Introduction
This was a term paper I wrote in Graduate School back in 2012, in a class that dealt with the role of the antihero in fiction. As I’ve talked about on the blog before, getting an MFA in Creative Writing may have made me a better writer, but at the expense of probably lifelong debt. At least the program was fun while it lasted. When they weren’t being snobby toward genre fiction, anyway. Our term paper due at the end of the semester was to be about the development of the antihero in a fiction medium of our choosing. I decided to focus on the Golden Age of Animation, which no one else in the class was doing. I’ve always been a big fan of cartoons, so it was something I already knew a lot about. This term paper has been sitting on my hard drive for going on nine years now, so I figured I ought to make it public. I don’t think I would ever get it officially published anyway, at least until I self-publish my memoirs one day. I want people to read it, so here it is. This isn’t the first essay or term paper from Grad School that I’ve made public on my blog, but it has been a while. This was my favorite term paper to write in Grad School. A lot more fun to write than my thesis was.
Anyway, enjoy!
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Suren Oganessian
Spring 2012
The Animated
Antihero:
The Development of Tricksters during the Golden Age of
Animation
I: Introduction
Animation,
as a whole, has been given the short end of the stick. Many in the academic
world fail to respect it as a storytelling medium, denying that it is in the
same league as film or literature. Animation is a very flexible medium
which encompasses several genres, comprising feature length films, television
shows, and today even online flash cartoons. There has fortunately been a
change in people’s attitudes toward animation in recent decades, however.
Despite stereotypes deeply rooted in the television era of the 1960’s that cartoons are strictly for children, today we see cartoons that appeal to
all different ages and demographics. It’s easy to forget that this versatility
in its appeal to different age groups was never anything new; cartoons meant
for general audiences is a concept that lay dormant for the better part of
thirty years, after the fall of the Hollywood studio system in the 1950’s to
1960’s rendered theatrical short subjects, animated or otherwise, obsolete
after nearly a half century of being a staple of the movie-going experience.
Animation is
a technique nearly as old as film itself, and it has its roots in the same
place; the movie theater. Certainly, children of the time enjoyed these
animated shorts, and some, particularly the ones made by Disney, were aimed at
kids, but they still had to be shown between newsreels, movie trailers and
feature length films. They needed to be something a paying adult would sit
through and enjoy too. In this way, the cartoons of the pre-television era were
viewed similarly to how newspaper comics are today. For a time, a cartoon could
get away with having a protagonist not be all that interesting
personality-wise, because the audience was still in awe of seeing a drawing
move, then seeing sound added, and finally color. But once the initial awe wore
off, it was only natural that the audience began to demand more interesting
characters, and more entertaining plots. Cartoons became more heavily
emphasized on gags and comedy, not unlike live action short subjects. And it
was in these fast-paced, slapstick animated shorts that the animated antihero
gradually emerged and thrived. In this paper, I will be examining how the
antihero developed in animated theatrical shorts over the 1930’s through the 1950’s,
as a marketing tool fueled by the changing preferences of the audience, and as a reflection of the society that produced them.
An antihero
can be described as “a protagonist of a drama or narrative who is characterized
by a lack of traditional heroic qualities, such as idealism or courage”
(thefreedictionary.com). In terms of classic animation, this might mean instead
of a cute little furry animal protagonist narrowly escaping the clutches of a
big mean hunter, the animated antihero turns the dopey hunter into their
plaything, humiliating him at every turn, punishing him harshly for daring to
attempt to harm the animals of the forest. The typical animated antihero almost
always has the deck stacked in their favor, with their infinite resourcefulness
and cunning wit. On the other hand, the animated antihero is also often
vengeful, selfish, violent, and at times downright cruel. To keep the
audience’s sympathy, it helped if the protagonist at least seemed like an
underdog at first; this can be as simple as casting them as a species generally
looked at as an underdog, such as a mouse, rabbit, or other hunted creature.
The protagonist is generally much smaller and weaker-looking than the
antagonist, though this proves to make little difference in the outcome of
their quarrel. But of course, the antihero, as well as the villain, appeared in
many different forms in these seven-minute struggles between the hunter and the
hunted.
II: The Early Development of the Animated Antihero
One very
generalized way of looking at the history of American animation since the
advent of sound in 1928 would be as a constant struggle between Disney, the
industry leader and innovator, and a handful of smaller animation studios
trying their best to dethrone Disney, by whichever method audiences will
respond to. It’s been this way since Mickey Mouse’s blockbuster short
“Steamboat Willie“ debuted and took audiences by storm with its use of sound,
all the way to today, where we have DreamWorks and other smaller companies sparring
with Disney/Pixar. Sometimes, normally when the Disney company is falling on
hard financial times, or is having trouble staying relevant to the current
tastes and attitudes of the movie-going audience, the other studios have some
luck, usually by doing exactly what Disney isn’t doing. And since Disney
normally uses traditional, righteous heroes as their protagonists, another
studio responds by making an unconventional, cocky or witty antihero as their
protagonist.
In the late
1920’s through the 1930’s, Disney’s Mickey Mouse and Silly Symphonies series
were smash hits. Having been the first to take advantage of what adding sound
could do for a cartoon instantly put Mickey Mouse on the map, while the stars
of animation’s silent age, such as Felix the Cat, fell out of popularity and
drifted into obscurity. Mickey had personality. He could talk, whistle, even
sing. This was quite the novelty at the time, and something no cartoon
character had been able to do before.
