. cartoons. Any claim he was he first to take notice of them is hearsay. An earlier champion was Paul Harrison in his column for the Newspaper Enterprise Association around June 23, 1937.

Farber’s opinion piece was published in the September 20, 1943 issue of The New Republic. In case you have never seen the full article, here it is:

Short and Happy
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 and are 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 fellow travelers in the field, is that Schlesinger 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 that 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 the Schlesinger 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 "Hiawatha," a kind person, or any bad actress' 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; Schlesinger is not 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 Mina bird, who hates man and beast alike.
The artistic method in Schlesinger 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 wacky humor.
The goal in Schlesinger heroes is a comic figure with a temperament and behavior as peculiarly his own as those of a Chaplin or a W. C. Fields, which goal is never achieved; but it leads to several rewards, like the Mina bird, who appears in the "Inki" (little African boy) series. The Mina bird is like a toucan, shaped like an acorn, coal black, who moves inscrutably in an atmosphere of over-whelming 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 Mina 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 Schlesinger's most unsuccessful creation—he looks like Robinson Crusoe). The famous Bugs Bunny is Schlesinger's one-animal advertisement of the moral that unadulterated torturing of your fellow men pays off.
At the 26-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 ("The Case of the Missing Hare," “Hiawatha's Rabbit Hunt," "Inki and the Lion") are masterpieces and the bad ones aren't a total loss. For instance, the poor "Rabbit Who Came to Dinner" 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. Schlesinger is 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. MANNY FARBER

All This and Rabbit Stew has never been on my winner’s list. When I watched it 60-some-odd years ago, I thought the hunter was too slow and stupid. Elmer Fudd may be a bit of a dullard, but at least his emotions change, and he’s a good foil in The Wabbit Who Came to Supper, with Farber describing one of my favourite scenes in the film.

Regardless, the one thing Farber wouldn’t have known at the time was the Warners cartoons got better and better. There were plenty of fine cartoons made before 1948, which were sold to Associated Artists Productions and found their way onto seemingly countless TV stations for ubiquity starting in June 1956. Over the years, millions of young people couldn’t turn away from their TV sets as they watched Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and others (including the unfortunate hunter in Rabbit Stew) over and over and over.

Maybe Farber praised the Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes early, but it’s those kids who grew up to research and write books and fanzine columns about them, creating the foundation of animation history knowledge that, today, seems like it was always there.

Stick Figures Help Win the War

Chuck Jones employs stick figures in parts of his 1944 look at life on the home front, The Weakly Reporter (released March 24).



“The girdle, that moulder of the Form Divine, has gone to war on the scrap pile,” intones Bea Benaderet. Jones doesn't waste time. By the time the dialogue is finished, so is the gag, and it's on to the next scene.



“More and more,” Frank Graham informs us, “women are filling jobs that, in the past, have been held exclusively by men.” Again, the gag ends with the dialogue. Observe the background. Didn't Jones once quote Leon Schlesinger that "purple is a funny color"?



“Even the army has opened its doors to women,” Graham informs us. And we get a WW2 version of the old rolling pin gag.



Uh, oh. The temptress spy!



Heh. That'll learn that Naz-she! (Stop groaning).

You can see Jones employed stylised backgrounds. Here's one I like.



Hmm. When Jones cuts back to the crowd, the tire has moved. Maybe the kid kicked it.



Actually the tire is on a cel. It is rescued by an ambulance crew, leaving the human to become a war casualty (Tires were valuable as they were rationed due to a rubber shortage).

The Film Daily called the cartoon a "funny satire." The Showman's Trade Review gave it a "good" rating, adding:

A cock-eyed slant on life as it has been lived in war time, Leon Schlesinger offers in this Technicolor number a snappy few minutes of harmless fun that won't hurt anybody and will amuse many. Rationing, transportation, shortages, and women come in for lampooning—to say nothing of Henry Kaiser's method for making ships spring up over night. It is, in short, a burlesque newsreel done in cartoons, and calls for further experimentation along this line. Art work and animation are outstanding.

Opined The Independent’s “Longfellow” on April 14, 1944:

A Merrie Melody that burlesques many of our pet wartime peeves. Contains a fair amount of laughs and should please.

Ben Washam receives the rotating animation credit; there's cop-behind-a-billboard scene I think is his. Mike Maltese provided the story. According to Mike Barrier, Earl Klein came to the Jones unit as a layout artist in 1944, and Bob Gribbroek painted the backgrounds. But if this cartoon was in production before then, Bernyce Polifka would have been the background artist. And Klein was in animation before 1944; he was part of an exhibition of art by members of the Screen Cartoonists Guild in Los Angeles in late November 1943. Prior to that, he was a scenic designer for the Fleischers in Miami and, census returns showing he was in Detroit in 1935, employed by Jam Handy before that.

And, yes, Jones would 114 today. Fortunately, his cartoons live on.

They're Not Hubie and Bertie

Remember in Mouse Wreckers, how Hubie lowered Bertie on a fishing line down a chimney to play head games with a sleeping Claude Cat?



Wait a minute. That’s not Hubie and Bertie. That’s Jerry and an unnamed mouse in The Year of the Mouse, a 1965 MGM short.

Both cartoons were directed by Chuck Jones and written by Mike Maltese, so the similarities are not coincidental.

The plot is the same in both. The mouse plants something on the snoozing cat, instigates violence, gets pulled up the chimney, and the cat is left to wonder why he is harming himself.

Mouse Wreckers is a far superior cartoon, with stronger gags, including the one where the mice nail everything on the floor to the ceiling. In The Year of the Mouse, Jerry sneaks a gun into Tom’s hands. The trigger has a string attached, which Jerry tugs before being pulled up the chimney. I like the dry-brush colouring after the gun goes off.



The main difference between the two cartoons is Tom figures out what’s happening, catches and imprisons the mice, thereby winning in the end.



Hey, didn’t this happen in another Jones/Maltese Warners cartoon, too?



Jerry’s mimicking of Tom’s expressions gets stale (Why are these mice picking on Tom anyways?). And almost all Mel Blanc and June Foray do in this cartoon is giggle, an incredible waste of their talents.

The animators on The Year of the Mouse are Ken Harris, Ben Washam, Dick Thompson and Don Towsley, with Maurice Noble and Phil De Guard on the Jones team. Gene Poddany provides an original score.

Enough of this. Let's bring on Hubie and Bertie.

Ala Bahma Smears

Several Chuck Jones cartoons in the first half of the 1940s featured smear animation. The Dover Boys (1942) may be the best-known example.

You can spot some in at least one scene of Case of the Missing Hare (also 1942), where Tedd Pierce’s story has magician Ala Bahma get his comeuppance from a revenging Bugs Bunny.

Here, Bahma is nailing a self-promotional poster over a hole in a tree, which is actually the entrance to Bugs’ home.



Bahma checks his handiwork.



The action is on single frames.

Ben Washam is apparently the animator in this scene, but I'll stand corrected. Ken Harris gets the rotating screen credit.

The cartoon is a forerunner of the great Bugs revenge short, Long-Haired Hare, where the rabbit crushes the performance of opera star Giovanni Jones.

Chuck Jones made some enjoyable cartoons released in 1942. Another likeable short is The Draft Horse, another one with a Tedd Pierce story and smear animation.