Four Warner Brothers cartoons

The Heckling Hare is a fairly typical Bugs Bunny cartoon animated under the able direction of Tex Avery, though the film doesn't have much sign of the frenzied energy Avery would later become known for. It runs through the usual Bugs gags, setting his wily charm against the incompetent pursuit of whatever poor creature is trying to catch the wascally wabbit this time. The adversary here is one in a long line of sad-sack dogs, with droopy ears, a pointer's tale, and a malleable, expressive face. Warner cartoons frequently revolved around delayed reactions, and Bugs' appearances often had a special variation on this trope, in which a hunter of some kind chats amiably and unsuspectingly with his prey before abruptly realizing who he's talking to. This schtick is best known from the Bugs shorts with Elmer Fudd, but it cropped up frequently with the whole Looney Tunes stable, and especially in the many cases where Bugs is futilely pursued by a much dumber adversary.

As the Bugs versus dumb enemy shorts go, this is somewhere in the middle tier, an average cartoon that runs through the whole array of recycled gags familiar to anyone who's watched any number of Warner cartoons before. The dog chases Bugs down a hole, while Bugs nonchalantly climbs out of a nearby second hole to make his escape. Bugs assaults the dog with slapstick violence, plants a juicy kiss on his lips, and races off. During a swim, Bugs calmly waltzes through any number of water hazards, avoiding rocks and diving only into deep-enough water, while the dog continually gets battered and halted by the obstacles in his path. The film's only unique variation comes with a scene where Bugs begins mimicking the dog's facial expressions, frustrating his pursuer into trying out increasingly outlandish faces to try to trip up Bugs. Avery basically uses this as an animation showcase, an excuse to run his characters through a barrage of funny faces and rubbery poses, and it's a nicely executed tour de force with some great gags. The ending recycles another typical Warner device, as it blithely breaks the fourth wall to come up with an ending: both Bugs and the dog are hurtling towards the ground, having fallen from a great height, and then abruptly pull up short at the last moment, gently touching down on their feet. "Fooled ya," Bugs drawls, and the cartoon ends. It's a funny, unexpected moment, but it lacks the subversive punch of other fourth wall shattering moments in the Warner oeuvre — it seems more like the writers were stumped for a way to end this umpteenth cookie-cutter Bugs cartoon and simply used the device as a clever cop-out.

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Tortoise Beats Hare is yet another Bugs Bunny cartoon directed by Tex Avery, but it flips the usual storyline on its head by making Bugs the dupe instead of the sly wisecracker who always gets the upper hand. It also breaks the fourth wall right from the opening credits, using the device to propel the story into motion. Bugs strolls casually in front of the credits and begins reading them out, peering intently at the words and mangling the names of the animators and writers. The joke is that his indignation over the title is what kick-starts the action: furious over the idea that a mere tortoise could ever beat him, Bugs rips the credits to shreds, revealing the forest scene behind them, then tracks down Cecil Turtle and challenges him to a race. The film then gets a lot of mileage out of its reversal of the usual Bugs tale. Instead of Bugs deftly avoiding a pursuer and making a fool out his hapless adversary, he's taken in by the turtle's clever scheme, which involves using all of his turtle friends, strategically placed along the race's path, to make Bugs think that he's always losing. Every once in a while, Bugs passes one of the turtles, is puzzled how Cecil ever got ahead in the first place, and soon comes along yet another of the turtles, who he again thinks is his seemingly sluggish opponent. The turtle even steals Bugs' signature move, planting a big kiss on the rabbit whenever he encounters him.

As much of a kick as it is to see Bugs in a somewhat different role than usual, this is still a middle-of-the-road Warner short, with surprisingly standard animation considering what Avery could do when he really cut loose. During the race, the animation is fairly static, conveying motion and speed primarily by layering blurring effects over Bugs' body and moving the scenery behind him. His body and pose is fairly static from frame to frame, hovering in mid-air with his arms chugging a bit, the backgrounds and speed lines doing most of the work. The result is that, in motion, the race doesn't have the manic intensity that Avery's best cartoons convey.

