From the WSJ Opinion Archives
LEISURE & ARTS
That's Not All, Folks!
"Of course you know this means war." Who said it?
"What an ultramaroon." "You're . . . dethpicable." "Hmm. Pronoun trouble." "Of course you know this means war."
Ring any bells? No? Well, try this one on for size: "Ehh, what's up, doc?"
If that phrase doesn't make you feel like gnawing a carrot, you're probably not a likely buyer of "Looney Tunes Golden Collection," a four-DVD set containing 56 of the finest Warner Bros. cartoons from the golden age of big-studio animation. Otherwise, get ready to laugh yourself silly.
The Warner animated shorts of the '40s and '50s have long been a gaping hole in the fast-growing DVD catalog. No more. Now you can revel in crisp, clear prints of such classic cartoons as "Rabbit of Seville" and "Duck Dodgers in the 24 1/2 Century," plus a full set of the bells and whistles without which no self-respecting DVD set is complete. Audio commentaries, music-only tracks, documentaries and featurettes--all are here in abundance. Especially welcome are the thoughtful commentaries of Michael Barrier, whose "Hollywood Cartoons" is the best book ever written about golden-age animation.
But these elaborate accoutrements are strictly secondary to the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies themselves, which are even better than you remember. Has there ever been a funnier cartoon than Friz Freleng's "High Diving Hare," in which the dapper, unflappable Bugs Bunny comes up with a dozen different ways to keep Yosemite Sam from pushing him off a diving board? Or a smarter one than Chuck Jones's "Duck Amuck," in which the chronically flappable Daffy Duck has a nervous breakdown when an unseen animator (who turns out to have long ears and a white tail) malevolently upsets his ink-and-paint world?
Not for nothing did Hugh Kenner, a literary critic with impeccable highbrow credentials, write "Chuck Jones: A Flurry of Drawings," an elegant little monograph about the man who unleashed Bugs on Daffy. The most gifted of Warner's fabled stable of cartoon directors, Jones churned out dozens of six-minute masterpieces shot on the tightest of budgets and fully as witty as the screwiest of live-action screwball comedies, not least because his interpretations of the Warner Bros. characters were deeply rooted in a sophisticated understanding of human nature. Asked to explain Wile E. Coyote's unappeasable yearning to eat the uncatchable Road Runner, Jones cited George Santayana: "Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim." That's not pretentious--it's true.
The Warner cartoons were anything but one-man shows, so "Looney Tunes Golden Collection" also includes informative featurettes about such indispensable collaborators as Mel Blanc, who supplied most of the major characters' voices (including Bugs, Daffy, Porky Pig, Sylvester and Tweety), and Carl Stalling, whose collage-like musical scores gave the on-screen action no small part of its comic punch. This set is more than just a pleasure to watch: It's Animation 101.
Are these the 56 best Warner Bros. cartoons? Not hardly. No box set containing only one Road Runner short (the first, "Fast and Furry-ous") can claim to be a greatest-hits collection. Nor will you find such Jones staples as "One Froggy Evening" (the unexpectedly dark fable of a singing frog and its greedy owner) or "What's Opera, Doc?" (in which Bugs plays Brünnhilde). Presumably they've been held in reserve for Volume Two, which can't be released soon enough to suit me, though I'm not complaining--much.
In addition to being pulverizingly funny, "Looney Tunes Golden Collection" offers a last look at an almost-lost art. Hand-drawn animation is quickly giving way to the newfangled digital variety popularized by Pixar Studios in such feature films as "Finding Nemo" (and also seen in the recently released "Looney Tunes: Back in Action," which combines the Warner characters with live actors). Digital cartoonery affords its practitioners a higher degree of technical virtuosity, while simultaneously facilitating the sort of hyperrealistic animation that Jones, Freleng and their colleagues shunned. Instead of being inhibited by the limitations of their primitive craft, the Warner directors were inspired by those limitations to new heights of fantasy. Sure, nobody ever mistook Bugs for a real live rabbit, but neither did anyone doubt for a moment that he was at least as "real" as, say, Jimmy Cagney or Groucho Marx.
The future of animation belongs to the wizards of Pixar, and the day will surely come when they triumph over their computer-enhanced technique instead of being swamped by it. But when the last ink bottle is empty and the last paint brush has been put away for good, Bugs and Daffy will still be with us, one sly, the other spluttering, just as Wile E. Coyote will never stop chasing the Road Runner. They are as obsolete as a silent movie by Buster Keaton--and as imperishable.
Mr. Teachout is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal Journal and the author of "The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken," just out in paperback from Perennial. He blogs about the arts at www.terryteachout.com.
