Short Take: Duck Amuck

The high point of cartoon animation may be the seven-minute Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies shorts produced by Warner Bros. between the late 1940s and the early 1960s. The characters--Bugs Bunny, Road Runner, Daffy Duck, and many others--had strong, sharply etched comic personalities, and the films, directed by Charles M. "Chuck" Jones and others, feature some of the most imaginative slapstick set pieces ever. Choosing the best one is a challenging task, but one of the obvious candidates is Duck Amuck, directed by Jones and featuring the high-strung, quick-tempered Daffy Duck. The story, credited to Michael Maltese, has a simple, straightforward conflict: Daffy versus the animator. All Daffy wants is some semblance of normality, but the animator (silent and unseen until the end) keeps arbitrarily changing things--the sets, the costumes, Daffy's appearance, and even his voice--all to Daffy's ever-mounting rage. The film is a hilarious slapstick dramatization of the formal aspects of picture construction and animated filmmaking. Additionally, it's a testament to the conceptual strength of the Daffy character. No matter how much his appearance and voice are altered, his personality is always unmistakable. And though the subtext is never emphasized, the material also functions as a wry parody of absurdist-existential narratives featuring an individual in conflict with a capricious God. The film is an extraordinarily artful and witty effort. The music is by Carl Stalling. Mel Blanc designed and performed the voice characterizations. Bugs Bunny, the most popular Warner Bros. character, has a cameo.