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The Great Piggy Bank Robbery is Warner director Robert Clampett at his peak, in a showcase for Daffy Duck that is one of the best representations of this character. Clampett's animation is fluid and wacky, typically relying on wild transitions to give his characters a rubbery, unstable quality that's particularly well-suited to Daffy. In the opening scenes, where Daffy waits anxiously for the mailman to deliver his favorite comic, Dick Tracy, Clampett enlists a staggering array of transformations and exaggerated effects to convey Daffy's enthusiasm and impatience. The duck paces despondently until he sees the mailman coming, at which point he leaps and bounds across the screen like a pogo stick, contorts himself into wild postures, sticks out his tongue and stretches his beak into outrageous angles, his eyes wide and his head shaking in anticipation. He slinks around the back of the mailbox, improbably hiding his entire body behind its slender post while his eyes, bulging and physically directing themselves towards the approaching mailman, sidle out from behind the pole along with the tip of Daffy's beak. This is exciting, visceral animation, expressing the character entirely through the hyperactive contortions that the animation goes through to get across Daffy's outsized emotions.

Once he actually gets his hands on the comic, things get even wilder, as he cheers on the comic detective with the energy of an acrobat, throwing himself into cartwheels through the air, his beak arcing both upwards and downward until its angle nearly reaches 180 degrees. Finally, his celebration of Tracy's victory reaches such proportions that he actually succeeds in knocking himself out with an uppercut to the jaw, sending the duck into dreamland. Clampett occasionally employs motion lines and blurs to achieve his effects, smearing areas of black and yellow across the screen to suggest Daffy's motion, but more often his animation hinges on the prodigious stretching and morphing that he enacts on the character. In individual frames, Daffy's body is often twisted into odd shapes, so that in motion the overall flow has that distinctive rubbery style. The rest of the short doesn't have anything quite as dazzling as the opening minutes centered on Daffy, but the duck's fantasy of himself as the private eye Duck Twacy is amusing, especially when it opens with a shadowy outline of the duck dick which, just for a fleeting moment, takes on the famous profile of the funny page cop that Clampett is paying tribute to.

The short even borrows Tracy's famous rogue's gallery, with visual references to Flattop and other Tracy villains, with even the cartoon's original gangsters obviously modeled off the precedent set by cartoonist Chester Gould's grotesque creations. There's something curiously stiff about these appropriations, though, and they're awkwardly integrated with the riotous energy of Daffy. The Tracy villains barely move at all, and some of them are just completely static drawings, no more active than the backgrounds. They nicely capture the gothic atmosphere of the Gould comics, but as animation most of this segment just doesn't work at all, pitting as it does the absurdly frantic Daffy against what appears to be an army of cardboard cutouts. The short feels incomplete as a consequence, but it's still a miniature masterpiece if only for being the definitive presentation of Daffy Duck as a lunatic perpetual motion machine.

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Despite its title, Frank Tashlin's The Case of the Stuttering Pig is mainly notable for its villain, a dastardly lawyer who ingests a Jekyll and Hyde potion in order to wrest an inherited estate away from young Porky Pig, Petunia Pig, and their assortment of more generic relations. Porky's the titular star, but other than his trademark stutter he doesn't have much of a character, and his main job here is to act scared and creep around an atmospherically lit old house. Tashlin does an excellent job of establishing an eerie mood, inspired by classic horror fiction to such a great degree that when, in the opening scenes, a knock at the door on a stormy night inspires fear in the pigs inside, one almost expects Poe's raven to be on the other side. He makes great use of negative images in order to convey the shifting of light and shadow brought on by lightning strikes, alternating the areas of black, white, and grey in the exterior shots of a hilltop mansion. It's a simple but expressive effect.

The film moves along at a brisk pace after the atmospheric opening, focusing mainly on the lawyer as he transforms himself into a Hyde-inspired monster, with an elongated black nose, a bulky torso, and tremendous teeth that are constantly exposed in a fiendish grin. Tashlin gets the maximum impact from the transformation by stretching it out, as the lawyer drinks the potion once with no effect, straining to change and then mixing up a second, more potent glass that does the trick. The scene is filmed from straight on, so that as the transformation is completed the monster begins to take up more and more of the frame, leaning forward until the whole frame is filled with his horrifying face, his teeth bared as though he's about to devour the audience — a threat made explicit when the monster's rant about his pending piggy victims soon spills over to take in the movie theater audience as well, pointing out a guy in the third row who especially annoys him for some reason. The monster eventually figures out that breaking the fourth wall can go both ways, with a neat ending gag that saves the piggies and delivers the villain's comeuppance. But before this, Tashlin gets the most out of his monster, accentuating its strangely graceful walk, with its skinny legs supporting a tremendous body, its evil grin and black-rimmed eyes. This is classic horror performed with cartoon pigs, and oddly enough no less creepy for it.