“He’s a pretty nice
fellow who never does anybody any harm, who gets into scrapes through no fault
of his own, but always manages to come up grinning,” Walt Disney himself said,
when asked how to explain why Mickey’s popularity had reached such huge
proportions in the 1930‘s, “Mickey is so simple and uncomplicated, so easy to
understand that you can’t help liking him.” (Bain and Harris, 20)
As a heroic
protagonist, Mickey Mouse was someone who
would be able to bring his optimistic cheer to audiences suffering through the
Great Depression. He had a slight mischievous streak in the earliest shorts,
where he can be seen doing things like disobeying the captain of the steamboat
he’s working on in favor of impressing Minnie with his musical skills, abusing
animals for the purpose of making music from their yelps of pain, and sneaking
a peek at Minnie’s leg as she pulls her stocking down to get a coin she had
stashed away. But these personality traits had to be watered down over time as
he became more popular with children, and he never really strayed far enough
from the righteous path to be called an antihero. Pretty soon, Walt Disney
would receive an avalanche of letters from angry parents every time Mickey so
much as kicked someone in the pants. By the late 30’s, he’d become a victim of
his own success as his personality inevitably began to stagnate. (24)
Disney’s
Silly Symphonies series similarly utilized sound in a way audiences hadn’t ever
seen before. These shorts were usually musical one-shots, sometimes retellings
of fairy tales and fables. Rather than featuring recurring characters with
comedic plots, they were generally showcases in quality animation, synced with
music. From the beginning, Walt Disney’s studio was known for producing
kid-friendly, optimistic, heartwarming fare. But their output was also visually
stunning and beautifully animated, being the first cartoon series to be
produced in Technicolor. Audiences of the Great Depression responded to the
simple, cutesy cartoons of Walt Disney’s studio; after all they needed some
cheering up. Throughout the 1930s, Disney was all but guaranteed to win the
Oscar nomination for Best Animated Short Subject. (56)
At first,
the standard tactic of most of the other animation studios at the time was to
mimic Disney. Every studio had its own Mickey Mouse knock-off as the heroic
star of their cartoons; Warner Bros. had Bosko (a now politically-incorrect
blackface caricature) and later Porky Pig, Universal Studios had Oswald the
Rabbit (who they quite literally stole from Disney early in his career), MGM
had Flip the Frog, and so on. Each studio had its own blatant imitation of the
Silly Symphonies series as well; MGM had Happy Harmonies, Warner Bros. had
Merrie Melodies and Looney Tunes (though both would turn into something quite
unique indeed by the late 30s), Columbia Pictures had Color Rhapsodies, etc.
But, seldom if ever has a cartoon studio been successful at beating Disney at
their own game (years later, Don Bluth’s studio may have been the only true
exception, though his success during the 1980s was fleeting). The studios that
broke away from Disney’s formula and did something different became the most
successful at competing with Disney. And it is in the cartoons of these studios
that the animated antihero came to reside.
Fleischer
Studios, under the ownership of Paramount Pictures, was one of those studios
which decided to innovate rather than mimic Disney. The studio had been a part
of animation almost from the very beginning, pioneering animation techniques
such as rotoscoping and blending live action with animation in the Silent Era.
Its “Out of the Inkwell” series, starring Koko the Clown, had been fairly
successful during the 1920s. But, the advent of sound had left the studio
searching for a way to stay competitive. It soon ended the “Out of the Inkwell”
series in favor of “Talkartoons”, a series of sound cartoons featuring Bimbo
the Dog, who was their attempt at creating a Mickey Mouse-like star. (Cabarga,
27) But the cartoons never quite aimed for the same audience as Disney. They
were experimental, racy, filled with sexual and drug-related innuendos, and
surreal. It was in this environment that gradually their first real star, Betty
Boop, emerged, first as a co-star to Bimbo and then gaining a series of her
own. This sexy starlet, a young flapper, brought in an older audience with her
charm and good looks. She was the first cartoon character with sex appeal. As
such, she’d often find herself groped by her antagonists, or suffer mishaps
that left her panties or bra exposed. Popular jazz musicians such as Cab Calloway
and Louis Armstrong would provide music for some shorts. (32-50) This was
certainly a different, more mature type of animated heroine, though not quite
an anti-heroine. But it was when Fleischer Studios acquired the rights to
produce Popeye the Sailor shorts that it truly became a forced to be reckoned
with against Disney.
Popeye had
previously been the star of a popular comic strip called “Thimble Theatre”.
With his squinty eye and bulging forearms, he certainly didn’t look like any
cartoon character who’d come before. “The funnier he looks the better the
cartoon will be.” (59) said Max Fleischer, when asked why he would want to make
a cartoon starring such an ugly character. And unlike Mickey, Popeye tended to
solve problems with his fists. When he ate a can of spinach, he would go into a
super-powered mode where even the laws of physics bent to his will (note that
he predated Superman by several years). Though he had a good heart, he was guilty of occasionally harming
innocent bystanders if it got him closer to his goal, and said goals weren‘t
always much nobler than winning a woman’s affections. In most shorts he is
caught up in a love triangle between Olive Oyl, his skinny love interest, and
the brutish Bluto, his rival. Depending on the short Olive would either be
loyal to Popeye and need to be rescued from Bluto, or she would be fickle and
indecisive, unsure if she’d rather be with Popeye or Bluto, sometimes even
choosing the latter, however temporarily. Popeye almost always won out at the
end, though there were occasions where he became so fed up with Olive that he
dumped her. The short “Beware of Barnacle Bill” was one such occasion, where
after pummeling Bluto to a pulp because Olive decided to choose him over
Popeye, Olive attempts to make peace and be with Popeye because he’s the
stronger sailor. Popeye instead angrily wrecks her home and leaves her, saying
she‘d probably leave him just as quickly as she was leaving Bluto (and he was
probably right). In another short, “Females is Fickle”, Popeye goes through the
trouble of saving Olive’s goldfish after it jumps off the side of his ship. The
goldfish is so sad upon being placed back in its bowl that Olive sets it free,
undoing Popeye’s hard work. Popeye then angrily throws Olive overboard. “You
can bet your last nickel that females is fickle says Popeye the Sailor Man” he
then sings. Such chauvinism could be credited to the times in which the short
was made, but he still let his temper get the better of him, harming a lady in
the process, something that was usually against his own morals.
