Three Cartoons: Duck Amuck (1953), One Froggy Evening (1955), What's Opera, Doc? (1957)

Remember when cartoons were made to entertain the whole family instead of selling stuff to kids? It was a time before the popularization of TVs in the 60s, when short animated movies were screened on theaters, mostly for free, being fun and entertaining as well as culturally rich and, every so often, even thought-provoking. As such, it is no wonder that, in 1994, when animation historian Jerry Beck published The 50 Greatest Cartoons: As Selected by 1,000 Animation Professionals, 90% of the picks for greatest cartoons of all time had been released prior to 1960. It is also not at all surprising that, out of those 50, nearly 20% were resulting of the amalgamation of the geniuses of Chuck Jones and Michael Maltese, with three of such cartoons, What's Opera, Doc? (1st place), Duck Amuck (2nd place) and One Froggy Evening (5th place) also being selected for preservation by the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress for being deemed “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant”. Having had the chance of growing up watching these animated shorts, as they made up the bulk of Brazilian television for kids in the 80s and early 90s, it makes me kind of sad for kids nowadays growing up on Ben 10, Teen Titans and the likes...

The first cartoon in the list, Duck Amuck (1953), does not have a story per se; in it, Jones and Maltese play with the conventions of animated movies, by having the animator and Daffy Duck, its sole character, interact directly with each other with hilarious consequences: backgrounds are changed mid-sentence, sound effects are misplaced, objects are redrawn while still in use, all to poor Daffy's dismay. Ultimately we learn the reason why: the animator is no other than Daffy's greatest rival, Bugs Bunny!

One of the many changes of scenery in Duck Amuck

The beauty of this cartoon lies on its unpredictability. At one point, Daffy is stranded on a desert island. After a very amusing close up, the frames of the cartoon start to melt around him, forcing him to keep them in place himself. Suddenly, we hear the ending fanfare, just to see an enraged Daffy pushing the "THE END" title card away, again complaining to the animator, who then puts the frame out of alignment just to spite him! The first time I watched Duck Amuck I must have been about 7 or 8 years old. I was watching it with my father, and I vividly remember the fun we had in trying to guess what would poor Daffy be put though next, all while struggling to contain our laughter so we could actually talk to each other!

I wish I could talk about the talented Mel Blanc, who voiced pretty much every major character at Warner Bros. Animation, including Daffy Duck, during the golden time of cartoon shorts. However, as I grew up laughing at a Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies cartoons dubbed in Portuguese, I simply cannot watch them (or any cartoon for that matter) in their original audio... Mihi ignoscas :-P

The man's reaction after having first seen
the frog sing, in One Froggy Evening

One Froggy Evening (1955) is a cheeky parable about the greed inherent to human nature. It starts with construction worker finding a frog (later to be named Michigan J. Frog) locked inside a cornerstone. The frog promptly starts to dance and sing to the astonished man, who then pictures himself as the amazing amphibian's rich producer. There is one catch, though: the frog will sing to the man, and to him alone, going limp otherwise. Because of that, after having lost everything he owned in trying in vain to promote the prodigious frog, the forlorn man ultimately traps it into the foundation of another building. The frog ends up being retrieved again a hundred years in the future by another man, who, also consumed by greed, starts anew the self-destruction cycle we have just watched.

In my opinion, there are two aspects of this cartoon responsible for making it stand above the others. First, the message behind it is quite universal: every human being, independently of cultural or economical background, should be able to empathize with the man (after all, to try and exploit the frog for one's own personal gain is, admittedly, everyone's first impulse); however, given the prospect of an easy profit, we tend to go too far, thus inevitably causing our own doom. Also, in a time when cartoons contained plenty of dialog, the only voice heard in One Froggy Evening is the frog's, and only when it sings; the state of mind of the characters is displayed in good old silent film fashion, that is, via facial expressions and gestures, expressively animated by Ken Harris, Abe Levitow, Richard Thompson and Ben Washam. It is impossible no to grin at the man's reactions when, for example, he is enthusiastically pitching his singing-and-dancing frog to a theater producer, just to have the frog refuse to sing: his (very palpable) embarrassment needs no dialog, never failing to make me laugh.

Bugs Bunny in drag as Brünnhilde in What's Opera, Doc?

Finally, What's Opera, Doc?  (1957) is a satire of several of Wagner's operas, in which Elmer Fudd, here a demigod, tries to kill Bugs Bunny. Bugs, to try and elude Elmer, disguises himself as Brünnhilde, Elmer's love interest. Sadly, his deception does not last long, with Elmer at long last managing to kill him. However, as Elmer sees Bugs Bunny lying on a rock, raindrops falling like tears off a flower over his motionless body, Elmer deeply regrets his actions. A weeping Elmer then takes Bugs into his arms and walks toward a cliff, with Bugs closing the cartoon with the line, "What did you expect in an opera? A happy ending?".

Whereas the animation stands out in One Froggy Evening, it is the layout design by Maurice Noble that steals the show in What's Opera, Doc?, as it achieves the perfect balance between caricaturing and paying homage to opera stage design. I specially like his rendition of the ionic columns in the ballet scene, that, for me at least, are exaggerated just enough to feel funny while at the same time not feeling out of place in a stage. 

It was cartoons like Jones' What's Opera, Doc?, Baton Bunny and Rabbit of Seville, as well as similar Tom&Jerry and Woody Woodpecker animated shorts, that first introduced me to classical music and opera. Thanks to them, I grew up enjoying the likes of Wagner, Rossini, Strauss, Tchaikovsky, Mozart and Chopin, and, maybe because of that, becoming able to fully appreciate their creations as an adult. Don't get me wrong: I enjoy SpongeBob SquarePants as much as any other person; I'll just make sure my kids watch the same cartoons I did as a child. I am confident they will thank me later.

Summarizing it:

Liked	Didn't like
It may be just nostalgia talking, but absolutely everything	Nothing at all

And I will leave you with the amazing singing and dancing Michigan J. Frog:

---

Great Movie review by Roger Ebert here.

If you liked these cartoons, then do watch everything you can by Jones / Maltese from the 1940s and 1950s.

---