The Girl Can't Help It

Considering its inauspicious origins, The Girl Can't Help It has absolutely no right to be as good or as wildly entertaining as it is. It's a blatant exploitation film on at least two fronts, an attempt to cash in on two separate but equally popular phenomena of the mid-1950s: the teen rock n' roll craze, and Marilyn Monroe. The latter is incarnated here by Jayne Mansfield, starring in her first film and outrageously made up as one of the best Marilyn impersonators of all time. She's got down the platinum blonde coifs, the wiggly walk, the breathy murmur of the voice, and even the deliriously silly repertoire of squeaks, giggles, and cries that so characterized Marilyn's ditsy public persona. And as if Mansfield's boffo impression wasn't enough, the film makes every effort to ape Billy Wilder's successful Monroe vehicle The Seven Year Itch, released the year before, bringing over Marilyn's costar Tom Ewell in a similar role as the ordinary schlub bowled over by the otherworldly beauty. Even Mansfield's apartment in the film, with its garishly decorated central staircase, seems inspired by the decor and layout of Ewell's apartment from Itch, where his character was casually seduced by Monroe.

In the hands of almost any other Hollywood director of the time, this situation would add up to little more than a quickie cash-grab, a plain-faced rip-off that attempted to create a new star from the exact same mold as the era's most famous star of all. With this plainly unoriginal material, director Frank Tashlin managed to create a film that not only completely outdid its obvious inspiration — even the best moments of The Seven Year Itch seem flaccid and snail-paced in contrast to this colorful, vibrant extravaganza — but which stands up on its own as a marvel of design, pacing, and visual comedy. Much has been made of Tashlin's pedigree in cartoons, pumping out animation for Warner Brothers' Looney Tunes line for years before making the transition into comedic screenwriting and directing. Indeed, a great deal of Tashlin's sense of humor and eye for visual absurdity is intimately connected to his cartoon work. This should be apparent right from the film's opening, in which Tom Ewell breaks the fourth wall by introducing himself as the actor who will be playing the agent Tom Miller in the upcoming movie. Ewell starts his introduction in a tiny gray square, growing annoyed as he realizes that the film really should be in Cinemascope color: he pushes out the sides of the screen to their correct ratio, then looks angrily upwards offscreen and makes pointed remarks until the color belatedly kicks in. This kind of metafictional goofing around was a common convention of the Looney Tunes cartoons, which often referred implicitly or explicitly to the offscreen animator, with characters looking upward in this way to get the attention of the artists — a device most famously used in Chuck Jones' Duck Amuck a few years earlier. Even the background of this opening, with its abstract landscape and musical instruments floating in space, is a nod to the surrealist imagery of the Warner Brothers cartoons.

More broadly, Tashlin gets a lot of ground out of taking a very cartoonish approach to the film's humor. He gets most of his mileage out of Mansfield early on, making every kind of gag he can think of about her gaga appearance and the effect she has on men, as though he's in a rush to get this obligatory sexual material out of the way so he can move on. So in pretty short order, Tashlin has Mansfield causing a delivery man's hands to melt through a giant block of ice, an old pervert's glasses to crack, and a milkman's bottle to bubble over with, um, white foamy milk (Freudians, ho!). Even more hilarious is a montage of nightclub scenes in which Ewell, as a luckless agent who's been hired to turn Mansfield into a star by her gangster boyfriend (Edmond O'Brien), brings the girl around to club after club to attract attention. Mansfield, of course, never fails to get attention, and her hip-swaying sashay does all the work, bopping and jiving around the room even for as simple a thing as walking to the ladies' room. Dolled up in a form-fitting red dress that's straight out of Tex Avery's Red Hot Riding Hood, Mansfield's curves barely even look human; her body is as hilariously distorted as a Looney Tunes dame. And Tashlin plays up the wolfish reactions of the men around her. When one nightclub owner catches sight of her, it looks like his eyes are about to pop out of his head and steam pour from his ears, so wild is his expression.