At times
Popeye wasn’t even on a higher moral ground than his rival. Take for instance
“A Dream Walking”, in which Olive Oyl sleepwalks into a dangerous construction
zone and both Bluto and Popeye rush to save her, but fight amongst themselves
because they each want to be the one who gets to save her. Their goal becomes
not to save Olive’s life but to win her affections when she wakes up. There’s
also “Wotta Nitemare”, in which Popeye has a nightmare about Bluto stealing
Olive away, and he promptly goes to punch out the real Bluto when he awakens
despite Bluto minding his own business for once; and “Hospitaliky”, in which
Olive is working as a nurse, so both Popeye and Bluto attempt to be the first
to get themselves seriously injured just so they can be looked after by her.
From
punching a charging bull and reducing it to sausage links and steaks when it
lands back on the ground, to sinking a ship because it was being noisy and
waking up his adopted baby Sweet Pea, Popeye’s brash, violent tendencies and
his sometimes questionable motivations made him animation’s first antihero, and
audiences adored him for it. According to a 1938 opinion poll, Popeye had
become more popular than Mickey Mouse by that year. He was even credited with
saving the spinach industry during the Great Depression. (75) But despite his
success, and his series lasting well into the 1950s, other cartoon studios
never tried to emulate Popeye the way they’d tried to emulate Mickey. It seemed
Popeye was an isolated case, one of a kind. But, in the 1930s he was still a
sign of things to come. It would still be a few years before antiheroes, mainly
in the form of the Trickster, started to become commonplace in animation.
III: The Development of the Animated Trickster
In his book Man
and His Symbols, Carl Jung explains the Trickster archetype by taking what
Dr. Paul Radin wrote while observing the mythology of the North American
Winnebago tribe in his book Hero Cycles of the Winnebago. According to
the book, in the evolution of the hero myth, there is the Trickster Cycle, the
Hare Cycle, the Red Horn Cycle and the Twin Cycle. These cycles, Dr. Radin
says, represent our efforts to deal with the problem of growing up, and can be
found across many cultures and mythologies. The Trickster, he says, is the most
primitive and least developed period of life.
“Trickster
is a figure whose physical appetites dominate his behavior. Lacking any purpose
behind the gratification of his primary needs, he is cruel, cynical and
unfeeling. This figure, which at the outset assumes the form of an animal,
passes from one mischievous exploit to another.” (Jung 103-04)
As Disney
and Fleischer Studios fought for domination of the animation industry in the
late 1930s, the stirrings of something new, very different from what either
studios were producing, was beginning to take shape at Warner Bros. Something
that would come to dominate the next two decades. But before that could happen,
the groundwork for a new type of animated protagonist was being laid, however
unintentionally, at Disney. In 1934, a Silly Symphonies short titled “The
Tortoise and the Hare” debuted. It was far from the first time the series had
done an adaptation of a fable, but usually it was closer to the source
material; the shorts usually didn’t go out of their way to be comical. This
short, on the other hand, became dominated by the character Max Hare, a cocky,
egotistical trickster.
Mainly for
the sake of showing off and bullying, Max Hare challenges the dim-witted Toby
Tortoise to a race. All of the forest creatures root for Max, the fan favorite,
and laugh when Toby appears. When the race begins, Toby says “Let the best man
win.” Max’s snappy response is “Thanks, I will! But I won’t beat you too bad.”
As in the original story, Max sits down to sleep while Toby catches up with
him, but once Toby does he proves to have only been playing possum, merely
letting Toby catch up with him to make things more interesting. Winking at the
audience and laughing, he zooms ahead once again, stopping a little later to
flirt with some female bunnies and show off in front of them, never worried
about Toby gaining the lead. However, eventually Max waits too long, and try as
he might to catch up in time Toby narrowly defeats him in crossing the finish
line.
The short
was seminal. Though a villain, Max Hare had charisma, sass. Something that
would go on to inspire cartoonists in the years to come, as Tex Avery and Chuck
Jones later admitted. “It wasn’t so much his personality that amused the
audience, as the fact that he had personality.” says animation historian
Joe Adamson on the subject of Max Hare. (Adamson, 46) In 1936 the short had an
even zanier follow up, “Toby Tortoise Returns”, in which Max Hare and Toby
Tortoise compete in a boxing match. Such shorts were oddities in Disney’s
catalog. But a character similar to Max Hare appeared in a Mickey Mouse short
as well, in 1936. “Mickey’s Rival” featured Mickey and Minnie’s picnic being
interrupted by Mortimer Mouse, another cocky, smooth-talking bully. With his
eyes set on stealing Minnie away, he gets Mickey out of the way by playing
tricks on him, all while Minnie looks on adoringly and laughs along with
Mortimer. In one scene, he grabs one of the buttons on Mickey’s shorts. “You
want this button?” he asks. Mickey replies yes, and Mortimer pulls the button
off and places it in Mickey’s hand. He grabs Mickey’s other button, and asks
the question again. When Mickey angrily replies no, he pulls the button off
anyway and tosses it aside, laughing. Such tricksters, when they appeared in
Disney works, were villains. It would only be a few
short years before characters that pulled pranks and bullied their foes,
sometimes for no reason at all, would become the stars of their own cartoons,
leaving wholesome characters like Mickey to the wayside. Mickey’s rival, it
seemed, would win out in the long run, though not before taking several
different forms.
