With insights from The Day The Earth Blew Up director Peter Browngardt, we salute the mad, mad, mad, mad worlds of Bugs, Daffy and co.
The medium of animation is often praised for its freedom – the limitlessness provided by the pen, pencil or paintbrush and their digital equivalents. That malleability is perhaps most conducive to comedy. It’s easy to forget this when a lot of contemporary work focuses on dialogue and improvisational riffing, but the ability to defy the laws of physics and timing at a whim makes this arguably an unbeatable medium for visual gags. Little exemplifies this trait on the same level as the Looney Tunes across their 96 year history.
Take how in “Fast and the Furryous” (1949), the Roadrunner (in his debut) blazes a trail across tarmac so fast that the entire road lifts up and bounces, the runner represented by a blurry streak of paint. Or look at one of the most famous examples: 1953’s “Duck Amuck” directed by Chuck Jones, where the very landscape becomes as flexible as the characters, and Daffy Duck is forced to adapt at a rapidly mounting pace. He begins as a musketeer who attacks off the page into blank space, suddenly forced into a different setting after demanding some backgrounds to be painted. The intentionally flattened scenery scrolls into a totally different environment defined by loose linework (and then nothing).
Piece by piece, components of animation become tools with which to torment Daffy: erasing his parachute and replacing it with an anvil; then the anvil with an artillery shell; gunshot sound effects replace guitar strings; Daffy gets the wrong colours; he even argues with himself from the next frame down in the film reel as Jones mocks up a projection error. The seven minute runtime is full of meta jokes about how the artists can conspire against their own characters and turn the very frame against them. It’s never quite out of cruelty – they’re resilient and they bounce back.
Beyond the many meta gags, it’s fun to see feeling represented so clearly through imagery; the rules of the world so often operate as the character observes them. In the aforementioned “Fast and the Furryous” there’s a gag of the Roadrunner running straight through a painted-on tunnel (a trap sprung by Wile E. Coyote) as if it were real – unless, of course, the artist decides it would be funny for the rule to no longer apply when it’s least convenient for the antagonist of the piece.
The Looney Tunes name has become synonymous with that specific brand of physical comedy and absurdist approach to bodies as a flexible conduit for jokes – think about how people use it as shorthand to describe films like Hundreds of Beavers, or the sequence in John Wick: Chapter 4 where Keanu Reeves tumbles down the steps by the Sacre Coeur.
That visual language – built by the likes of Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett and Friz Feleng, as well as their predecessor Tex Avery and all their collaborators – persists throughout animation. But the Looney Tunes still have that same life in them too, with work like the recent Looney Tunes feature The Day The Earth Blew Up. (Those in the United States probably have the characters on their mind from a recent showcase on Turner Classic Movies, who became the “new home” for the extensive Looney Tunes library after Warner Brothers removed these shorts from HBO Max.)
Peter Browngardt, the director of The Day The Earth Blew Up, reflects on how contemporary animators are still building on the work of those artists, even unconsciously. “I think it’s the graphic simplicity and elasticity, even when people don’t realize that’s what they’re borrowing,” Browngardt says. “Strong silhouettes, readable poses, and characters that can bend reality without breaking audience trust. You see it everywhere, from TV animation to internet shorts.” This much can be seen in the works of artists like Genndy Tartakovsky, an influential voice in Cartoon Network, and even abroad in the work of Japanese director Masaaki Yuasa, who has spoken about how Chuck Jones and Tex Avery inspired his fluid and often abstract approach to anime.
You can see where Genndy Tartakovsky gets his early design ideas from in shorts like “What’s Opera, Doc?” (1957), with the dramatic, expressionist shapes of its backgrounds and bright colour design clashes (purple tree trunks, bright green grass, yellow cliffs) and intentionally wonky proportions, that surface in service of creating intense parodic drama (“Well what did you expect in an opera? A happy ending?” Bugs quips at the end). It’s a lineage felt in work like Samurai Jack, which also pulls from the works of UPA Animation, a studio somewhat in parallel with what Jones was doing around the same time.