This unhinged, cartoony expressionism extends throughout the film, and especially to O'Brien's character. Ewell is a grade-A ham too, and Tashlin uses him well by playing up both his most slack-jawed, anxious moments and his plodding everyman stoicism, but O'Brien is the film's only personality who can compete with Mansfield herself. He's like a sinister variation on Porky Pig, idiotic but perfectly capable of casual brutality. When he's leading Ewell on a tour of his Long Island mansion, pointing out the places where his gangland friends met their ends, he's absolutely hilarious, and he's even funnier singing his maudlin jailhouse rock tunes, which take the idea of "rock" a bit too seriously, dealing as they do with chopping at rockpiles. He's even privileged with the film's very last moment, a prototypical Porky closing when he steps through the enclosing frame of the final shot, walking forward through the black, now-empty space to directly address the audience, entreating them to listen to him sing. It's a very self-serving version of "t-t-t-that's all folks!"

If Tashlin quickly dispenses with the bulk of the film's sexual sight gags featuring Mansfield, getting them out of the way in the first half hour, he never quite grows tired of the film's other central conceit, which was its attempt to jump on the rock n' roll bandwagon that was then viewed primarily as a teenage fad. Though this idea was every bit as much of a cash-grab as Mansfield's creation of a would-be Marilyn II, the rock n' roll is incorporated organically into the film, with original rock artists doing live performances in rehearsal studios and nightclubs. The film boasts quite an impressive roster, too, with A-list acts like Fats Domino, Little Richard, Gene Vincent, and the Platters bolstered by lesser-known but then-popular artists like the Treniers, the awkward Elvis rip-off Eddie Cochran (who's held up as an example of how you don't need talent to be popular — ouch!), Eddie Fontaine, and many others. Many of these artists give stunning performances of their hits, and the film remains, among other things, a time capsule for mid-50s rock at its best. Little Richard and the now-forgotten Treniers in particular are positively electric, generating enough heat and energy with their raucous songs to drive the entire film. This music, by itself, is reason enough to watch the film, but it also helps that the director doesn't simply allow the songs to exist as documentary snippets separate from the film as a whole, but incorporates them fully into the milieu, creating a carefully drawn sense of time and place.

Though the film's producers doubtless viewed rock as a passing craze, Tashlin seems to have much more respect for the artists involved. He really gets this stuff, and he enhances the natural power of these performances by not only allowing them to run almost interrupted for their entire lengths, but by filming them dynamically and with visual panache. A soulful performance by the jazz singer Abbey Lincoln becomes an exercise in visual abstraction and color fields for Tashlin, as the curvaceous singer poses in a bright red dress, her hourglass shape forming a red cutout against the deep blue of the plush curtains behind her. When the number ends, Tashlin pans slowly downward, onto the black and reflective stage, where Lincoln's red shape is transformed into an abstracted series of circles, like the early stages of a cartoonist's character design, the body broken down into geometric figures and color areas. Elsewhere, he intercuts an idiosyncratic Fats Domino performance with periodic shots of the dancing feet of the teenage crowd, the bare feet and swishing dresses of the girls creating a riot of movement and bright color. This echoes the opening credits, which take place over a wild jitterbugging party that seems to have provided the visual inspiration for the opening sequence of David Lynch's Mulholland Drive. And why not, since Tashlin has crafted perhaps the definitive cinematic representation of 50s rock culture. This carefully honed aesthetic and attention to color carries over into each of the performance numbers, which are perfectly designed, with seemingly endless attention lavished on the musicians' outfits and the brightly colored sets they're placed in. Even without Mansfield, the film would be a delightful tribute to 50s rock at its best, and Tashlin's lovingly staged musical numbers capture the era's energy and vitality like no other film.

The Girl Can't Help It is a rare treat that is so much more than the sum of its parts, even if on paper its parts might seem to clash quite a bit. It's a gangster movie parody, a thrilling musical celebration, a sexual farce, a love story. It doesn't all always work, and there are a handful of slack moments and missteps here and there — like a maudlin fantasy guest-starring Julie London, singing a song of heartbreak to Ewell from his memory — but for the most part this is a crackling comedy with some equally potent music at its core.