The next
step in the development of this archetype took place at Warner Bros. studios,
under the supervision of one Fred “Tex” Avery. To start with, the films that
cartoons ran alongside with at Warner Bros. were often more mature than that of
other studios. They specialized in gangster movies starring Edward G. Robinson
and James Cagney, who played rough and murderous yet charismatic characters
that themselves could be called antiheroes. This made the studio much more open
to the option of injecting slapstick violence into their animated shorts than
most other studios were at the time. But that didn’t happen until the arrival
of Tex Avery. (Adamson, 47) As previously mentioned, Warner was originally one
of the studios which attempted to mimic Disney. The Merrie Melodies shorts were
originally meant to showcase the Warner musical catalog and dazzle audiences
with color, like Silly Symphonies. Looney Tunes at first featured the kind of
bland recurring everyman characters that most studios trying to create their
own Mickey featured. In the mid-to-late 30s, Porky Pig was still their main
star. It wasn’t until 1937’s “Porky’s Duck Hunt” that Avery would create a
breakout new character for Warner, this time, a Trickster.
Tex Avery
had only shortly before been able to convince producer Leon Schlesinger to
allow him to head his own animation unit and have some creative freedom in his
cartoons. Avery’s philosophy was that anything could happen in a cartoon,
something that ran contrary to the realism which Disney was popularizing at the
time. Avery’s brand of humor relied on subverting the audience’s expectations,
making the impossible happen. His favorite tricks included breaking the fourth
wall; gags such as having the main character pull a hair out of the projector,
a chase scene suddenly going into black and white because they’d crossed a sign
that read “Technicolor Ends Here”, and sometimes, having a character run off of
the very film the short was printed on. (Needham, “Tex Avery: King of
Cartoons“) One of the earliest shorts in which he was allowed the creative
freedom to showcase his unique brand of humor was in “Porky’s Duck Hunt”. It
was to be another typical Porky Pig short, in which he went out hunting for
ducks. For the most part, it still was a typical Porky short, with one
exception. Porky encounters an insane black duck on his hunt, one who bounces
on the surface of the water screaming “woo hoo!’. Porky appears to shoot the
duck, and sends his dog out to fetch the body. But instead, the duck emerges
from the water carrying the dog to shore. Porky, breaking the fourth wall,
complains that this wasn’t in the script. The duck replies “Don’t let it worry
ya, Skipper! I’m just a crazy, darn fool duck! Hoo-hoo!” This duck didn’t get
frightened when there was a gun pointed at him. Instead of throwing his hands
to the air and trembling, he jumped around like a maniac, or tied the two
barrels of the shotgun into a bow. Anything but what a sane person (or duck)
would do. The duck proved popular enough with audiences to appear in subsequent
shorts. (Adamson, 48) He was given the name Daffy. His next short a year later,
“Daffy Duck and Egghead” featured Daffy tormenting a hunter named Egghead in
much the same fashion.
As his
series progressed Daffy’s cartoons moved away from teasing hunters at a duck
pond and into more urban settings. He became more anthropomorphic and tended to
have Porky Pig play his straight man, someone who could react to his zaniness.
Tex Avery only directed Daffy’s first two shorts, and one more before he left
Warner Bros., after that he was developed by cartoonists Bob Clampett and Chuck
Jones, each having something to add to his characterization. In the early days
he lived up to his name, he was an insane duck who reacted toward his
adversaries in unexpected ways, but as time went on he became more calculating
against his enemies. (49) By 1940’s “You Ought To Be In Pictures” his desire to
be in the spotlight, something that would gradually come to dominate his
character by the 1950s, was already showing itself. In this short, he
convinces Porky to quit his job as a cartoon character and try out for feature
length pictures, all so that Daffy can be Warner’s number one cartoon star.
After a disastrous attempt at it, when Porky returns to Leon Schlesinger’s
office he overhears Daffy negotiating a new contract because he’s “a better
actor than Porky ever was”.
Though
usually the protagonist, Daffy was self-serving, and cruel toward his enemies
and sometimes even his friends, in true trickster fashion. He became very successful
with audiences, giving Warner Bros. their first big star, and other studios
began to take notice. For the first time, a cartoon character that played cruel
tricks on someone at a psychological disadvantage garnered the audience’s
sympathy. This, in turn, paved the way for later characters such as Woody
Woodpecker (basically Universal’s equivalent to Daffy in all but name and
species), and of course, the earliest versions of Bugs Bunny. By this time,
Disney had largely given up on Mickey Mouse, and ended the Silly Symphonies
series in favor of their new rising stars, Donald Duck and Goofy. Neither of
them were tricksters, though Donald, who often became a victim of his own
uncontrollable rage, and who sometimes would find himself tormented by animated
tricksters (that he usually provoked first), would make a strong case for being
an antihero. Disney had finally been forced to make more character-driven
shorts by these new challengers. (Bain and Harris, 24)
With the
onset of World War II, and even a couple years before, audiences no longer
longed for the optimism of Mickey Mouse. They wanted a protagonist who was more
aggressive, who belittled his enemies and made a fool of them. “The cocky
characters, for some reason, the public seems to like. They don’t like those
kinds of people in real life.” remarked Warner Bros. cartoonist Friz Freleng
when asked about the popularity of this character type. (Adamson, 20)
Audience’s tastes had already been gradually changing up to this point, perhaps
due to the Great Depression coming to an end, or due to simply being tired of
the same old things as color and sound in cartoons began to lose their novelty.