The definition of the Looney Tunes and their flexible, graphic style is of course not solely down to Jones, or even just Avery or Freleng. Browngardt’s mind goes to the equally influential Bob Clampett: “His work pushed characters into raw, almost surreal territory, and you can feel the anarchy in every frame,” he says. “There’s a wildness there that still feels dangerous.”
Watching as many of these shorts as one does for research, patterns of names appear, like the animators Lloyd Vaughan, Ben Washam and Ken Harris, all of whom appear on many of Jones’ most acclaimed shorts. Not to mention the work of designer/layout artist Maurice Noble and background painter Philip DeGuard, their production design flirting with abstraction and graphic stylisation, feels definitive of the Looney Tunes people hold in their memories. “I’d also really want to highlight Paul Julian,” Browngard notes. “His background work and color sense did so much to define the mood and atmosphere of the shorts, especially the later ones. Those abstract skies, graphic shapes, and bold palettes weren’t just decorative.. they amplified the comedy and emotional tone. His work helped prove that backgrounds in animation could be expressive and stylized rather than purely functional, which had a massive influence on how animated worlds are designed today.”
In emulating all of these artists Browngardt says that a sense of restraint can often be forgotten. “The old shorts knew exactly when not to move. A held pose could be funnier than a flurry of animation. That balance between bold design and precise timing is harder to emulate than the surface style, but it’s the secret sauce.” Such a handle on timing is even reflected in the rare moments where the Looney Tunes interact with the real world, such as in “You Ought to be in Pictures” – a peek at the drawing tables suddenly interrupted by a loud call for lunch, cutting to a large crowd of animators bolting at impossible speed.
Chuck Jones himself affirmed such a thought. In a written tribute for the Los Angeles Tribune to Tex Avery following his passing in 1980, Jones said “animation is the art of timing, a truth applicable to all motion pictures.” He also added that the masters of timing are typically comedians, citing Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, and of course Avery. Even before the look of the Looney Tunes had become codified (in whatever sense that applies), Avery’s shorts like “I Love To Singa” found whimsical humour in things as small as the bounce in the step of a little jazz-loving owl (Owl Jolson, he’s called!), not entirely removed from the rubber hose limbed Fleischer Toons.
These visual quirks changed over time (perhaps best described by Tony Zhou in his “Every Frame a Painting” series), and with the release of a new feature it’s hard not to reflect on how modern methods of making or even viewing animation have changed how we interact with the Looney Tunes. “The biggest shift is speed, both in production and consumption,” Browngardt says. “Animation today is often made faster and watched faster. Shorts are clipped, looped, memed, and algorithm-fed. That changes how rhythm is perceived.” Browngardt points out that classic Looney Tunes were built for a theatre audience, saying that the timing could be more indulgent, even musical, for a captive crowd. “Rabbit of Seville” (Jones, 1950) is a sterling example of the melodic approach, impossible acts (like a shotgun tied in a knot) timed to the sounds of the Spanish opera The Barber of Seville, only this version stars Bugs and Elmer.
Changes to a more rapid environment, Browngardt says, hasn’t dulled the effect of the Looney Tunes’ specific oeuvre of cartooning, and that the characters themselves handily survive this shift. “Their clarity and graphic strength make them incredibly adaptable to modern viewing habits. The danger isn’t technology, it’s forgetting that timing, contrast, and silence are as important as motion. Modern tools are powerful, but the interaction only works if the underlying principles of animation and comedy are still respected.”
So far removed from their origins, there’s an undeniable longevity to these characters. Browngardt attributes it to what he describes as “honesty through exaggeration.” He continues, “the characters are extreme, but the emotions are real.” Such a sentiment has been reflected by Jones himself, saying in an interview that “if you can’t tell what the character is thinking by the way they’re moving, they’re not animating”. Browngardt adds: “Greed, pride, fear, jealousy. Those things don’t age. The animation style supports that by being bold and direct rather than ornamental.”
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