12/14: Six Looney Tunes cartoons

Bob Clampett's Draftee Daffy starts off as just another World War II patriotic cartoon, with Daffy reading the newspaper and cheerfully recounting the latest American military victories, launching into an elaborate song and dance routine extolling the virtues of the US. Watching it today, this segment can probably only elicit a groan, though Daffy gets some good lines in, because even the best-made propaganda is ultimately a little boring. But then Daffy gets a call from the draft board, and a man comes to deliver his draft notice, and there ensues a wild and frenetic chase as Daffy does anything possible (and quite a few impossible things too) to escape service. Somewhere in there, inevitably, a sneaky little thought occurs: Daffy's a hypocrite! In its unobtrusive way, this short mocks the hypocrisy and faux-patriotism of those who are all for war just as long as it's an abstract concept happening somewhere far away, and in that sense it remains startlingly relevant now.

More importantly, once the action gets moving, it's a dazzlingly fun cartoon, and a perfect showcase for Clampett's tremendous animation skills. The chase scene was a dependable standby of all the Warner animators, and Clampett hits all the usual points here, as always riffing on some basic plotlines and gags. The delayed reaction, the chaser who follows his prey through even the most elaborate traps and escape routes, the bomb that gets casually handed back to the one who lit it: these constantly recycled plot elements serve as the skeletal basis for Clampett's rubbery, fluid motion animation, in which Daffy stretches and contorts himself into pretzels with every movement. Daffy, with his wackiness and exaggerated character, is a perfect fit for Clampett's rubberized sense of movement, and a chase film is exactly the right form for this union of the director with his perfect character.

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I Haven't Got a Hat, directed by WB mainstay Isadore "Fritz" Freleng, is mainly notable for being the first cartoon to feature Porky Pig, who would shortly after become the studio's major star (following on after more generic earlier characters like Bosko and Buddy). At this early point, though, Porky doesn't look much like he would later on, and he doesn't have much to do either, although his characteristic stutter was already in place. The film is basically a showcase for the introduction of a whole cast of new characters, of whom only Porky would ultimately stick around for very long. Among this crew was also the mischievous cat Beans, the stuck-up Oliver Owl, a pair of playful dogs named Ham and Ex, and a shy girl kitten. All these characters are in a school, supervised by a cow schoolmarm, and putting on a series of performances for the benefit of their classmates. It's a setup that gives each character the opportunity to step up and introduce themselves, ostensibly to the class, but actually to cartoon audiences of the time, by giving a performance. The Looney Tunes cartoons of the time didn't have much in the way of memorable recurring characters, and these new creations each get their moment in the spotlight here for a try at enduring fame.

The problem is that the short is very light on gags. Ironically, though Porky would be the only one of these characters to last beyond a few cartoons, his part here is by far the weakest. Porky's introduction is just one lengthy joke about his stuttering, which goes on for so long that eventually the class chases him offstage by summoning a pack of dogs to attack him — presumably the audience would've been ready to kick him off much earlier. Later, the WB cartoonists would realize that Porky's stutter, though it defines his personality and to some extent endears him to audiences, is best when it's not the focus of the jokes but a simple accepted fact of the character's being. In later Porky shorts, his stuttering could be funny — especially when it resulted in fun streams of fractured wordplay — but it was rarely placed at center stage in the narrative the way it is here. Little Kitty fares just a little better, shyly reciting "Mary Had a Little Lamb" with exasperated prompting from her teacher on the sidelines — still basically a one-gag show, but at least it's a mildly funnier gag. Finally, there's some interplay between the piano-playing owl and Beans, who's set up here as a trickster character much like Bugs would later become. This is the short's best sequence, a small taste of the madcap insanity that would soon mostly push aside the song-and-dance routines and dominate the Warner cartoons for the next 30 years. Otherwise, this is a relatively undistinguished early effort from the studio, more notable as a historical landmark than a good cartoon in its own right.

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Porky Pig's Feat is an absolute work of genius, there's simply no denying it. A pure comic masterpiece, it's packed with so many jokes and wonderful small moments that it's almost impossible to grasp everything that's going on without watching it several times. Porky and Daffy's expensive stay at a plush hotel that they can't pay for triggers a lunatic barrage of rapid-fire gags as the duo attempts to flee from the nigh-unstoppable hotel manager. There's a joke every second, and director Frank Tashlin has the visual panache to milk every one of these jokes for all they're worth. In one scene, Porky and Daffy send the manager tumbling down a massive spiral staircase, and his yells of pain come echoing up to them (at one point, the voice actor hilariously mixes in a recitation of the vowels with the yelps). When the pair looks over the edge, Tashlin shows each of their faces in turn, with a reflection of the falling hotel manager visible in their eyes, and immediately after he inserts another visual joke, a shot of the staircase as a spiral heading down seemingly to infinity — but when Daffy insults him, the manager is back at the top of the stairs like a rocket. Tashlin also plays with mirroring in another scene, when a defiant Daffy is glimpsed sticking out his tongue in a reflection from the manager's monocle.