But the bombing of Pearl Harbor only accelerated the change. The US government
at this time was actually commissioning cartoon studios to produce pro-US
propaganda cartoons, so we had the likes of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Popeye
going up against bumbling Nazis and, by today’s standards, offensive Japanese
caricatures. (58) One couldn’t send the likes of Mickey Mouse to expose how
stupid America’s enemies were supposed to be, after all. America as a whole had
succumbed to a wartime attitude. Thus, the traditional hero was
rejected in favor of tricksters and antiheroes due to a newfound cynicism from
the audience.
In 1941, Tex
Avery quit his job at Warner Bros. and was soon hired by MGM to help their
fledgling animation unit. While there, he created Screwy Squirrel, essentially
a parody of his own creation, the animated trickster, taken to its logical
extreme. (Needham, “Tex Avery: King of Cartoons”) In his debut short,
1944‘s “Screwball Squirrel”, Screwy begins things by beating up a far cuter,
Disney-esque squirrel and stealing his cartoon away. “You wouldn’t have liked
the cartoon anyway.” he explains to the audience. Instead of waiting for an
antagonist to come along and provoke him, Screwy calls up a “registered bird
dog” on the phone and although the dog at first refuses to chase Screwy, the
squirrel taunts him into chasing him. The rest of the short is a series of
cruel tricks he plays on the dog, even making fun of how formulaic the cartoons
featuring tricksters had become by this point (after walking the dog off a
cliff Screwy is seen selling newspapers and shouting “Extra Extra! Dog falls
for corny old gag!”). Screwy’s series lasted only five shorts due to creative
backlash from Avery himself, but it marked the moment in time in which the
typical animated trickster, as well as their antagonists, needed to be taken to
the next level in order to keep the audience’s sympathy, once the initial
thrill of having a trickster as a protagonist wore off within a few years.
There needed to be at least a dose of morality to these new animated
tricksters.
IV: The Hare Cycle: Animated Karmic Tricksters
The Hare
Cycle, Dr. Paul Radin explained, was the next step in the development and
progression of the hero. Like the Trickster, he appears as an animal, but
instead he begins to take on more mature personality traits. “One can see that
he is becoming a socialized being, correcting the instinctual and infantile
urges found in the Trickster Cycle”. (Jung, 104-05) Over the course of the
1940s, we see the most popular Trickster protagonists in animation go through
a very similar process. Generally peaceful, they don’t act against their
enemies until pushed too far, and even then, they’re more likely to let their
enemies ruin themselves than to act with aggression. They’re still not without
flaws of course, they can still blur the line between hero and villain, and
sometimes they don’t even come out on top at the end of the short, if they
begin to punish disproportionately and become aggressors themselves. This is
because, like the fables and folktales that preceded them, animated shorts
began to follow their own kind of moral code or karma; if you do bad things,
then bad things will happen to you (normally very violent bad things). When
these bad things were administered by someone else, that character had to have
been the one victimized, or occasionally, sticking up for someone else who’d
been victimized , by the wrong-doer. Antagonists had to deserve what was being
brought upon them. When they didn’t, audiences responded poorly. Within the
course of a few years, the frenzied approach of Daffy Duck in his first shorts
was toned down. Ironically, (and almost too ironic to be a
coincidence), the best way to observe this gradual progression from the
Trickster Cycle to the Hare Cycle is to examine the personality development of
a cartoon hare.
The concept
of rabbits as tricksters seems to have its roots not only in Native American
mythology as mentioned by Jung and Radin, but in the mythology of Western
Africa as well. For instance, Zomo the rabbit is an African trickster figure
who in folktales always got the better of his enemies by using his wit to turn
the tables on them. In one myth, he tricks a cow into giving him milk by
flattering the cow and saying that its horns were strong enough to split a
tree. The cow then charged at the tree, embedding her horns into it and getting
stuck. Zomo then helped himself to her milk. Africans brought these oral tales
to America with them when taken there as slaves, and over time they merged with
local Native American myths, and eventually developed into the American
folktale figure Br’er Rabbit. (Adamson, 50)
Br’er Rabbit
was another such trickster who used his wits to overcome brute force, against
his foe Br’er Fox. One such story, “The Tar Baby”, has Br’er Rabbit captured by
Br’er Fox, and while the fox contemplates all of the tortures he’s going to
inflict on Br’er Rabbit now that he has him, the rabbit pleads that above all
else, he doesn’t want to be thrown into the thorny briar patch. Br’er Fox
decides to do just that, only for Br’er Rabbit to escape, taunting Br’er Fox as
he does, because being thrown into the Briar patch was actually what he wanted. Br’er Rabbit was not so much a smug bully, but liked to play off of
the foolishness of his foes and use reverse psychology to get desired results.
Joel Chandler Harris heard these stories on a plantation in Georgia as a child,
and grew up to popularize them by publishing them in his Uncle Remus book
series in the 1880s. By the 1940’s these stories were still preserved enough
in the public consciousness for the mythological trickster rabbit figure to
make yet another incarnation. (51)
In the late
1930s to early 1940s, Warner Bros. was trying out new characters to
compliment the success they’d found in Daffy Duck. In doing this they mainly
copied themselves, remaking essentially the same character as a different
species. One of these was a rabbit, who went unnamed at first and who never
really struck a chord with audiences in his first few shorts, partly because he
victimized his foes to the point where the audience found him annoying and
rooted for his foes instead. He came to be named Bugs Bunny, though he was more
of a prototype of the later Bugs, hardly the same character. (52) In the 1940
short “Elmer’s Candid Camera”, for example, we see the potential pitfalls of
having a trickster protagonist who picks on foes for no other reason than his
own amusement. In Elmer Fudd’s debut short, he is a nature photographer looking
to photograph a rabbit in its natural habitat. When he comes upon Bugs, the
rabbit refuses to allow Elmer to get a good shot at him, and continues to
pester him when he decides to move on to photographing other animals.
