Follow My Hop

Dry brush and multiples enliven a sequence in Hiawatha’s Rabbit Hunt, a June 1941 Warner Bros. cartoon directed by Friz Freleng.

Bugs Bunny tries to escape from Hiawatha’s arrow to the head by hopping sideways. Hiawatha keeps up with him. The annoyed Bugs blurts out “Well, try this one!” That’s where the dry brush and multiples come in as Bugs hopes to a nearby cliff. These are random drawings. Freleng, or his layout artist, has Bugs hopping to and from the foreground.



Hiawatha follows.



Yes, it’s that fine old cartoon gag. Gravity takes effect after a character next to a cliff realises he’s in mid-air. Joe Barbera and Charlie Shows were still employing it in 1958 on poor Yowp in the Yogi Bear cartoon Foxy Hound-Dog.



We get the sucker-transformation gag seen in All This and Rabbit Stew (Avery, 1941). Does anyone know when it was first used in a cartoon?



Down he goes.



Mike Maltese wrote the story for this, with Gil Turner handed the animation credit.

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.

Re-Used Gag Time

Warner Bros. cartoons occasionally re-used animation footage and, sometime, gags.

Here’s an example of the latter. First, from Friz Freleng’s The Wabbit Who Came to Supper (1942), written by Mike Maltese. Bugs is in Elmer Fudd’s house taking a bath or shower and singing “Angel in Disguise.” He’s off-key. He comes out to a convenient piano, gets in tune with the correct note, and goes back into the bathroom.



Ten years later, in Bob McKimson’s Upswept Hare, written by Tedd Pierce, Bugs is in Elmer Fudd’s house taking a bath and singing new lyrics to “There’s No Place Like Home.” He’s off-key. He comes out to a convenient piano, gets in tune with the correct note, and goes back into the bathroom.



Bob Givens laid out the McKimson cartoon. I prefer the layout of the earlier short because you can see Bugs' face, though the head position may have come from Pierce's storyboard.

McKimson and Pierce have a switch on an even earlier gag, Porky's Duck Hunt, from 1937; Pierce was on the writing staff then. Twice in the cartoon, Porky shoots a hole in the ceiling. The upstairs neighbour doesn't take kindly to it.

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In Upswept Hare, Elmer Fudd is conned by Bugs Bunny into shooting into the swimming pool. We see the resulting damage. This time, the downstairs neighbour gets his revenge, and with a little more than a punch.



There's also a shoot-the-apple-off-my-head scenario found in Avery's Daffy Duck and Egghead (1938, Bugs Hardaway credited with the story), and a take-a-shot-at-Bugs gag in A Wild Hare (1940, Rich Hogan credited with the story), though they're really not the same Bugs/apple gag as the one in Upswept Hare.

McKimson didn’t believe in Avery-style outlandish takes. In Upswept Hare, Elmer realises he’s floating in mid-air then goes into various poses before dropping (his face is brown from being shot by Bugs earlier in the cartoon). I like the individual frames here and wish they stood out more in the cartoon.



McKimson's animators are his brother Chuck, Phil De Lara, Herman Cohen and Rod "I calmed him down" Scribner.

Re-Using Harman-Ising

Reusing animation was not beneath Hugh Harman and Rudy Ising at Warner Bros. No, we don’t mean the same stomp-slide step Bosko and other characters did. Or the same three-quarters view, open-mouth-with-tongue expression found in all kinds of circle-headed characters. We mean whole scenes.

Here’s a good example from We're in the Money, released Aug. 26, 1933. It’s a pretty lacklustre cartoon. The same old toys-come-to-life-and-play-a-Warners-owned-song schtick. One scene has a toy with wheels for feet. He rolls along in a right-to-left pan, stops and twirls. It’s a cycle of eight drawings.

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Why, here it is again from A Great Big Bunch of You, released November 12, 1932.



The end title animation is reused, as the toy shouts “So long, folks!” From the Money ending.



And the Bunch ending.



Like a number of Harman and Ising, there are cycles in Money of cheering, applauding characters. Some cycles were used more than once.

The animation credits on A Great Big Bunch of You went to Ham Hamilton and Tom McKimson. On We're in the Money, the credits go to Friz Freleng and Larry Martin.

Money was the last Merrie Melodies cartoon from the Harman-Ising team. On May 4, 1933, The Film Daily reported Leon Schlesinger had ended his contract with them.

The title song was heard 55 times in a Warners cartoon, more than any other tune owned by the studio (The William Tell Overture was used 88 times and Yankee Doodle in 58 cartoons).