The cartoon is crammed with these kinds of surprising moments, displaying a keen attention to detail and a way of thinking about scenes, even in cartoons, in terms of the camera's eye. When the manager, insulted by Daffy, prepares to slap the duck, Tashlin pans away to Porky, who's looking on in fascinated fear, and only when the offscreen slap is over, panning back to show Daffy with a white hand print across his face. This kind of moment stands out because of its innovative use of self-consciously "cinematic" techniques in cartoons, but Tashlin's images could be equally striking in terms of pure visual humor. When Daffy accosts the manager, he squashes their faces together and burrows in until the man's face is twisted in on itself, whereupon Daffy turns to the camera and points, telling everyone to look at the new Dick Tracy character, Pruneface (who, indeed, had been introduced in Chester Gould's strip the year before). Towards the end of the film, in an even more metatextual moment, Porky and Daffy discuss Bugs Bunny, saying that they once saw him make a very daring and tricky escape in "a Leon Schlesinger cartoon."

This short is packed with these kinds of multi-layered gags, enhanced by the fluid visuals of Tashlin's expressive animation style. His Daffy, in particular, is brilliantly realized and acted here, as in the opening scene where he loses a dice game and slinks away, every inch of his body telegraphing his depression. His stooped shoulders, dragging feet, and head drooped practically to the ground give his walk exactly the feel it should have, and he's equally expressive when jolted into action for the rest of the cartoon. This is a real joy of a film — I've watched it over and over again tonight, probably five times already, and it's a riot every time.

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Plane Daffy is another WW2 short, and director Frank Tashlin makes it one the classics of the era, opening it with a tribute to the Hollywood flying pictures, especially Howard Hawks' Only Angels Have Wings. The opening shot is a fog-shrouded view of the flyers' airbase that evokes Hawks' lonely aviation outpost in the South American jungle, although in this case it's a birdhouse, and the flyers are all pigeons. And, of course, one duck too. That would be Daffy, who takes on a dangerous mission when all the other "pilots" are seduced and waylaid by the Nazi spy Hatta Mari, who's so dangerously sexy that even a poster of her, shown to the troops, sways and sashays seductively so that her hips shake from side to side. Daffy can resist, he says, because he's "a woman-hater, she won't get to first base, this Hatta Mari tomater!" Of course, it doesn't work out that way, and the film gives way to one of those manic and logic-defying chase sequences that so define Looney Tunes cartoons.

Tashlin structures the film in an interesting way, though, so that the crazed release of this chase serves as a counterpoint to the comparatively staid and serious first half of the film. For the first few minutes, the cartoon is set up like a conventional flying ace film (excepting the replacement of the pilots with pigeons, of course), with the birds worrying about their missing friend and chain-smoking until mounds of cigarette butts pile up in the headquarters. A narrator provides a grim voiceover, the seriousness of his narration only undercut by the fact that he's speaking in rhyme, combining a fairy tale sensibility with the macho attitude of the flying picture genre. Once Daffy enters the scene, the mood is shattered, and the foggy ambiance of the birdhouse headquarters gives way to a wacky and surrealist chase as Hatta Mari attempts to extract military secrets from the unwilling Daffy. The chase itself is a masterpiece of warping space: the space seems to entirely change from one shot to the next, with Daffy's motion keying the transition from one space to the next. He opens a door, finds Matta Hari right behind it, darts towards the bottom of the frame and suddenly there's a staircase right there for him to leap down (and of course Matta Hari will somehow be waiting at the bottom as soon as he gets there). And there's an immortal line when the sexy spy chases Daffy into a refrigerator, and he pops his head back out to exclaim, "What do you know? The little light stays on!" This kind of absurdist digression isn't just a fun aside, but the very essence of the cartoon's method, although the equally absurd treatment of spatial logistics in the chase is perhaps a more subtle touch. In fact, the film's whole second half might be thought of as an absurdist detour from the genre pastiche of the beginning, going from the moody Only Angels Have Wings to the wackiness of a screwball comedy (hey, much like Hawks himself). Wackiness is built into the film's DNA, its very structure, which is what makes it such a classic of insanity.