This version
of Bugs, rather than being an insane rabbit version of Daffy as he had been in
previous shorts, is instead reserved and unflinching, almost to the point of
being emotionless rather than smug. He pulls several tricks on Elmer, such as
pretending to suffocate and die after Elmer captures him in a net, leaving
Elmer thinking he’d killed the rabbit and feeling terrible about it. He eventually
drives Elmer to have a nervous breakdown by the end of the short, causing him
to jump into a lake. After Bugs rescues him, he simply kicks him back into the
lake again, laughing. The short did not go over well with audiences, and Chuck
Jones, the director of the short, came to dislike the short himself in later
years for its sluggish pacing and lack of motivation from Bugs. (53) The main
problem was that Elmer had never really done anything to deserve being
pestered.
Later that
same year, Tex Avery decided to put his own spin on the premise. In 1940’s “A
Wild Hare”, Elmer is no longer a nature photographer, but a hunter, armed not
with a camera but a shotgun. And he’s hunting rabbits. Finally posing a threat,
even though he lacked the mental capacity to back up the threat, his shotgun
was enough to make him a credible villain. When Elmer walks up to the first
rabbit hole he sees and shouts “I got you now wabbit, come on out or I’ll bwast
you out!”, the new and improved Bugs Bunny instead emerges from a nearby hole.
Casually strolling up to Elmer, nonchalantly munching on a carrot and peeking
over the shoulder of the man who’s trying to kill him, he asks, “Eh, what’s up
doc?” Elmer, hopeless in his stupidity, explains what he’s up to, not realizing
he’s speaking to the rabbit. Audiences were floored. “They expected the rabbit
to scream, or anything but make a casual remark,” Tex Avery recalled years
later, “We decided he was going to be a smart-aleck rabbit, but casual about
it.” (54) The rest of the short features Elmer trying to trap the rabbit, only
to have all his traps turned against him. After Elmer begins to get frustrated,
Bugs, seemingly feeling sorry for Elmer, agrees to give him a free shot from
his shotgun. Elmer misses of course, but Bugs clutches his chest and falls to
the ground, coughing and giving a dying speech as Elmer cradles the rabbit in
his arms. After he “dies”, Elmer erupts in tears. Though very similar to the
gag pulled earlier in “Elmer’s Candid Camera”, here Elmer’s sorrow is made
hilarious by the fact that he’s a hunter rather than an innocent
photographer, and killing Bugs was what he had wanted to do in the first place.
And after Bugs reveals that he was still alive by kicking Elmer in the pants,
Elmer storms off in anguish, defeated.
“A Wild
Hare” came to set the standard for Bugs Bunny cartoons from then on, and a star
was born. Bugs’ personality continued to be refined over the next few years,
under several directors. During the early 1940s he was still for the most part
in the Trickster Cycle. Although his life was being threatened by Elmer,
various hunting dogs and other enemies, he had quite a bit of fun preying on
their dim-wittedness once they gave him the slightest reason to do so. But Bugs
wasn’t always a winner. In “Tortoise Beats Hare”, for example, Bugs finds
himself matching wits with a tortoise named Cecil in a race. Like his ancestor,
Max Hare, Bugs at first thinks there’s nothing to worry about, he has the race
in the bag. What he doesn’t realize is that Cecil knows all too well that he
can’t beat Bugs, so he hired several look-alikes to rig the race, waiting at
various points along the course of the race to take over where one left off.
Bugs tries cutting a rope bridge down, blowing up the trail, barricading it
with boulders, but the tortoise always seems to be a step ahead of him. Bugs,
on the receiving end of the abuse for once, becomes as livid as anyone he’d
picked on before would. This seldom seen ‘sore loser’ aspect of his character
turned up occasionally throughout his career, and it was a turning point in his
characterization when it first appeared. For another example, there’s “The
Hare-Brained Hypnotist” in which Elmer Fudd, trying to hypnotize Bugs into
submission, accidentally hypnotizes himself into thinking he’s a rabbit. Elmer
immediately begins to mimic Bugs, to Bugs’ irritation. Bugs is driven to
picking up Elmer’s shotgun and going after Elmer, only to have the barrels tied
in a little bow when he shoves it down the rabbit hole, a complete role
reversal.
The
adaptability of Bugs and his ability to keep his cartoons from becoming
predictable, sometimes by not even coming out on top at the end or falling prey
to his own tricks, was what made him unique at the time. He wasn’t just another
Screwy Squirrel, and gradually as the years went by he would develop into a
character who was more mature than the common trickster, who only resorted to
his antics when forced to, normally by declaring “of course you realize this
means war!” when pushed too far. Director Bob Clampett once explained Bugs
Bunny’s character, writing as Bugs himself in the first person:
"Some
people call me cocky and brash, but actually I am just self-assured. I'm
nonchalant, imperturbable, contemplative. And above all I'm a very 'aware'
character. I'm well aware that I am appearing in an animated cartoon...And
sometimes I chomp on my carrot for the same reason that a stand-up comic chomps
on his cigar. It saves me from rushing from the last joke to the next one too
fast. And I sometimes don't act, I react. And I always treat the contest with
my pursuers as 'fun and games.' When momentarily I appear to be cornered or in
dire danger and I scream, don't be consoined [sic] – it's actually a big
put-on. Let's face it Doc, I've read the script and I already know how it turns
out." (17)
The
explanation for Bugs’ popularity offered by the motion picture trade periodical
Showmen’s Trade Review brings up another good point.
“Why,
when most spectators are inclined to sympathize with the underdog, should a presumptuous
bumpkin like this win their approval? The answer might well lie in the fact
that the average person, in like a hard-working introvert striving to get
along, found in this character the nerve and bluster, the boldness and
self-assurance, he himself would like to possess.” (18)
Director Chuck Jones concurred; “Bugs Bunny is a glorious
personification of our most dapper dreams. We love Daffy because he is us, we
love Bugs because he is as wonderful as we would like to be.” (9) So, as often
is the case with antiheroes, Bugs became popular because he did the kinds of
things we only wish we could do.
To best
illustrate this, let us for a moment compare the way Mickey Mouse and Bugs
Bunny reacted to similar situations. In the 1936 short “Moving Day”, Mickey,
Goofy and Donald are worried about the overdue rent on their house, when the
burly Sheriff Pete barges in and gives them an eviction notice. All three
characters shiver fearfully in Pete’s presence. The rest of the short involves
them trying to hastily pack their things into a tiny car before Pete returns to
auction all of their belongings off, Donald and Goofy having a hilariously hard
time at it. During the course of these events Donald accidentally leaves the
gas running, and at the end of the short when Sheriff Pete lights his cigar,
the entire house blows up, as our heroes drive away safely, having gotten the last laugh. The scenario seems realistic enough, something that any
of us might have tried to do in that situation. Mickey went out of his way to
avoid confronting Pete, choosing instead to try and go behind Pete’s back and
save his belongings. And Pete is dealt with by an accident rather than by
active violence from any of the protagonists.
Bugs Bunny,
on the other hand, would have never taken that kind of flack from Pete, no
matter how threatening he was. In the 1949 short “Homeless Hare” Bugs is
residing in a rabbit hole located at the last vacant lot in a thriving
metropolis. His home is suddenly scooped up with a steam shovel, with him still
inside, by a construction worker named Hercules because a skyscraper is being
built over the site. Bugs first tries to reason with him, asking him kindly to
put his home back where it was. Hercules gives a dishonest chuckle and agrees,
before dumping the contents of the steam shovel, Bugs included, into a gravel
pit, and then dumping more dirt on top of it. Satisfied, Hercules steps out of
the construction vehicle, only to be greeted with a brick to the face. Attached
is a telegram reading “Okay Hercules. You asked for it. -Bugs Bunny.” The rest of the short has Hercules get steel
girders dropped on him, catapulted into space by a construction elevator,
slammed through wooden planks, dropped into wet cement, and finally, via an
elaborate Rube Goldberg machination Bugs initiates with a single hot rivet,
gets a ten-ton boiler dropped on his head. “Well Toodles, do I get my home
back, or do I have to get rough?” Bugs asks. Hercules surrenders, and the
skyscraper is built with a little niche in it to leave room for Bugs’ rabbit
hole.
Whereas
Mickey took a more sensible and less confrontational approach in response to
having his home threatened, Bugs aggressively fought back against his bullying
evictor. Mickey adapts to his problems to overcome them and is later rewarded
by karma, while Bugs fights back vigorously, and makes the rest of the world
bend to his will. The audience roots for Bugs because he does what they wish
they could do in that kind of situation. People wish they had that much control
over their lives. Their sympathy with Bugs, as well as the vindictive joy they
receive by watching Hercules get his comeuppance, is derived from the patient
demeanor Bugs displayed at the beginning of the short when he politely asked
Hercules to put his home back where it was. By 1949, Bugs had gone from the
mean-spirited yet reserved rabbit that picked on a helpless photographer
version of Elmer, to a calculating, self-assured and aware trickster, who only
strikes when provoked. By comparing “Homeless Hare” to “Elmer’s Candid Camera”
and “Moving Day” we get a clear sense of how cartoon characters in general
evolved dramatically in a relatively short period of time. Bugs had reached the
appropriately-named Hare Cycle, and in doing so became the most popular cartoon
character of the 1940s and 50s.
As
influential as Bugs was, no other cartoon character came close to completely
emulating him. After Tex Avery joined MGM, he recalled being told “Look, give
us another Bugs Bunny.” He explained, “And brother, I never came up with one.
There is no such animal.” (67) However, the underlying philosophy behind Bugs’
cartoons, that bad things happen to bad people and those bad things must be
brought about by a trickster, was very influential. Bill Hanna and Joseph Barbera’s
Tom and Jerry series produced another such karmic trickster, Jerry the
mouse. Often, a short would start with Tom the cat tormenting Jerry (perhaps
having him tied to a dart board, used as a ping pong ball, or whatever Tom‘s
devious mind can come up with), or foiling Jerry’s attempt to steal food from the
fridge. Jerry would then dish out punishment until the stubborn Tom finally
quit, or was blamed by his owner for the mess their antics had caused and
thrown out. Tom would have his teeth knocked out, his bottom stabbed, his tail
broken or even severed, all in the name of slapstick. But, true to the karmic
moral code that the shorts operated on, if Jerry ever provoked the conflict or
became overly aggressive, Jerry would lose; in “Baby Puss” for example, Jerry
happens upon Tom being tortured by a little girl who is making him dress and
act like a baby. Jerry finds this endlessly amusing and teases Tom for it, even
calling in some of Tom’s cat friends to witness his humiliation. At the end of
the short when the little girl forces castor oil into Tom’s mouth for being
naughty, the bottle spills into Jerry’s mouth, and he ends up sick to his
stomach. Such losses are necessary to break the formula, as with the losses of
Bugs, but the concept of a downtrodden and victimized character suddenly
dishing out violent punishment onto a dim-witted foe who brought most of it
upon himself is present in both series. They allowed the audience
wish-fulfillment and escapism, bringing their innermost (and at times sadistic)
desires for justice to the screen, something that appealed to audiences as much
during World War II as it does today. This has always been the allure of the
antihero.