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I Got Plenty of Mutton is a Frank Tashlin-directed one-shot, featuring a starving Depression-era wolf who's so desperate for food that he attempts to trick a deadly ram who's guarding a flock of sheep. This wolf, like so many of the supposedly predatory animals in these cartoons, is a dumb and hapless creature, not unlike the later Wile E. Coyote, who was based on this kind of one-shot wolf character. Like Wile, this wolf is a sad and sympathetic character, driven by sheer desperation and starvation, an outgrowth of the Depression and wartime rationing and shortages. He's introduced with a classic Depression-era gag, the "meal" that consists of just a single pea, eaten with a knife and fork in small pieces to prolong the pleasure of eating it.

His attempts to outwit the sheep's guardian ram are similarly pathetic, and he quickly turns to that tried-and-true Warner device, dressing in drag. It's interesting how often various characters resort to this trick in these cartoons, and not only Bugs Bunny. On one level, it's an indication of a fatal weakness in the male personality: again and again in these cartoons, otherwise stolid and powerful male characters are undone by the temptations of women (or other men disguised as women). The ram who's so fearsome when the wolf first shows up is transformed into a lecherous Romeo, steadfastly pursuing his new love. It's a typical irony, though, that his romantic pursuit is so single-minded that the wolf is just as thoroughly kept away from the sheep, unable to escape the advances of the ram, who woos his love with a whispery French accent, punctuated by a loud "BAHHHH!" The ending adds a new and bizarre twist to this loving chase: when the frustrated wolf finally reveals himself, the ram simply shrugs and takes up the chase anew. The ram, apparently, has decided that he just wants some love, and it doesn't matter what species or sex the object of his affection might be.

In the handful of Tashlin cartoons I've watched so far, it seems typical that the narrative structure ranges far and wide and is structured around these kinds of surprising pivot points, which periodically swing the story into totally unexpected places. The sad and hungry wolf of the cartoon's first few minutes is quickly forgotten after his first encounter with the ram, and the story then becomes a question of how he'll manage to outwit his adversary. Then the story shifts gears again, becoming a chase between an amorous character and the unwitting object of his desire; the unexpected ending provides yet another narrative shift, towards a new story that couldn't have been guessed from anything that preceded it. And all this in a cartoon that lasts less than 8 minutes. Tashlin never provides a solid narrative ground, allowing the characters and their interactions to drive the storytelling. The result is a kind of mini-epic that feels a lot longer than it is, even as its pace remains perfectly calibrated. It simply packs in so much detail and so many different ideas into its compact running time, and it's endlessly fun to take this kind of roller-coaster ride with a master director like Tashlin.

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The Stupid Cupid, in comparison to the aforementioned cartoons, is a mild-mannered effort from Frank Tashlin, though it's still charming and fun in its own quieter way. The short stars Elmer Fudd as a wayward Cupid, who's spurned by Daffy because the duck is already (unhappily) married with a line of kids so long that the pictures of them fill up a photo album with an extra accordion fold tailing off with still more Daffy Juniors. Once again, we're back to women as the undoing of men in a Looney Tunes cartoon, and Daffy, having learned his lesson the first time, wants no more arrows. But Cupid Fudd takes this rejection to heart, and skewers the unlucky duck with a mega-arrow that makes him fall in love, inappropriately but hilariously, with a chicken. He consequently falls afoul (you thought I was going to make a fowl joke, didn't you?) of a rooster, and the requisite chase ensues, punctuated with alternating violence and romance.

This cartoon lacks some of the flair of other Tash-helmed 'toons, which means that its jokes, while funny as ever, lack some of the extra pop of the camera-play in Porky Pig's Feat or the radical spatial restructuring of Plane Daffy. It's indicative of the extraordinarily high level of quality in the Warner shorts, and the amount of structural and formal play in their construction, that a hilarious and enjoyable cartoon like this can fall into the mid-level of their output simply for lacking those additional levels of meaning and sophistication. Still, the scene towards the end, where Daffy worms his way into the middle of a kiss between the rooster and the hen, has to be one of the most uproarious ménage a trios scenes in cartoon history. Saying this is only an average Warner cartoon isn't too much of an insult; saying it's an only an average Tashlin cartoon is even less of one.