V: Conclusion: The End of the Golden Age to Today
Into the
early-to-mid 1950s, characters like Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Tom and Jerry
continued to reign supreme, having, characterization-wise, reached top form.
But like all great things, the Golden Age of Animation wasn’t to last. By the
late 50s, outside forces conspired to do away with the theatrical short as a
medium. Television became its replacement; with television around, no one
wanted to sit at a movie theater all day. Budgets shrank because television
studios wanted their cartoons done cheaply and quickly, so both animation and
writing quality suffered as a result. Cartoons became more sitcom-like, and
directed exclusively toward children. Cartoons no longer aired in timeslots
that adults would have to sit through, relegated to Saturday mornings and
weekday afternoons, so they no longer had to work to impress adults as well as
children. Tricksters still existed to an extent, such as Yogi Bear and Top Cat,
but were few and far between as time wore on, and none had the same complexity
as their predecessors. The death of Walt Disney put his company in a slump that
it wouldn’t manage to pull itself out of until the 1980s, by which time
cartoons were becoming little more than half hour toy commercials for the likes
of Transformers and He-Man.
Disney
pulling itself out of its slump, spurred by competition from Don Bluth’s
animation studio when An American Tail defeated them at the box office,
ended up improving the animation industry as a whole considerably when it began
making bigger-budgeted animated feature films which captivated audiences, and
also moved into television animation. Using higher quality animation and
writing than its competitors raised the bar and caused other studios to improve
their cartoons as well. Warner Bros. responded in the 1990s by creating Looney
Tunes spin-offs for television, such as the shows Tiny Toon Adventures
and Animaniacs, again rising against Disney with edgier and zanier humor
and characters. The dynamics that fueled the development of antiheroes and
tricksters in animation during the 40s and 50s were back in place on
television, but nowhere was this more apparent than in the realm of
feature-length animated features.
Once Disney
reclaimed its place on the top with the release of The Little Mermaid, new
animation studios began to spontaneously spring up in order to cash in on the
newfound success of animated features, most of them parroting Disney’s writing
and animation style, often with adaptations of fairy tales. But an unexpected
game-changer came onto the scene in the mid-90s. Pixar, in partnership with
Disney, debuted with Toy Story, the first fully computer-animated
feature length film, and within a few years, computer animation began to
eclipse traditional 2-D animation. Disney’s success in animated features began
to dwindle in the late-90s as interest in traditional animation began to wane,
while a fledgling animation studio, DreamWorks Animation, tried their hand at
dethroning Disney and Pixar, by releasing computer-animated movies with suspiciously
similar premises within months of Pixar (Antz coming out after Pixar’s A
Bug’s Life, A Shark’s Tale coming out right after Finding Nemo).
When this didn’t work, they unleashed Shrek; a biting parody of Disney’s
traditional fairy-tale style, rather than a mimicry.
With an
unlikely, non-heroic protagonist and subversive, low brow, pop-culture-laden
humor, the film gave audiences something different from the norms they were
used to, and it was an astonishing success. It seemed that the 1940s were repeating
themselves, in a way. After a decade or so of Disney’s dominance, another
studio decided to innovate (if not outright mock) rather than mimic Disney, and
had found success. As a result, today DreamWorks is Disney’s biggest
competitor. It seemed that audiences were growing tired of Disney’s princesses
and fairy tales. There could be a number of reasons for this; feminist
critiques of traditional Disney films becoming more mainstream and talked
about, people becoming more jaded by world events like the World Trade Center
attacks and the War on Terror, or perhaps simply becoming tired of the same old
things as they lost their novelty. Quite possibly some combination of the three
are responsible. It was not all that different in the 1940s when the attitudes
of World War II as well as boredom with the status quo led to audiences
rejecting traditional heroes in cartoons. Disney promptly began to imitate the
style of DreamWorks after a series of embarrassing defeats at the box office,
abandoning traditional animation while also relying on low brow,
pop-culture-laden humor with edgy protagonists voiced by celebrity comedians.
With the films Chicken Little and Enchanted, Disney had gone so
far as making fun of itself in an attempt to stay relevant to an audience whose
tastes had shifted toward a more cynical kind of humor.
One way in
which DreamWorks and its use of the antihero as a marketing weapon against
Disney has had a visual impact on the way animated films are marketed is on the
posters themselves. Since around the time Shrek became popular, every
movie poster, even if the film it advertises actually is more traditional and
heartfelt, features the protagonists wearing a rascally smirk with a cocked
eyebrow, no matter how mild-mannered they may actually be in the film. Even if
the protagonist isn’t an antihero or a trickster, the marketers of the films
want you to think that they are, even if only on a subliminal level. Why else
would they be looking so mischievous, so smug and cocky on the cover? Thus, we
see that the animated antihero is alive and well in today’s animation industry,
and is used by animation companies in the same way it was in the 1940s. To
echo the words of Friz Freleng, the audience seems to like the cocky
characters, even though they don’t like those kinds of people in real life.
Marketers know that well. Much has changed since the Golden Age of Animation,
but in many ways, the corporate wars in the animation industry can still be
explained as Mickey Mouse still struggling against his rival after all these
years.
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Note
I saved the works cited here for posterity. I miss the days when YouTube was so lax with its copyright. Don’t expect any of these links to actually work, remember I wrote this term paper in 2012.
